Author: fgt

Fields Of The Nephilim rose during goth’s 80s heyday, looking like a cross between Victorian undertakers and the stars of a spaghetti western. In 2012, as they prepared to release live CD/DVD, Metal Hammer caught up with singer and sole original remaining member Carl McCoy to talk mysticism, metal and unfortunate ‘drug’ busts.

There is always a pattern in life. Just because you can’t see the pattern, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It means you are standing too close to the subject to make it out or you haven’t studied it for long enough. The 28-year career of English gothic rock band Fields Of The Nephilim can seem strange – perhaps full of wrong turns and missed opportunities when taken at face value. To see a pattern in the chaos, one has to pay close attention.

They formed in Hertfordshire in 1984, incorporating elements of psychedelic rock and heavy metal into the era’s predominantly post-punk, goth sound, drawing on Victorian art and spaghetti westerns for their striking image and delving into the occult for their philosophy. They wanted to be “the alternative to the alternative”, and their first album, Dawnrazor (1986), and early singles such as Moonchild and Psychonaut, gave the UK scene a much-needed shot in the arm, revitalizing the sound by introducing metal’s power and urgency into the sonic mix. Not only would they be an influence on goth metal acts such as Paradise Lost and Nevermore, but on later extreme metal groups such as Cradle Of Filth and Behemoth. But when they were at the height of their popularity and their powers after the release of Elizium in 1990, they fell apart in disarray.

The creative driving force behind the band, singer Carl McCoy, had always been ill at ease with being a rock star, but it seemed that now he had started retreating into a world where he had little contact with his audience. He may have gained an impressive degree of artistic control by withdrawing from people, but at what cost? Working mainly on his own, he may have recorded the fantastic industrial death metal album Zoon in 1993 under the name Nefilim, but it would be three years until it saw the light of day and Fields themselves wouldn’t return properly until the release of Mourning Sun in 2005.

By this time, Carl had abandoned touring in favour of one-off gigs with anonymous session players he referred to as “ghost musicians”. But something else was going on. Between their rebirth and a pair of sold-out Hammer-sponsored nights at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire dubbed the Ceremonies in late 2008, there was a year-long series of gigs held around the globe. Fans and casual observers alike could be forgiven for thinking these shows were chosen at random, but considerations like when the venue was cheapest or when certain road crews were free were furthest from Carl’s mind.

When they took to the stage in Helsinki, Finland, on December 29, 2007, it wasn’t a coincidence that it was also the anniversary of the death of the Russian visionary mystic Grigori Rasputin. On March 15, 2008, the band travelled to Poland to play Warsaw’s Stodola venue. Again, no coincidence that this was the anniversary of the death of HP Lovecraft, the author responsible for the greatest occult fiction ever and a huge influence on Carl’s lyrics. When they played in the Greek city of Athens on March 21, it coincided with The Equinox Of The Gods, or the New Year in the Thelemic Calendar, Carl’s religion of choice. This pattern would be continued until the final Ceremony itself, which was on July 13, 2008, the birthday of John Dee, the black magician employed by Queen Elizabeth I as astrologer and necromancer.

The rebirth of Nephilim was a colossal magickal ritual, traversing the globe in space and covering many years in time. It was intended to harness the power of their fans and history itself to help resurrect the group as a new entity for the 21st Century.

Carl, who’s always refused to talk directly about his belief in the occult and ritual magick, admits that the string of concerts were part of a bigger plan: “Nephilim gigs are different to going down The Dog & Duck to get drunk and watch an AC/DC tribute band. I take a different approach to what Nephilim concerts are and what they mean. They are a ritual because they’re collaborations with the audience – we become like one. When we play live there is no longer a ‘them’ and an ‘us’ because our audience is quite special. All of the shows that we’ve done over the last few years, up to the Ceremonies events at Shepherd’s Bush, have been held on specific dates. I have never mentioned this to anyone before but I’ve got a record of a lot of births and deaths of inspirational people. It was part of a bigger plan.”

Carl, who is a lot more down to earth than his austere image suggests, allows himself a little chortle, when his obsessive fanbase, who pore over everything he does in forensic detail, are mentioned. “Yeah, not even they realised,” he admits. “No one found out. I’ve never mentioned it before now.”

We’re talking to him today because now you too can see and hear the fruits of his seven-year labour. The two final gigs were recorded and filmed and are being released as a CD/DVD box set. “The Ceremonies project is about crystallising a point in time which embodies magical moments created by Fields Of The Nephilim,” he reveals. “Having focused on the live elements over the last few years, this represents a closure and regeneration. Ceremonies is a representation of where we are now, from this point we move forward. We continue to evolve.”

The reason it’s taken so long to appear isn’t that Carl has been waiting for planets to align, but simply because he insists on doing most things himself. “I don’t think becoming self-sufficient as a musician, producer and editor was something I intended to do,” he muses. “It’s a lot of work. Back when the first incarnation of The Nephilim disbanded in 1991, I wanted to do a project by myself and have control over my vision. I did initially include a couple of producers at the time and I wasn’t happy with the results. They couldn’t picture where I was coming from, so that’s where it started.”

When asked if he thinks the occult ritual for ending one period of the band’s history and kickstarting another has worked he pauses for a long time before saying: “I feel like I’ve been trapped in limbo for a very long time, but now it’s time to move on. I feel it’s time to do what I do best, which is producing new music and getting out there and performing live. It’s been a long time since the band started and I do like to go forward rather than backwards.

In practical terms, does this mean that there’s going to be new album?

“There will be new material, but whether that appears as an LP straight away or a series of EPs, I don’t know,” he answers. “I kind of like the idea of EPs, but I don’t know. I have been speaking to my label, EMI, about this. I’ve been working on new material for the last four months, and now it’s time to get in the studio, get my head down and get some new music out. I should have something out in six months’ time. That sounds about realistic to me.”

Carl’s spiritual journey through life has been a complicated and individual one. And that, as he doesn’t mind telling you, is the whole point. He simply wants his fans to think for themselves. In very loose terms he is a follower of new age religion/spiritual philosophy of Thelema. A century ago, notorious magician, free thinker, drug fiend and top flight mountaineer Aleister Crowley had a vision which became the basis of Thelema and its bible, The Book Of The Law. Crowley’s anarchic idea was that the 20th Century would see the birth of a new era of morality governed by one rule only: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Followers, or Thelemites, are supposed to rid themselves of outside conditioning and the desires of their ego and follow their one true will. Carl still sees himself as a spiritual person with magickal and shamanic beliefs: “I’ve always seen myself as a spiritual person no matter how wanky that sounds. I’ve always felt like that. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with my upbringing [as a Jehovah’s Witness] or just the way I am, but nothing changes around me and the person you see on stage is the real me.”

Thankfully he ignores us when we ask if he’s the real McCoy on stage, and continues: “The person off the stage is the person who is trying to get on in life and be sociable. People presume that you get on stage and put on this persona. Nah! It’s the other way round. The person onstage is the real me. That’s where I feel more comfortable. I don’t think when I’m on stage. This may be a shamanic approach to life but it’s in a natural way. It’s not forced or something I have to read about or share with anyone.”

Hopefully if you connect with metal on a deeper, philosophical or moral level, this is something that may be chiming with your own belief system. Metal’s fascination with Satanism is a very complex thing and should never be taken at face value or be generalised as just one thing, but for many of us, the Devil exists only as a metaphor for the exertion of self- will in opposition to power structures of religion and other forms of authority that stamp down on individualism and rebellion. This is something that sounds eerily familiar to Crowley and Thelema.

“Loosely I’d agree that these philosophies are similar,” Carl concedes cautiously. “The thing for me is that it’s more of an individual approach. Crowley I guess was similar in that respect. I certainly find there is nothing I desire from [my occult beliefs]. It’s not about me gaining things. The outcome I want from my beliefs is merely inspiration. If my beliefs can inspire me creatively and they can inspire the Nephilim audience as well, then I think that’s my purpose in life, because that in turn inspires me.”

“There is no harm in it,” he insists. “I’m not dabbling with people’s heads too much. I’ve spent my life following my own path seeing where it will take me but there has never been any sense of, ‘Oh, I must read this book and cast this spell’ because that’s just the writing of men. You must think for yourself.” He adds that perhaps the biggest link between Nephilim and metal is through the sound not the philosophy. “It’s an attitude thing,” he notes. “We had to get the grittiness into our music right from the beginning. Zoon [the band’s most overtly metal statement] is probably the album I’m most happy with. That and The Nephilim, they’re the only ones I go back to.”

“Crowley was misunderstood,” he adds, appealing to anyone reading this piece who is interested in the so-called dark arts. “All people know about is ‘The Great Beast’, but there was more to him than that. By all means read his writings, but you have to bring out your own understanding of it, not someone else’s point of view.”

As for being specific about his own occult practices, Carl is as coy as ever and will only say: “I have my own ways of ritual magick. I have my own rituals that I perform but not in the typical way that most people would imagine. We’re not all Victorians, are we?”

So he doesn’t wear a wizard’s hat?

“No, I wear a pillow case! Ha ha ha!”

The influence of Fields Of The Nephilim stems not just from their music and magick but through their highly individual image. If goth was a genre that prided itself on individualism, then The Neff were the most individual of the lot. Decades before you could buy alternative clothing off the peg in stores, the Nephilim created their own look in true DIY fashion.

“I was always inspired by a lot of Victorian imagery and films like Once Upon A Time In The West,” Carl explains: “The combination was Jack The Ripper meets The Man With No Name. I used to make my own hats. I’d fashion them from top hats and Stetsons and sew them all together. You couldn’t actually get clothes like the stuff we wore. I don’t think we actually went out and bought anything apart from the obvious stuff like boots. I came from a bike background so I always had shitty old leathers that I could use. The coats and the hats were quite significant at the time but we used to throw them together ourselves.”

And it wasn’t just the floor-length coats that the band bequeathed to the goth scene of the last 20 years. It has become regular for artists to wear weird contact lenses, but when The Nephilim kickstarted this craze in the 80s it was unheard of. “I used to get mine from a guy who made them for BBC dramas,” admits Carl. “It was very much to do with my grandfather. I used to look like him except he was blond with very pale eyes. I had this old photo of him and I had some lenses made so I could look more like him. I guess I was always one for not wanting to be seen. It’s what it all comes down to, the hats with wide brims, the contact lenses, shades… I’m still the same really; I’m still essentially a shy kid, even though I’ve picked a funny career for some- one who doesn’t like being recognised. I was hiding behind all those things. I still am.”

But perhaps the most individual aspect of the Nephilim look was created by using the humble bread-making ingredient, flour. If you went to see the band in the 80s, you couldn’t come out of the venue without being coated in the stuff. Fans would take bags of the powder to gigs to toss over each other and into the air, and between that and the dry ice it was sometimes difficult to see more than a few feet in front of you while they were playing. When the word ‘flour’ is mentioned, Carl starts laughing.

“It was part of our dressing down thing,” he chuckles. “We hated glam bands, so we wanted to look as grimy as possible. Also, there were some very eccentric people in the lineup and none of us were alike, and if you put us in a room together you wouldn’t know we were in a band. We were doing a photoshoot one day and we had some clay dust with us, and we covered ourselves in it just so we would look more like a gang. Then we started using flour and it stayed with us. We used to love going to parties where other bands were there. You’d know we’d been there because there would be flour handprints on the backs of people’s jackets and around their shoulders. It was proper dressing down and people stayed away from us because of it.”

Which brings us neatly to one of the more unlikely sounding stories that has attached itself to the band. Didn’t The Nephilim’s use of flour end up with them as the wrongful victims of a massive drug bust?

“Yeah!,” he laughs again. “We got nicked in Nottingham Rock City by the police who thought it was cocaine. The fans used to put the flour in little plastic bags to take it to the gigs so they could coat themselves with it. Some of the bandmembers had fans back at the hotel with them that night and in the morning one of the cleaners found one of these polythene bags with a ball of white powder in it. So the police came down and they got onto the tour bus and they found 12lbs of this stuff. Ha ha! So we all got arrested and got carted away.”

So they thought they’d found 12lb of cocaine! They must’ve been getting ready to take the rest of the month off…

“I know, we got half a page in The Daily Mirror for that one!”

Beat out the flour, brush off the dust, knock out the dirt. Look closer and closer underneath until you can see the pattern emerging from the chaos.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 228, February 2012

Along with Journey, Anglo-American superstars Foreigner defined early 80s AOR music thanks to 1981’s mega-selling 4 album. In 2011, the band looked back on the making of a classic.

Six months into the endless, ever-expanding time frame that was the making of Foreigner’s fourth album, producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange decided he needed a break.

Looking up from the mixing desk in Electric Lady Studio, located at 52 West 8th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, he yelled at those in the control room who, like he, had just endured yet another gruelling night-shift and missed yet another sunrise.

“What the fuck are we doing here? We need to go out! We never go out! We need to go to Central Park… Let’s go buy some Frisbees!”

With the band having long left the studio, Mutt’s outburst would only have been witnessed by his close coterie of engineering staff, and a young, then-unknown keyboard player named Thomas Dolby who had recently been drafted in for the sessions.

All of them were startled, but took their cue and followed Mutt up the stairs and out on to West 8th Street, blinking in the morning sunshine. He hailed a yellow cab and ordered it to wait outside 5th Avenue’s legendary toy store FAO Schwarz while he bought a variety of Frisbees, then leapt back in the cab and instructed the driver to take them all, giggling, to Central Park. For what Dolby remembers as a truly joyous five minutes, they raced about the park, flinging the coloured plastic discs around like excited schoolchildren high on life. But, after those five minutes, the real Mutt Lange resurfaced…

“What the fuck are we doing here? We’ve got an album to make!”

With that, he led them all away, hailed another yellow cab and raced back to Electric Lady.

Foreigner’s guitarist Mick Jones hears this story for the first time when Classic Rock Presents AOR meets him in his London hotel suite during the band’s recent European tour. He might be unfamiliar with this specific tale, but recognises it immediately as indicative of what he describes as the producer’s “intense” commitment to the work. Jones recognises it, of course, because it mirrors his own, and explains why the album took so very long to make. How long?

“It took about 10 months, counting pre-production… maybe the best part of a year,” Jones shrugs, pointing out that the group’s 1977 debut LP had taken nine months, their second, 1978’s Double Vision “about six months”, and their third, 1979’s Head Games, “probably almost the same again”. So Foreigner had form in that department. But 10 months? The best part of a year?! Wasn’t that some kind of record at the time? Apparently so…

“I remember I was in a club in London and Simon Le Bon came up to me and said, ‘I hear we’re in the running for the prize for spending the most time and money in a studio!’,” grins Jones, not a little ashamed as well. “Unfortunately, we did share that distinction…”

The Frisbee excursion was not a significant factor, then, in Foreigner 4’s extended gestation. The real reason was Jones and Lange’s 100 per cent commitment to making absolutely the best record possible, and refusing to stop until they were sure they had. For both men, that meant achieving a new level of excellence in the songs.

Jones: “The songs are the basis of everything. They always were with this band. I always set out to make albums that you could listen to from beginning to end, without filler…”

The statistics for Foreigner 4 prove that all the hours, days, weeks and months in the studio, all the deadlines missed, all the budgets broken, were ultimately worth it.

The album enjoyed 10 weeks (in three spells) at No.1 in the Billboard charts, starting on August 22, 1981 and ending February 11, 1982. American sales exceeded six million. It remains the band’s best seller in the UK, reaching No.5, and earning a gold disc, while it also made No.4 in Germany. Of the six songs released as singles in the US, only the last – Luanne, in 1982 – failed to go Top 30.

Perhaps most importantly of all, 30 years later all 10 of these songs still resonate strongly.

Time and money are relative. As is failure.

A bit of context is needed. Foreigner were a success right out of the box: Stateside, their self-titled debut of 1977 sold five million copies and reached No.4. A year later, their second effort, Double Vision, made No.3 in the US – even climbing to No.32 in the UK – and shifted seven million copies. So when third album Head Games, released in 1979, stalled at No.5 on the Billboard chart and only went quintuple platinum, something was deemed to have gone wrong.

Jones: “That did start the thinking, that we needed to be positive about our identity for the fourth album. Okay, we’d beaten the jinx of the first album being a flash-in-the-pan with Double Vision being so strong, but I think on Head Games we really went into ‘excessive mode’. The drugs came into the picture a bit too much there. So we kind of had a massive hangover after that album [laughs]. I look back on it and think it wasn’t quite focused. We tried to toughen the image of the band up with Dirty White Boy and Head Games itself, but that’s where the question about where we were going originated…”

English bassist Rick Wills – who had joined the line-up for Head Games, the former Peter Frampton band/Roxy Music member having replaced New Yorker Ed Galgliardi – had a few concerns. “In some ways, after the first two Foreigner albums, Head Games was something of a departure in style and form,” he says. “It was a bit more heavy and rocky, and that didn’t go down so great with everyone. And, of course, we had that very controversial album cover…”

It featured a girl caught in the act of wiping her phone number off a gents’ toilet wall, but it was perceived by some as something more provocative. A lot of American record stores refused to rack it.

“I think we sold a lot less of that album for that reason alone,” Wills continues. “It did very well, but by Foreigner standards it was considered something of a failure. Having just come into the band I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell – this doesn’t bode well for my future!’”

Jones was thinking about the future, too, but Wills wasn’t the one who needed to worry. The guitarist and band-leader was more concerned that the demands of keyboard player Al Greenwood and ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald to be included in the songwriting process would weaken the band. Greenwood was dismissed first, McDonald followed soon after (years later, when the band reconvened in mid-2010 to rehearse some new songs, McDonald was present, but the line-up was soon pared again down to four).

Wills: “I hadn’t expected this. Mick had said to me he wanted more freedom to bring other musicians in, to experiment – especially with keyboards – because this was the era when people were beginning to do amazing things, electronically. Mick – who was never one to stand still – wanted to try these things out, because he thought that was the way forward.”

Jones: “It was a tough time, emotionally. Ian was a close friend, but Lou [Gramm, singer] and I just felt we had hit our stride writing together and we wanted to really start to maximise on that. We talked at length about it and had a fairly clear vision of where we wanted to go, so it was a question of being a bit ruthless. We felt we wanted to focus.”

One of the songs that was helping them focus was a ballad.

Wills: “Mick tended to write most of the songs on a piano, using mostly the black notes, so everything was in sharps and flats, and little bit weird when it came time to transpose them to the guitar… As I recall, it was fairly bitty at first, but the one song he did have completely finished was Waiting For A Girl Like You. The first time they played it to me, I said, ‘Well if that isn’t a hit, I don’t know what is!’”

Jones’ voice bears a tremor of emotion as he recalls the genesis of that song: “Waiting For A Girl Like You almost wrote itself. That was the first time I had a really serious emotional experience. It was overwhelming. From the moment we put down the basic track and Lou added a scratch vocal, I found it hard to be in the room without breaking down during the playbacks. It was such a strange sensation. I really got the feeling that something was coming down through me, that I was just the conduit. It was the first time I’d got in touch with what I’d heard other writers or artists talk about.”

That song would, of course, change everything – but so would the band’s choice of producer. Jones had taken both co-production and ‘musical direction’ credits on the first three albums – never less than fully involved – but was also keen to gain a respected second opinion on a song (or third, if it was one co-written with Lou Gramm). The man chosen was Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange (rhymes with “hanger”), a man known as Mutt who was the big dog in rock production at the time, having steered AC/DC to consecutive multi-platinum successes with Highway To Hell and Back In Black.

Jones, though, had been a fan of his for some time: “Mutt first caught my attention when he produced a band called City Boy, way back [Mutt produced City Boy’s first five albums, starting with 1976’s self-titled debut]. I’d been impressed by the work he’d done on that band. And he had applied to do the Head Games album, actually. He came over to New York to see me, but it was just a question of bad timing for him, so we chose Roy Thomas Baker. But Mutt was always in the back of my mind, so when he reapplied for the fourth album, that was it.”

Lange later became legendary for his painstaking, particular note-by–note work with Def Leppard, but was still a relatively unknown quantity to Jones, who insists he was unaware such methods might be used upon Foreigner.

“I knew that he was really into sound, that he was dedicated and he was very serious,” says Jones. “He really showed incredible enthusiasm.”

The first evidence of that enthusiasm came during the pre-production stage when, having heard the songs that the band felt were ready to be recorded, he asked to hear the ideas that Mick considered unfinished. It was not something the guitarist felt comfortable doing, inviting this stranger into his hitherto-private world of taped bits and pieces.

Mick says Lange “forced his way into” this private world. “It was the first time I’d ever let anybody in there,” he adds. “In some cases, he was hearing stuff I thought was embarrassing. But he wanted to hear every single thing I had, even if it was only a 10-second snippet.

“Out of that process, we put Urgent together. It began as just an instrumental passage I had, the thing that became the intro. But I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. I thought it might become some sort of weird instrumental.

“Mutt also helped put Juke Box Hero together. It was originally two separate songs. Lou had one idea called Take One Guitar, and I had the Juke Box Hero thing. Mutt helped us to gel the two…”

Mutt’s contributions are openly acknowledged, but not recognised with the co-writing credits he later received with Leppard. It seems safe to presume he was handsomely rewarded, although Mutt is never available for comment. The man who Jones, with a grin and no small degree of understatement, describes as “a bit of a recluse”, has made only one significant public statement in the last couple of decades: “I’ve always been a private person. I don’t value being in the media spotlight. I’m fortunate to be able to avoid it.”

English engineer Tony Platt, a man who worked with Mutt on a number of albums before Foreigner 4, offers a first-hand view of his methods, and insists the producer is always artist-led. “One of Mutt’s absolute talents – and it is an exceptional talent – is insisting upon getting the songs right,” Platt says. “And he wants to get the songs right before you go into the studio, so you’re starting from a very strong perspective. In fact, the Foreigner 4 album got put back a couple of times, because Mutt didn’t feel the songs were in quite the right shape. Even when I went out to theoretically begin recording, and they were still in pre-production, I ended up hanging around in New York while they were sorting out a couple of songs.

“Then we took them into the studio and started getting sounds. That would undoubtedly suggest other changes that they might want to make in the arrangement of the song, strengthening the sound. The sound can then move further forward – and at a certain moment, we take a snapshot of it and then they could say, ‘That is how it should be. That is the moment in time that this song should inhabit.’ Mutt was always very good at picking that moment, perfectly.”

History has proven Mutt’s infallible sense for what makes a hit record. But what was it like on the other side of the control room window?

Jones shrugs. “Mutt was intense. He was intensely dedicated to it, as well. We had our differences, you know. We were like two goats – stubborn – and we locked horns a few times…”

At a point that even the meticulous Platt can only recall as “late summer/early fall 1980”, recording finally began in the same studio where Head Games had been recorded: Atlantic Studios, on New York’s Upper West Side. However, it would prove to be a false dawn.

Platt: “It was a studio in which a lot of very good things had been done, but it had seen better days at that point in time. Atlantic had air-conditioning units that buzzed, and there were desks that were a little bit weird, so after about a week in there we just decided we had to go somewhere else.”

They would end up at Electric Lady, the legendary recording studio in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village that Jimi Hendrix had built in a basement he’d originally bought to turn into a nightclub. His earlier plan to make it a ‘curvaceous’ space with no right angles faltered, but as a studio it has endured. Jones had worked there in Spooky Tooth. Lange had used it for Back In Black.

Platt: “Both Mutt and I had been very happy at Electric Lady, so we decamped and went there. Studio A is a big room. It still has the murals on the wall that were done when Jimi first bought it. It’s an astonishing space. It has a lot of vibe to it.

“So we set up… We created a large area for the drums, with a big screen set up for the bass. We built a room within the room for the guitar amps. I had to get as much separation as I could, but within a rock context – because I knew a lot of stuff might be replaced. And Lou sang all his vocals in the vocal booth that was already there. It was quite a large booth – and that became his home for all the time we were there! He kept bringing things in and making himself more comfortable.”

But first things first, and that meant recording Dennis Elliott’s drums.

“Mutt had wanted to go the electronic route with the drums,” remembers Jones. “That didn’t sit well with me or with Dennis. That was a bit of a bone of contention!”

Wills: “I remember for three days Dennis was just hitting snare drums. He finally got up and said, ‘Listen man, I can fucking play drums. You can’t even get a sound!’ He was really angry [laughs].”

Jones: “Mutt also wanted to use a click track for timing, and Dennis took offence to that, as well. When he and I were working on the song Break It Up, we got so fed up that, at one point, we just said, ‘Fuck this!’ and went into the studio together. I sat at the piano, Dennis sat at the drums, and we laid down the basic track, just him and me. Then we turned round to Mutt and said, ‘Okay? Happy now?!’ We wanted to prove the point that this band could play and keep time, too.

“I guess I wanted to stay more old-school than Mutt,” Jones muses. “He was all for going ahead and using the technology that was coming up at that time – as you can hear on his Def Leppard albums, the drums there are electronic, they’re synthesised… But I didn’t want to go that route. It wouldn’t have worked for us.”

Today, Dennis Elliott – now retired from the music business and answering a new calling as a wood sculptor – seems reluctant to re-live all this, but recalls that his working life was simpler on the group’s earlier albums. “I was usually done with the drum tracks within the first two weeks, and the songs were then built upon those tracks.”

Elliott is a keen sailor, and during the sessions for Foreigner 4 he would moor his boat at a basin on the Upper West Side, where he lived with his wife Iona. The basin being a relatively short drive from Electric Lady, members of the band and Mutt would often step aboard after a day in the studio, to unwind and enjoy the views.

Elliott, who might ordinarily have expected to be hitting the ocean by this point in the sessions, recalls: “I couldn’t really go too far, and it did seem to take an eternity. Sometimes a song would go through so many changes during that time, it was necessary for me to come back in and start all over… I would stop by the studio every week or two to see what progress was being made – but on the Foreigner 4 album, they always seemed to be playing foosball!”

Sometimes known as table football on this side of the Atlantic, Platt recalls that he and Lange installed the foosball table at Electric Lady. “We bought a table and put it at the back of the studio so, at the end of the night, we’d all unwind around it. We’d get the beers or the wine out, and have a tournament.”

Wills: “Every time there was any downtime, we’d go out there and play at the foosball table. We all got good – and got ferociously competitive about it. Especially Mutt…”

Platt insists he was the foosball champion – “Somewhere I’ve got the trophy, a miniature Converse sneaker” – which Jones confirms. But, as Wills observes, “at $2,000 a day, it was quite an expensive hobby!”

According to the bassist, very little work seemed to be getting done. “It was hard to get the gist of where we were going to go with this album, because after just about every session, there would be this long conversation, between Mick and Mutt, about where we were going with the album and what was needed. If Mutt’s anything, he’s a perfectionist. He doesn’t let anything slide, won’t let anything past him unless he thinks it’s good enough. And Mick Jones is pretty similar – so boy the two of them did lock horns a few times. It was tough!”

Everyone agreed, though, on Waiting For A Girl Like You.

Wills: “That was one of the first songs we recorded – kept and done as a second take! It sounded fabulous. Everybody’s performance on it sounded great and we knew we had that in the can.”

“Waiting For A Girl Like You was Lou’s original live vocal,” says Platt. “That was one of those tracks where I remember the recording session very, very clearly. We put down a basic washy keyboard in the background, with the main track. There was some editing in between takes… And once we’d chosen the master and done all the edits, I remember sitting there till about three o’clock in the morning, and everyone was still saying, ‘Oh, play it back again, play it again!’ There was a general feeling that this was going to be the big hit…”

What no one appreciated while listening to Waiting For A Girl Like You, however, was that Gramm was not going to be able to replicate its incredible chorus live.

Jones: “In hindsight, I’d say Mutt really pushed Lou, probably past his range. I was there as well, so I have to take a bit of… I don’t know about blame, because it all worked out as we all wanted it to work out. But in hindsight, Lou did have a lot of difficulty with the pitch and the range of a couple of those songs. Juke Box Hero was another song that strained his voice to the limit.”

Wills: “Lou could sing it in the studio, but he couldn’t reproduce it live every night. We actually used to do it a semitone down from the record. We used to detune – we had separate guitars for that song. Same with Juke Box Hero. It was just too much for Lou to do. It led to some sort of mind-games going on between him and Mick about performances and stuff. That’s how the whole thing started to disintegrate later on in our careers, really, with Lou not being able to really cope with the demands.”

At the time, though, Wills reckons the singer was unfazed by most of what was going on: “He just dealt with it in Lou’s way – very quietly and subdued. Although he was very much involved in the writing side with Mick, when it came to the recording he would make suggestions, but pretty much let Mick and Mutt run the show…”

That show was gradually running around the clock. They might take the occasional day off, but recording was becoming a way of life.

Wills: “Electric Lady became our second home. We initially began sessions at midday, but three months later they’d gone on so long that we were starting at midnight.”

Like Dennis, Mick and Mutt were holed up in the city. Lou Gramm and Rick Wills were commuting from their homes in Westchester County – about 45 miles, or a 45-minute drive, from Manhattan. This was “no big deal” according to Wills, who prefered to “go back to his home and his family every night. Or whatever hour it was. Sometimes I’d get back at 6am, just as they were getting up to go to school… It was pretty bizarre!”

Their shifting schedule ultimately led to the lyrics for one of Foreigner 4’s songs. Nearby the studio, on the corner of Sixth Avenue, there was a Nathan’s Famous hot dog eaterie, as Jones recalls: “The later it got at night, the bigger the buzz got, and a lot of weird characters, some of them hookers, would appear. It was a big mixture of a lot of different characters – so that was the inspiration for opening song, Night Life.”

However, the extended studio hours were taking their toll financially.

“At the time it was considered unrealistic,” says Wills. “We’d spent over a million dollars in recording costs. There was a lot of pressure – from the record company, from the management and from ourselves. It was pretty tough. Our manager, Bud Prager, was going crazy, having to keep going to Atlantic for more and more advances, just to pay for the studio time. Because once you’ve got that far into it, you can’t turn back, and you begin to realise that you’re going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records to pay that advance back…”

Steadily, though, great tracks started to emerge, including songs like Urgent, which had barely existed when sessions first began, and was, at one point, stripped right back to Elliott’s drum track and that quirky guitar intro.

The song, however, is made by the sax solo played by the late, great Junior Walker. Jones saw Walker and his All-Stars were playing in a club nearby, so he and Wills skipped out of Electric Lady, watched three or four sets, and then invited a bemused Walker down to the studio.

Elliott and his wife made sure they were there to see the soul legend in action. “It was very amusing,” remembers Iona, “because after he played his solo once, he was very happy with it, but Mick made him play it several more times, and was trying to get him to stretch out more and more, until it became that wonderful solo.”

“It turned out that in all his career he had never done an overdub,” adds Jones. “Everything he’d ever done was live. So the first five or six takes, he was really uncomfortable. He had the headphones on, but couldn’t get used to that fact that he was overdubbing. But he did, after a while, and started playing some stuff. He explained, ‘I’ve kind of changed my style up a bit…’ and started playing this jazzy, softer type of stuff. Mutt and I were sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, no, we need the Junior Walker we know and love.’

“Mutt, bless him, went and straight-talked it to Junior: ‘This is great but we really need some of that Shotgun/Road Runner stuff.’ ‘Oh, you want the old shit? Okay!’ So he gets up, does it again and in two or three takes we’ve got it. However, it did take a tremendous amount of editing. Mutt and I spent two days chopping up little slivers of quarter-inch tape from the different takes, and then splicing it all together. We wanted it to be a classic solo, and I think that’s how it ended up…”

It’s tempting to paint Lange as the villain of the piece, but, as the Junior Walker story shows, Jones was just as much a perfectionist. Today, he concedes: “We had these moments with Mutt, but we kind of overcame it. Nothing lasted longer than the time it took to achieve what we’d set out to achieve. Gradually, things eased up with Mutt, and we really started to appreciate what we were all bringing to the party. He loosened up from his more ‘stiff’ approach.”

After three months, however, Platt had to leave. He’d stalled a prior engagement to re-mix Samson’s Shock Tactics LP, but could delay the project no longer.

Platt: “I would speak to Mutt now and then, of course. If he ever had any questions on anything I’d done, he’d just call me up. It was all recorded in 24-track analogue. Those tapes already had a lot of edits in them, so you wouldn’t want to keep playing them. The normal practice in those days was to make up a slave reel from the master reel so you could do all your overdubbing on the slave reel – then you would lock the two together when you did the mix, so you wouldn’t be degrading the sound on the master reel, by playing it over and over again. So before I left I made up all the slave reels and checked everything was right before I left.”

The other thing Platt did before leaving was recommend his replacement, Dave Wittman, the man who would carry the torch as Lange’s right-hand man to the very end of the project.

Initial sessions had seen Platt record keyboards by Peter Frampton’s Bob Mayo, sometime Lou Reed man Michael Fonfara, and Larry Fast from Peter Gabriel’s band. But Mutt and Mick wanted something more. They went after a then-unknown Englishman by the name of Thomas Dolby, who could be found busking in Paris, avoiding a UK music lawyer’s bill he couldn’t afford…

Dolby: “I got a call from a friend in England who said, ‘Somebody called Mick Jones phoned for you and said he wanted you to do a session…’. I thought this was Mick Jones of The Clash, who were one of my favourite bands at the time. I’d actually never heard of Foreigner. But when I looked into it, it turned out that they were actually very big in America!”

Lange, a partner in Zomba Publishing, had heard one of the 22 year old’s demo cassettes and liked his keyboard playing, so, in mid-January 1981, he suggested to Mick that they should check Dolby out.

“I spoke to them from Paris and they suggested I should try out for a day or two and asked, ‘When could you come over?’,” remembers Dolby, of the initial contact. “I thought very hard and said, ‘Well, tomorrow morning!’

“Mutt was really sticking his neck out in insisting that they hired me and fly me over. I was a kid who had previously thought himself lucky to have spent four hours in a recording studio. I was like a bull in a china shop – ordering up all sorts of keyboards and effects, from a list like a takeaway menu.

“They’d already put keyboards on most of the album, but they weren’t very happy with them, so they gave me a trial to see what I could do. The first track they gave me was Urgent, and they were very pleased with that so they asked if I could stick around and do the whole album.”

Mostly, Dolby’s contributions consisted of very subtle keyboard arpeggios, doubling every note Mick Jones and Rick Wills had played.

Mutt could then add yet another layer to the mix but, as Dolby explains, “he’d make it very, very quiet, so you could hardly hear it. That would just make the guitar playing sound better… I think I was on pretty much the whole album.

“Waiting For A Girl Like You was clearly the centrepiece of the album, but they were nervous about it, because they weren’t really known as a ‘ballad band’. But they were also very confident about it, and Mutt Lange, in particular, was absolutely convinced it would be the biggest hit they’d ever had. He said, ‘I really want to make this remarkable. Every time this comes on the radio, I want people to prick up their ears and know exactly what they’re listening to.’

“I was very heavily influenced by Brian Eno and his ambient stuff, and I had a style like that. This was in the days before polyphonic synths that allowed you to play chords. Back then you could only play one note at a time, but you could build up chords on a multi-track by playing long single notes and layering other notes above and below them. It would vary the sound a bit, and you’d end up with a nice mesh. So I recorded a few minutes of that, and Mutt came in and took a slice of it – maybe 25 seconds or so – and spliced it into the front of the song. And it worked rather well!

“I remember, a couple of years later, I’d be driving in middle America somewhere, listening to some AOR rock station, and this sound would come on. It was absolutely unmistakable. I felt it was quite subversive, really, to get some ambient Eno music on to American AOR radio!”

For Dolby, who to that point had “barely made a penny” as a session musician, one month’s work changed his life. “I came back from the States with an envelope full of cash, which I used to make my first album, so the proceeds from Foreigner 4 set me up. By the time Waiting For A Girl Like You came out, then suddenly I had all sorts of option for other work…”

Despite that cash – which led directly to his 1982 debut album The Golden Age Of Wireless, and early hits Windpower and She Blinded Me With Science – Dolby recalls that “they were trying not to break the bank, so I actually stayed in Mutt’s hotel suite on Central Park South. It had a pull-out settee in a second room, and I slept on that for the first week or so. I remember that Mutt would leave for the studio in the morning, before I woke up, and often wouldn’t get back until after I was asleep. The man slept, like, four hours a night! And yet he still found time to sit cross-legged on his bed, playing guitar and singing like Van Morrison. Really extraordinary. He was a very interesting man…”

By the time Dolby arrived, Foreigner had been in Electric Lady about six months but were, it would transpire, only two-thirds of the way through the process. “They would work during the day on vocals and mixing, and at night I was set free in the studio until they came back in at nine o’clock in the morning.”

Jones: “We would give him a load to do, then go out to dinner and just leave him there. Then we’d come back to hear what he’d put on…”

The painstaking work continued with some unusual distractions. Next door to Electric Lady is an art-house cinema called the 8th Street Playhouse. After a late-night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the punters had inadvertently left his seat gently smouldering. Some hours later, smoke was seen pouring out of the cinema; next door, in Electric Lady’s control room, Mick Jones could smell something burning.

“We thought at first the fire was on our side,” he remembers. However, thoughts of countless hours of work being lost were suddenly interrupted by a loud banging on the wall.

Dolby: “Suddenly members of the New York Fire Department came through the wall of the studio with axes. They were very big, beefy guys, and all I could think was that they looked like the Village People…”

Electric Lady survived the intrusion and work resumed. Soon, Dolby’s work was done and he flew home. But for Jones and Lange, pressure was building. Their time at Electric Lady was about to hit a brick wall as the next client, Hall & Oates, refused to budge again. Worse, Mutt’s booking to produce Def Leppard’s Pyromania had also been put back for the last time. Eventually, he simply had to let go of Foreigner…

Jones: “Mutt stayed absolutely as long as he could. It was gut-wrenching for him when he had to leave, but he had to… Def Leppard was already three or four months over-schedule. We’d been through this intense time together, the best part of nine months, so it really was gut-wrenching.”

With Mutt out of the studio – though still in touch on the phone, and listening to mixes couriered across the Atlantic – Jones ended up adding the final touches, mixing and sequencing with engineer Dave Wittman. This lasted around four weeks, from March through to April. With just 10 days of studio time remaining, Jones took the drastic step of taking a bed into the studio and sleeping there rather than lose focus.

Jones: “We’d got into this thing where the studio was like my den. I didn’t even go outside.”

Wills: “He was almost going mad, truly!”

Come the final seven days, Jones and Wittman reckoned they still had 10 days of work to do. With “Hall & Oates’ roadies in the corridor delivering their gear”, they were completing the final song. Meanwhile, Lange and Prager opened what was supposed to be the final mix of Foreigner 4.

Jones: “I get this call from Mutt, and he says: ‘Where are the fucking background vocals on Juke Box Hero?!’ Then my manager called up, asking the same thing: ‘Where are the background vocals?!’”

Jones admits he had removed them on purpose: “It was some ridiculous idea I’d had… I tried to explain this as a creative decision, but they both said I was crazy and insisted I put them back – at which point I realised I’d made the wrong decision, somewhere in those last 10 days of madness.

“So I go see Dave and say, ‘I think we may have fucked up, here! How can we fix it?’ He just said, ‘Don’t worry!’ and rushed back in. Juke Box Hero was so intricate that we’d used every single cable and every single piece of equipment in the studio. Dave and I had all four hands on the desk. Within two hours, he had re-established the set-up – all the equipment, the cabling, the faders, everything and remixed the whole chorus section of the song again. It was just his recall from a completely different mix. And by some miracle it fitted back in – with just a little bit of level adjustment – the choruses and the rest of the song are from two different mixing sessions. It was miraculous. And that was the very last thing we did!”

A fittingly fraught ending to the marathon process, a stroke of luck that was well deserved after all the hard work before. The band took the songs out on the road… and the rest is rock’n’roll history. Asked to reflect on Foreigner 4 today, Jones pauses thoughtfully before answering. “It was definitely the sum of what I thought we’d been building towards. When I look back on it I know it’s my favourite album. I know the process was long, gruelling and costly – costly not just financially, either. Relationships got strained during that album. Domestic situations got out of control. There was a lot of intensity involved in that. But looking back it’s the one I always say I’m probably the most proud of.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR magazine issue 3, July 2011

Freelance contributor to Classic Rock and several of its offshoots since 2006. In the 1980s he began a 15-year spell working for Kerrang! intially as a cub reviewer and later as Geoff Barton’s deputy and then pouring precious metal into test tubes as editor of its Special Projects division. Has spent quality time with Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Ritchie Blackmore, Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore – and also spent time in a maximum security prison alongside Love/Hate. Loves Rush, Aerosmith and beer. Will work for food.

It has been suggested now and then that Status Quo tracks can sound a little, well, samey. But that’s only to those who don’t appreciate them. Yet even Quo diehards might find largely the same set of songs performed four times in the same box set (two of which are literally identical) a little repetitive.

Nonetheless, as a polished-up re-release of a classic live album, a careful remastering of these recordings from Glasgow Apollo in October 1976 (with all three nights’ full performances thrown in), it does a handsome job, heightening the best qualities of the original without smoothing off any essential rough edges.

People often refer to Quo as being ‘at the peak of their powers’ here. But while that might be true of their live potency, as songwriters and their trajectory towards becoming ‘the people’s band’, they’d barely got started. Not only had they yet to write and record some of their best songs when Live! was recorded, it’s also faintly baffling in retrospect that they didn’t play Down Down or Paper Plane, or other big hits (Break The Rules, Down The Dustpipe). But this is a band who were perhaps eager to prove they were a serious rock band and that singles chart success wasn’t really what they were about.

That’s where this expanded Live! set finds it’s USP. The marathon jams through Forty-Five Hundred Times are central to this album, and on three 16-to-18-minute takes on it here they give themselves licence to roam. Francis Rossi’s guitar playing sounds positively possessed at times, and by the end on one of these nights his guitar isn’t even in tune any more. He’s similarly galvanised on the fretboard on the gutsy renditions of Roll Over Lay Down. Elsewhere the visceral aggression of Quo’s performance also punches holes in the speakers, as when bassist Alan Lancaster gets to the mic and pretty much roars his way through Bye Bye Johnny.

As Classic Rock News Editor Dave Ling’s must-read sleeve notes remind us, the band themselves always differed regarding this record’s value, with perennial malcontent Rossi annoyed at the messy performances, which unlike many live albums of the era went unconcealed by studio overdubs. But as drummer John Coghlan concludes: “Ask any Quo fan and they’ll agree. That rawness was the reason they liked it.”

That ragged glory endures. And there’s enough of it here to keep the Quo army headbanging for, ooh, around forty-five hundred hours, give or take.

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock. 

The Black Keys have announced details of their new album, No Rain, No Flowers. It’ll be released on August 8 via Easy Eye Sound/Parlophone Records, and is the follow-up to last year’s Ohio Players collection.

The new album was produced by Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney at Easy Eye Sound Studios in Nashville, and found the pair working with songwriters Rick Nowels and Daniel Tashian, as well as keyboardist Scott Storch.

“I had worked with Rick Nowels on Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence,” says Auerbach. “We’d never really collaborated with a keyboard player or someone who writes on piano the way he does, but it clicked immediately.”

“We wanted to go straight to the source – into the room with people known for their songwriting,” says Carney. “Daniel Tashian was one of the first people I met after moving to Nashville, and we’ve been fans of Scott Storch forever.”

“This whole album was really laboured over with a lot of love,” adds Auerbach. “We hope you feel that.”

The band have also released the title track of the album as a single (below), which follows the launch of Babygirl in March and The Night Before in February. The album is available across multiple formats and can be pre-ordered now.

The Black Keys’ No Rain, No Flowers tour kicks off in Durant, OK on May 23 at the Choctaw Casino & Resort’s Grand Theater. The tour arrives in Europe in late June. Full dates below.

The Black Keys: No Rain, No Flowers tracklist

No Rain, No Flowers
The Night Before
Babygirl
Down to Nothing
On Repeat
Make You Mine
Man On A Mission
Kiss It
All My Life
A Little Too High
Neon Moon

The Black Keys: No Rain No Flowers tour 2025

May 23: Durant Choctaw Casino & Resort Durant: Grand Theater, OK
May 25: Colorado Springs Ford Amphitheater, CO *
May 27: Morrison Red Rocks Amphitheatre, CO *
May 29: Bonner Kettlehouse Amphitheater, MT *
May 30: Boise Outlaw Field at the Idaho Botanical Garden, ID *
May 31: Bend Hayden Homes Amphitheater, OR *
Jun 01: Berkeley Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, CA ^
Jun 03: Los Angeles The Greek Theatre, CA ^
Jun 07: Austin Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, TX ^
Jun 08: Rogers Walmart AMP, AR ^
Jun 11: Wilmington Live Oak Bank Pavilion, NC ^
Jun 12: Raleigh Red Hat Amphitheater, NC ^
Jun 14: Asbury Park Stone Pony Summer Stage, NJ ^

Jun 26: Odense Tinderbox, Denmark
Jun 29: Esch-Sur-Alzette Rockhal, Luxembourg
Jul 01: Berlin Zitadelle Spandau, Germany
Jul 02: Zurich The Hall, Switzerland
Jul 04: Marmande Garorock, France
Jul 05: Beauregard Festival France
Jul 06: La Nuit De L’Erdre, France
Jul 08: Leeds Millennium Square, UK
Jul 09: Manchester Castlefield Bowl, UK
Jul 11: London Alexandra Palace Park, UK
Jul 12: Cactus Festival, Belgium
Jul 13: Bospop Festival, Holland
Jul 15: AMA Music Festival, Italy
Jul 16: Rock In Roma, Italy
Jul 19: Benicàssim, Spain

Aug 09: Atlantic Cityn Borgata Hotel, NJ #
Aug 10: Bethlehem Musikfest – Wind Creek Steel Stage, PA #
Aug 13: Forest Hills Stadium, NY §
Aug 15: Gilford Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion, NH §
Aug 16: Boston MGM Music Hall at Fenway, MA §
Aug 19: Bridgeport Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, CT §
Aug 21: Clarkston Pine Knob Music Theatre, MI §
Aug 22: Cuyahoga Falls Blossom Music Center, OH §
Aug 24: Indianapolis Everwise Amphitheater, IN §
Aug 28: Columbia Merriweather Post Pavilion, MD §
Aug 29: Bethel Bethel Woods Center For the Arts, NY §
Aug 30: Canandaigua Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts, NY §
Aug 31: Toronto Budweiser Stage, ON §
Sep 03: Chicago Huntington Bank Pavilion, IL §
Sep 05: Milwaukee BMO Harris Pavilion, WI ^
Sep 06: Minneapolis The Armory, MN ^
Sep 07: Kansas City Starlight Theatre, MO ^
Sep 11: Mexico City Pepsi Center, Mexico
Sep 20: Atlanta Shaky Knees Music Festival, GA

* = with Hermanos Gutiérrez
^ = with The Heavy Heavy
# = with The Velveteers
§ = with Gary Clarke Jr.

Tickets are on sale now.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.

Ronnie James Dio died 15 years ago, on May 16, 2010, less than six months after announcing he was battling stomach cancer. Classic Rock‘s Paul Elliott, who first saw Dio onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1984 and interviewed him many times, paid tribute.

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The man whose mighty voice lit up the music of Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Dio and Heaven And Hell was truly a unique talent: a vocalist of immense power, expression and innate melodic flair, an elegant lyricist, and a storyteller of rich imagination. There is magic in the words and voice of Ronnie James Dio.

Music was central to his life from an early age. Although he never received any formal vocal training, as a child he mastered French horn and trumpet, to which he later attributed the breathing control pivotal to his singing power. He played bass guitar in his first professional group, the Vegas Kings, a rockabilly outfit formed in 1957 and based in New York State. But it didn’t take him long to answer his true calling. By the end of 1958, he was lead singer of a new-look band, Ronnie & The Red Caps, later renamed Ronnie Dio & The Prophets after Ronnie had adopted a stage name appropriated from mobster Johnny Dio.

Success did not come quickly. As the rock era dawned in the 60s, Dio toiled in obscurity as leader of the Electric Elves, subsequently shortened to Elf. But in the early 70s came the break that he had longed for, when Deep Purple’s Roger Glover and Ian Paice saw potential in Elf and elected to produce the band’s self-titled debut album. And from there, a strong connection was formed between the two bands – a connection that led Dio to the man who would transform his career and change his life.

Ritchie Blackmore, Deep Purple’s moody guitar hero, took a shine to Elf – and especially their singer – when the two bands toured together between 1972 and 1974. And when Blackmore chose to make a solo record, having openly voiced his displeasure over Purple’s funk-influenced albums Burn and Stormbringer, he enlisted Dio and the other members of Elf, minus guitarist Steve Edwards. That album, titled Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, was released in 1975 shortly after the guitarist quit Deep Purple. And it was immediately apparent that Blackmore had found the perfect foil in Dio, a singer whose voice and imagery were ideally suited to Blackmore’s baroque taste.

Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow was the album on which Ronnie James Dio came of age. After all the lean years before and with Elf, this was Ronnie’s golden opportunity, and he responded with a performance of complete authority. The album’s opening track, Man On The Silver Mountain, set the template for so much to come: an epic, mystical tale rendered in a voice that soared and thundered. And Dio proved equally adept on the album’s gentler songs, the poetic Catch The Rainbow, and The Temple Of The King, perhaps the most beautiful and elegiac song he ever recorded.

What followed was one of rock’s all-time classic albums, establishing this new band – now simply named Rainbow – as a major force, and confirming Dio as a singer of unrivalled power. Released in June 1976, Rainbow Rising is the model of what aficionados like to call ‘castle rock’: heroic, fantasy-themed, progressive heavy metal built to a monolithic scale, and most potently illustrated by Stargazer, the album’s vast quasi-symphonic centrepiece. Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton, then writing for Sounds, summed up Rising perfectly, describing it as ‘thermonuclear rock’n’roll’.

How to top that? Ronnie almost did on Rainbow’s third studio album Long Live Rock’N’Roll with the track Gates Of Babylon, another Stargazer-sized set-piece. But that record, best known for its anthemic title track, was to be Dio’s swansong for Rainbow, Blackmore replacing him with dapper Englishman Graham Bonnet as he pursued a more radio-friendly direction. It was hard on Ronnie, being out of a job after just four years with Rainbow. But within a year he would be courted by another world-famous rock band – and this would present him with the greatest challenge of his career.

When announced as the new singer in Black Sabbath – succeeding the much-loved Ozzy Osbourne – Dio faced hostility from the media and from hardcore Sabbath fans. To further complicate the issue, Dio was an American joining a quintessentially British band. But Dio’s debut with Sabbath, 1980’s Heaven And Hell, silenced his critics. In Sounds, Peter Makowski stated: ‘Ronnie James Dio has injected a whole new energy into the group… Just sit back, turn it up and feel your brain implode.

Simply put, Dio made Black Sabbath great again. His gift for melody, and his poetic sensibility, brought a lyrical quality to Sabbath’s music and inspired Tony Iommi in particular, whose lead guitar work on the album’s phenomenal title track is the best he has ever played. And crucially, Dio could also handle the really heavy stuff, as he proved emphatically on Neon Knights, arguably the heaviest of all Sabs songs. Nobody has ever sung a heavy metal song better than Ronnie did with Neon Knights.

He would make another great album with Sabbath, Mob Rules, released in 1981. But as so often happens, a combination of heavy touring and personality clashes led to a split in 1982 amid rumours that the rival parties had been tampering with the mix of the live-in-concert album Live Evil.

Many years later, Ronnie would dismiss these stories as “bullshit”, but on the cover of Live Evil there was a small detail that spoke volumes of the animosity between Sabbath and Dio: the singer was billed not as Ronnie James Dio but as plain Ronnie Dio. It was a cheap shot to which Ronnie reacted by forming a new band under his own name, a band whose first album would blow Sabbath out of the water.

Holy Diver, released in June 1983, is one of the great heavy metal debuts. The band Ronnie put together featured two familiar faces – former Rainbow colleague Jimmy Bain on bass, and fellow Sabbath fugitive Vinny Appice on drums – plus a relatively unknown and inexperienced guitarist in 19-year-old Vivian Campbell, previously of Irish band Sweet Savage. But they made a tight unit: Bain and Appice rock solid, Campbell flashy and fiery.

With Ronnie now undisputed group leader for the first time since Elf, Holy Diver was the album on which his singular artistic vision was finally realised. It’s a record packed with classic songs, not just Dio classics but genre-defining heavy metal classics: Stand Up And Shout, Holy Diver, Rainbow In The Dark, Don’t Talk To Strangers. By comparison, Sabbath’s Born Again, featuring Dio’s surprise replacement Ian Gillan, was widely regarded as a joke, even before Spinal Tap lampooned the Sabs’ Stonehenge stage set.

Throughout the 80s, Dio – the man and the band – maintained a large and loyal following. Band members came and went, beginning with Vivian Campbell, who went on to Whitesnake and then Def Leppard. In ‘86 Ronnie organised Hear ‘N Aid, heavy metal’s answer to Band Aid, a charity project for African famine relief that produced a hit single, Stars, written by Ronnie and sung by a hairy ensemble cast featuring members of Motley Crue, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. And if no subsequent Dio album ever matched Holy Diver, Ronnie continued to deliver great songs (We Rock, The Last In Line, Sacred Heart, Rock’N’Roll Children) and spectacular live shows. (Nobody who saw Ronnie battling Dean The Dragon on stage could ever forget the experience!)

Then, in the early 90s, came an astonishing volte-face. Ronnie rejoined Black Sabbath. It didn’t last. They made a half-decent album, Dehumanizer, but when Sabbath were invited to support Ozzy on what was billed as the Double-O’s farewell tour, Ronnie pulled out and Rob Halford of Judas Priest acted as stand-in.

Ronnie re-launched Dio in 1994, and in the next 10 years the band recorded five albums with varying line-ups. But for Ronnie, Black Sabbath was unfinished business, and in 2007 he reunited with Iommi, Appice and bassist Geezer Butler as Heaven And Hell. This would prove to be Ronnie James Dio’s last hurrah.

Initially, Ronnie had intended to reform Dio after Heaven And Hell’s world tour, but such was the success of that tour, and so strong was the vibe in the band after recording three new tracks for the Black Sabbath compilation The Dio Years, it was decided that Heaven And Hell would record a brand new album. That album, The Devil You Know, was released to widespread acclaim in 2009. It would be the last of Ronnie’s recordings released in his lifetime.

The death of Ronnie James Dio has had a profound effect both on those who knew him and those who simply loved his music. For this writer, there are many memories to cherish. Ronnie was the first rock star I interviewed as a professional journalist, back in 1985, when he was promoting Dio’s Sacred Heart album. It was a huge thrill for me to meet him. Since 1980 – when I unwrapped a Christmas present from my brother, a cassette of Heaven And Hell – I have been a Ronnie James Dio fan.

I first saw Ronnie on stage with Dio at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1984, on The Last In Line tour. And across the years I’ve seen Ronnie play so many great shows: at Birmingham NEC with that bloody dragon, at London’s Astoria performing the whole of Holy Diver, and the last time, at Brighton Centre with Heaven And Hell.

My last interview with Ronnie was just a couple of years ago, when he was in London with Heaven And Hell. What I remember most of all was the warmth of the rapport between him and Tony, Geezer and Vinny. I asked Ronnie about a phrase he used many times in his lyrics, a phrase that had become akin to a trademark: ‘Look out!’ He’d used it in Holy Diver, in Rainbow In The Dark, and a record-breaking five times in Sabbath’s Children Of The Sea.

He smiled. “It’s funny. Whenever I play in Phoenix, this one guy is always there, and every time I’m going to sing it he holds up sign that says ‘Look Out!’ I take it as a compliment!”

He was right: it is a compliment. When I had a leaving party after 10 years working for Kerrang!, the invitations featured a photo of Ronnie with a stuffed eagle and the headline: Look Out! It was a tribute to the man who, for me, best epitomises the spirit of heavy metal.

In a 2009 issue of Classic Rock, I stated: ‘Of all the legendary heavy metal singers, Ronnie James Dio is the greatest.’ And there are many, all over the world, who share that opinion. I recall a drunken night with friends in Brighton when the conversation inevitably turned to heavy metal, and, specifically, singers – at which point one friend, Andy Hunns, threatened to walk out of the pub unless we all agreed that Ronnie James Dio is the No.1 metal singer of all time. We agreed, Andy stayed. Rob Halford was voted No.2.

Ronnie James Dio sang so many great songs: Man On The Silver Mountain, Sixteenth Century Greensleeves, The Temple Of The King, Stargazer, Tarot Woman, Starstruck, Kill The King, Long Live Rock’N’Roll, Neon Knights, Children Of The Sea, Heaven And Hell, Die Young, Stand Up And Shout, Holy Diver, Rainbow In The Dark, The Last In Line, We Rock. But if there is one song, above all others, with a lyric that best captures the essence of Ronnie James Dio, it is Sacred Heart: ‘Whenever we dream, that’s when we fly.’

He dared to dream, and he flew high. Rest in peace, Ronnie.

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

It’s a decade since Daevid Allen left us to take up a new cosmic address. It’s technically 11 years since I See You – Gong’s 13th studio album and his final recording on this earthly plane – was released. The band never were ones to yield to the dictates of time.

Invariably, figures of Allen’s stature have left their best material in the distant past, but I See You stands defiant as a work of towering vitality, a raised fist and even a raised finger on tracks like This Revolution – a denouement fitting for a man who occasionally went by the characteristically bonkers epithet Divided Alien Bert Camembert.

Perhaps the nicest touch on this 10th-anniversary edition is the blackened circular border around the wheel of life of the cover, imitating Gong’s classic debut Camembert Electrique from 1971. That direct homage indicates everything has come full circle, even if the wheel continues to roll without him – or the physical manifestation of him, at least.

It seems remarkable now that Gong formed because of a visa problem in Paris in 1968, the Adam’s rib from Soft Machine, taking a more circuitous, mayhem-strewn route towards enlightenment. Significantly, I See You was not only Allen’s last album, but guitarist Kavus Torabi’s first for the mystic travellers. As such, it feels more like a celebration of the cyclical nature of life – a passing of the baton – than it does a commiseratory tribute to a fallen leader.

This Revolution is a howl at capitalist idiocy that feels more pertinent than ever

Gong are still going strong with Torabi at the helm, a position bequeathed to him by Allen when the latter knew his cancer was terminal. Consequently, the album was less an end than a beginning; although tracks like the shimmering, shamanic closer Shakti Yoni & Dingo Virgin (honouring the group’s founders) might well cause a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye.

Elsewhere, Gong are mercurial and quixotic, rolling back the years on tracks like Occupy, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Angel’s Egg. Syllabub finds Allen jiving over a funk groove with an unusual time signature, at least before it careens off to the Moon in a rigid 3/4 formation that turns out to be just an appetiser for some far out cosmic jazz.

And Pixielation is almost hip-hop in its big-beat dimensions, save for the odd hippy flute, cantering coda or intermittent ambient swathe that separates sections of the song with brownian noise.

But perhaps the most memorable moment of all is This Revolution, a Beat-like howl at capitalist idiocy that feels more pertinent than ever. ‘This revolution has already begun inside us,’ Allen intones, and it’s truly inspiring stuff. Shine on, Bert Camembert, shine on.

I See You is on sale now via Kscope.