Transcript of an interview I recorded with Scott Gorham of BLACK STAR RIDERS - 16/07/19. Full article here. MAL-
It's great to be talking once again to Mr. Scott Gorham, Scott, thanks for taking my call. SCOTT- Thank you, Mal. It's good to talk to you once again. It's been a while but it's all good, babe (?) MAL- How about this, right? Take yourself back 2012-2013 you're touring as Thin Lizzy. You've got an album of stuff recorded, you know? 'Do we release it as Thin Lizzy? Do we not?' You chose not to. I think that was the right decision. And here we are about to talk about the fourth BLACK STAR RIDERS album, can you believe it? SCOTT- Really, well, we got done with the first album. I remember Ricky and I looking at each other go 'Well, you know, it's a pretty good album. I wonder. I wonder if we'll be able to get to do this, another one', you know, and we spool on years later, and there we are in Los Angeles recording 'State Of Grace' here and, and we look at each other and go 'Wow, could you believe we're on, we're on our fourth album?' We didn't know if you're going to get past the first one. Right. So, so it's great. So really great, Mal to be talking with you on our fourth album. MAL- It's just unbelievable, isn't it? Now we've had a couple of lineup changes over the time, but spread out. Marco left between the first and second. Robbie Crane came in he's still there. How's he going? SCOTT- Robbie's great. Robbie is always a source of inspiration, that guy. I love him to death. And he is just one hell of a bass player. You know, he just keeps keeps coming up with these lines where that you're just inspired right? You know, every time you bring these things out what a great sound and what a great guy you know. So Robbie will be there right to the end whenever that is. MAL- After heavy fire. Jimmy left the drum stool and we got Chad in. Tell us how you found Chad, and how's he going? SCOTT- Jimmy left because of family reasons. Got a couple of kids, he's married. Every time we were touring. And this kind of goes with Damon also it would always be in Europe. So time away from the family was crazy for them. And they had to, you know, be with their family, while their kids grow up and all that and I was fine with that, you know, in a band, it's not a jail sentence, you know, you do what you gotta do, and then you get out, you know, but Chad, we had tried out a few drummers. All of them were good. But you know, we were looking for something that extra that little bit extra, right. And along comes Chad he finds out that we're looking for a drummer. He makes a video of himself playing I think three or four BLACK STAR RIDERS songs and I thought, both Ricky and I saw that something in Chad, here's a guy that if you want a really cool groove, he's got it. And if you need some stomping, you know, hell raising drums, he's got that also, right. And he's a cool guy. So one of the things we saw that Chad was our guy, there was no question about it, there was right. And the same thing happened with the you know, Damon Johnson he left I think a year later, same thing, the family thing he needed to get back to his family you know, couldn't be (?) much , not be able to watch his kids grow up. So you know, it's the second time in my career that you know, an open audition was held. And these are like horror situations to be in right? But a lot of these guys were good. None of us were actually once again quite right for holding down that right hand spot for BLACK STAR RIDERS. And then Christian Martuci, I'd never really really heard of Christian before. He was playing in a band called STONE SOUR. Now it kind of heard of STONE SOUR. So that kind of piqued my interest right off the bat. He also worked up a video I think he laid down I think five BLACK STAR RIDERS songs you know, and I like this look, but more more than that. I like what he was doing with the songs the way he thought about it. And I thought this is the guy you know, this is the guy that's gonna hold down that right hand section over there on the BLACK STAR RIDERS stage. So now now all of a sudden we got a band back together again, it's probably it might have been stronger than it's ever been. MAL- I must admit, I was devastated when I read that Damon was leaving but having heard the album, these two chaps, Christian in particular, have fitted right in hven't they? SCOTT- Yeah, yeah, he's hit a home run you know, Christian's one of those guys wait if you if you kind of look at BLACK STAR RIDERS, and you hear the guitar bits that we come up with Damon and I are style wise, we're pretty close together. Not completely, but pretty close right? Now Christian, on the other hand, he's got a pretty different style than myself. But while watching that video and seeing what his ideas of maybe how some of those parts have gone it really piqued my interest. So what I'm feeling now and BLACK STAR RIDERS guitar wise is the ideas and the sound is widened quite a bit from you know, the previous three albums. Not you know, not to say that Damon didn't do a great job. Absolutely he did a great job. But now we've got this little kind of wholly different sound going on. Which, which I love I think it's great. Like I said, to me, the sound has been widened and so that it's like a slicker more stand on your own kind of sound. MAL- I'm going to expand on that a bit and tell me if I'm out of line, but I don't think the band needed a kick up the arse right? I DON'T think BLACK STAR RIDERS needed to kick up the arse, but Christian came in and gave it a kick up the arse. That's that's the way I hear it. SCOTT- Well, that's great. And I love hearing that, you know, because you know, every time you know, you get a new member of the band, you know, it's like rolling the dice. You know, this is a gamble. Is this going to work or is it not going to work? But both Ricky and I you know we had this real belief that this guy, this Christian guy he he's gonna work he's gonna make this whole thing work you know, so I think what actually, you know, when you listen to the album, you can see that, you know, the hopefully you know, you guys think the same way that we've been proven right. The reaction so far on the album's been nothing but pretty phenomenal, you know? So I feel I'm feeling pretty safe in my choice right now. MAL- Now we've gone into the studio to record the fourth album, how are we going with the recording here? Where did you do it? How good a process was it? SCOTT- Well, this is a way different way of doing an album for all of us. So we we came up with the scheme, it's a system that we've never tried before. You know with all of us being living thousands of miles apart, you know, getting together for rehearsal is just an absolute non starter, that was not going to happen, right? So it was Christian that came up with this idea he'd done it once before. I think he did it with, think he did it with STONE SOUR, right? What he does is he takes his laptop out of the road, that it's got Pro Tools in it, right? And he knows how to work it very well. And he suggested 'Why don't you do this, you all you guys record your ideas on your iPhone, iPad, whatever you got, send it over to me, I'll load it into my laptop here. And I'll start, you're trying to glue all these bits together song wise, right? And you just feel free at any point to give me some kind of guidance the way you want, you know, these bits to go whatever', right? And right off the bat, I thought 'Yeah, I don't know if I like that idea. You know, come on, we got to be in the same room together eyeballing each other here to get the vibe, but Okay, I'll give it a shot'. Well, what the heck, let's see what happens here. The worst thing that could happen was it's not going to work, right. So I think I sent over 20 ideas, maybe a little more, Ricky sent over 25, Robbie sent his ideas in, and there was Christian and all these glueing all this stuff together, right? We came up or he came up with what however you want to put it with the 15, 15 songs with all of our parts that we had written inside these songs, right. And what that did, because we only had two weeks to make this album for god sakes. I mean, that's kind of a blink of an eye. It made it so that when we got into rehearsals, there wasn't all this wasted time of, you know, you know, starting that, okay, here's our starting point, we've already got our starting point, there's 15 templates of songs right there all ready to go. Now we just had to kind of fine tune all of these different songs, right and figure out what your lead bits were going to be and, you know, throw in maybe a harmony guitar here, you know, those kind of things. So it saved massive amounts of time. So when we got into the actual studio, which was Spirit Studios in Los Angeles, we already knew what we were doing, you know, that now from that point on, it was just like kind of minor adjustments. So that right there made the atmosphere much lighter, you know, the felt like a huge weight was off of everybody. So it was a, it turned out to be a really cool way to you know, write an album, which was a brand new way for me and Ricky and everybody else. So it was a great, great idea. MAL- Back when I spoke to you when the 'Killer Instinct' was about to come out, you confessed that you came up for the riff for 'Soldierstown' while in the shower, right? SCOTT- Yeah, I do that a lot in the shower. MAL- Have we got any similar stories about this album? SCOTT- Well, the last song to go on the album was was mine it was called 'Underneath The Afterglow', right? That's Ricky's title. He wrote the lyrics for it, but I had this riff, we'd already had 14 songs done and you know, ready to work on and all that. So on the plane over 'What am I gonna do with this riff? I really liked this riff'. (?). So I called my nephew in Los Angeles, saying 'I'm coming over doing this. Oh, can I stay at your place for a few days? Just get over the jet lag'. 'Yeah, sure. Noproblem'. So on the drive home to his place I told him I got this riff. I want to show it to you, right? He goes 'Cool. Let's up over my studio' He's part owner of this recording studio. So we get there and I immediately started to see his engineers setting up microphones. 'Wow, is this, is a session coming on? What's going on? 'We're gonna, we're going to demo this idea of yours' and 'What? You're kidding, right? Okay.' And he and I just sat down and just started to glue this song together. And when we got done with it, we, all of us and all three of us the engineer, Jesse and I, and we sat back 'Oh, wow, man. That is, that's pretty cool that everybody else in the band has got to hear this'. So I sent it off to Ricky Jay Ruston, the producer, and Robbie and everybody said, this has got to go on the album. But we're at the 11th hour lyrics haven't been written melody lines, the whole deal. And I gotta say Ricky really pulled that out of the bag. He already had lyrics written up. He came up with a really cool melody line. And it made it on the album, like I say on the 11th hour so it's a great. MAL- What about the riff for another state of grace? Was that one of yours? SCOTT- Now that's Ricky. That's the Irish guy doing the Irish riff. Ricky comes up with with more riffs than you would think. You think of Ricky as just the singer or playing his acoustic guitar and no, he's he's a he's pretty good riff-meister himself but you know, the Irish thing is very near and dear to Ricky's heart obviously coming from Belfast. And me coming from, you know, the whole Thin Lizzy Irish side of things. So, we always put, we always give the Irish a nod on every album that we do, it's just kind of part of our sort of DNA or to give to give Ireland a nod or thank you so much and, and the Irish stuff is fun to play, you know, there's always a great groove that happens in inside all this great Irish music. So we give it a nod on on every album, MAL- What happens now? You've got the album coming out September 6th. What's the plan then? SCOTT- Well, before then, we've got four Thin Lizzy shows that Ricky and I are doing, we've got two festivals in England and another festival in Barcelona. And a the last festival will be in Belgium, right? And that's purely because the you know, the Black Rose album is 40 years old this year MAL- And can I tell you that I was nearly going to be coming over for one of those. SCOTT- Well, come on over, I know one of the guys in the band, I can get you in, be glad to have you. So anyway, you know we're doing these four shows that I'm really happy to do it. I still love playing all the Thin Lizzy stuff, right. But like you said, the album BLACK STAR RIDERS, it gets released in September, October we're on tour in the UK, we do the do the whole of the UK then fly over to Europe. And I think we got six or seven weeks in Europe for that tour. And the only disappointing part right now is I don't see anything for Australia, and I find that extremely disappointing because Ricky and I, he and myself, we haven't been there for six years now. And to me, if you're gonna say you're on a world tour, and you don't include Australia, you're not actually on a world tour, you're an extended European tour, so I've been telling everybody and everybody wants this badly, wants to come over to Australia. And so we're going to try everything we can to make that happen. Obviously it won't be this year, but it will be hopefully in the beginning or so. In 2020 so that's the plan anyway. MAL- Right. Scott Gorham thanks so much for taking my call. Really Best of luck with the new BLACK STAR RIDERS album, 'Another State Of Grace' out early September. Really good album, best of luck with it. And hopefully we see you on a full world tour in Adelaide. SCOTT- Thank you so much Mal. It's been great talking with you. And hopefully we are coming to Australia. We'll see everybody then. Thank you so much. Comments are closed.
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AuthorMetalhead who hates bad parking. |