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Founded in the early 1990s and originally in existence until the end of that decade, underground British black metal label Cacophonous Records helped launch the careers of Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Sigh and more. In 2016. as the reactivated label prepared to release a shelved CoF album, label founder Neil ‘Frater Nihil’ Harding, the band’s frontman Dani Filth and more looked back on how Cacophonous shaped extreme metal.

In an era when there are almost as many record labels as there are bands making records, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when labels were fewer and further between, not least in the world of extreme metal. Back in the 80s and 90s, being signed became a genuine status symbol not least because, pre-internet, having a label behind you was often the only way to get your releases into the hands of fans and your music into the ears of potential listeners. No Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify or Facebook back then – hell, we didn’t even have MySpace.

It was against such a background that the explosion of second wave black metal took place and almost all the key releases of the 90s were scattered over just a handful of labels: Osmose, Candlelight, Deathlike Silence, Fullmoon, Misanthropy, Merciless, No Fashion and, of course, Cacophonous Records, who helped launch the likes of Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Bal-Sagoth, Gehenna, Primordial and Sigh.

The roots of Cacophonous are actually embedded in another iconic UK label, Vinyl Solution. Growing from the Portobello Road record store of the same name, it offered a diverse roster from the worlds of techno, hip hop and hardcore punk, alongside significant thrash and death metal bands such as Cancer, Macabre, Cerebral Fix and Bolt Thrower.

Initially folding lyric sheets in exchange for a few records, before eventually taking over the mail order, Frater Nihil – then known simply as Neil Harding – was pretty well-versed in the business by the time he was offered a position overseeing the label. Almost immediately he set about to separate its metal component and turn it into a new self-contained label; Cacophonous was born.

The plan at first was to just release seven-inch records and this is what he did, showcasing underground acts such as Sigh, Kawir, Psychic Pawn, Megiddo and Monolith. The latter was a homegrown thrash/death metal band perhaps most notable for featuring drummer Nick Barker, a soon-to-be member of Cradle Of Filth – as it turned out, it was a crossing of paths with Cradle in 1993, and their induction of Barker, that would set the course for both parties.

“The band left a copy of the Total Fucking Darkness demo in the shop while I was out,” Neil recalls. “I listened to it and thought it was amazing, so I called them up the next day and we went for a beer and talked about the future. They shared a similar ideology; it was Satanic music as I saw it and I thought it would fit very well into what I wanted to do with the label. Cradle were the first band that you listened to and thought, ‘This is the future,’ and really everything sprang from that. It was like, ‘OK, this is the band everyone should hear.’”

“I knew about the store at Portobello because I worked at my granddad’s flower shop in London every Christmas,” remembers Dani. “At lunchtime they’d say, ‘Go for lunch, here’s 20 quid,’ and I’d jump on a train, and come back with all these records saying, ‘Oh, that was delicious.’

“Principle… was originally going to be a seven-inch,” he continues. “We’d been on tour with Cancer and Nick was their drum tech. He came down to produce the EP and in the course of one day he went on to become the drummer and the EP became an album. It all happened very quickly, which was very exciting for a young band.”

Released early in 1994 with the memorable title The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh and the historic catalogue number NIHIL1, it represented Cacophonous’s most ambitious release to date, completely redefining the nature of the label in the process. Neil abandoned the seven-inch release schedule and instead concentrated on breaking Cradle. This was a much bigger task than it might sound, for while the band would ultimately sell half a million copies of the album, in the early days they were met with considerable bemusement and even active resistance. Even a 1993 UK tour with Emperor (a thing of legend today) struggled to pull attendees. “I remember at one show there were literally two people,” Dani laughs. “We ended up saying, ‘This isn’t going anywhere’ and walked off halfway through a song.”

Black metal was still a pretty unknown quantity in ’93 and ’94, particularly in the UK, and distributors baulked at this ballsy, corpsepainted six-piece. Many media outlets refused supportive coverage altogether due to the genre’s associations with desecration, arson, murder and totalitarian politics, and a ‘Satanic panic’ of sorts arose, with scare stories by UK tabloids and even the BBC. At one point both the group and Neil even had to sign a disclaimer distancing themselves from far-right politics in order to get distribution.

But while there were certainly elements of hysteria at work, there’s no doubt that both the band and particularly Cacophonous were intended as more than purely musical ventures. Here was an overtly Satanic record label that unapologetically took inspiration from some pretty extreme occult groups, a point largely reflected by Cradle themselves and evident in Principle…’s lyrics and artwork. Most telling of all was the final (unlisted) track, Imperium Tenebrarum – essentially a short statement of intent, spoken by Neil himself.

“You had various occult groups, people were talking about Satanic war and changing things from an occult sense,” says Neil. “There was a notion among people who listened to Satanic black metal that you were part of something greater. That’s why on Imperium Tenebrarum we’re talking about burning down temples and marching over dogma, because that’s what I really believed in and wanted to showcase with the label. And that’s partly why I championed Cradle.”

“There was a feeling that there was something revolutionary happening,” adds Dani. “It felt like the time was right. That was ’93. Metal had died a horrible death, grunge had killed the mainstream off, so it felt like a revolution. There were bands popping up all over the place, you had those famous magazines covers, the church burning, you didn’t know what was happening day to day and the seriousness of it just added to the excitement.”

A different but equally significant British band Cacophonous signed was Bal-Sagoth. Far less grave than Cradle and with fantasy literature rather than occult leanings, their blend of symphonic extreme metal and heroic atmosphere provided a musical template for future bands such as Turisas and Ensiferum, and Cacophonous would end up releasing the first half of the band’s six-album discography.

“They’ve got a very particular fanbase, but in some cases have wider appeal than Cradle,” says Neil of the Yorkshire clan. “There are more people I’ve met over the years who aren’t into metal per se who know Bal-Sagoth.”

While the albums were all larger-than-life, the band had been so disappointed by their demo that they only sent it out on request and even today vocalist Byron Roberts credits Neil’s foresight with regard to the signing.

“I sent a big letter with the tape,” he recalls, “I said, ‘If we’re ever given a decent recording budget, this is what we’d want: big symphonic keyboards, intros, extensive spoken parts. It’s basically supposed to sound very epic and orchestral.’ Neil saw the potential in those songs and offered us a three-album deal. So that was our big break because none of the other labels wanted to know.”

Irish Pagan black metallers Primordial were another early signing, the band releasing their acclaimed debut full-length Imrama in 1995. Neil was also keen to pick up some of the black metal talent coming out of Norway and, maintaining a focus on the more symphonic and ethereal side of things, he signed both Gehenna and Dimmu Borgir, the latter a tip from Emperor guitarist Samoth. Cacophonous’s release of Dimmu’s second album, Stormblåst, ultimately broke the band to a much wider audience, laying the groundwork for its follow-up, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, which ultimately propelled them toward the mainstream.

Not all the label’s signings would prove so accessible, of course. Japanese black metallers Sigh signed to Cacophonous after the death of their former label owner, Mayhem mainman Euronymous. They then proceeded to perplex both their fanbase and their new label with a series of superb but increasingly experimental works integrating elements of jazz, rock and classical. Their acclaimed Hail Horror, Hail album even prompted the label to put a disclaimer on the back of the sleeve to explain its unusual nature to the unwary.

“When we were making Hail Horror, Hail, we seriously though that nobody would like it,” says Sigh founder Mirai. “Neil actually came to Japan while we were recording it and frowned upon what we were doing. We were really happy to see that. When a lot of magazines ended up giving it a high score and it was ranked in the albums of the year, we were so surprised.”

Sigh might have represented the more challenging side of the scene, but in general by the mid-90s black and occult metal were becoming increasingly popular. The label’s sales reflected this, and the growth led to the recruitment of more staff, most notably one Julie Weir. “Suddenly I was selling 10,000 units instead of 1,000 units; it was making money and it wasn’t just a bedroom project anymore,” Neil explains. “That’s why Julie came in, to do the things I didn’t want to do. All I wanted to do was listen to demos, go to gigs, sign bands and sort out artwork and recordings. I didn’t want to publicise what I was doing.”

Despite (and in part perhaps because of) this rapid expansion, Cacophonous began facing a number of challenges. A falling out with Cradle over the proposed second album, Dusk… And Her Embrace, resulted in the group departing the label altogether and re-recording the album for Music For Nations. While their contractual compromise, 1996 opus V Empire, did prove to be the most successful Cacophonous release ever, the loss of the band was a significant blow. Some rather Cradle-esque examples of vampire-themed goth/black metal were released by bands such as Finland’s Twilight Ophera and Germany’s Ancient Ceremony, but made little real impact. Meanwhile, other big sellers such as Dimmu Borgir and Bal-Sagoth also departed, signing contracts with Nuclear Blast. This was an awkward situation as the German label had been distributing for Cacophonous and led to a split between the two parties, one that would ultimately spell disaster for the UK label.

“We found another distributor who wanted to get into the metal market – they mainly dealt with rock and punk – and made a switch,” recalls Neil. “But they had no clue, no contacts and they didn’t have the same customer base, so instead of pre-selling 5,000 in Germany we plummeted and were selling 500. Effectively we lost our place in the market and suddenly we were being leapfrogged by lesser labels and there was no money. We weren’t getting the sales and so bands weren’t coming to us.”

The label was more or less silent between 1999 and 2002, and during these years a sister label arose, namely Visible Noise, driven by both Julie and, initially at least, Neil. Cacophonous would make a brief resurgence with a number of distinctly different groups between 2002 and 2004 (“I decided to try something new with blackened metal and deathcore,” says Neil, “it was a rebranding”) but the writing was on the wall and Cacophonous sank into the shadows.

A decade later, a conversation between Neil and Julie regarding the possibility of making vinyl releases of some of the back catalogue quickly ignited a spark that led to the two agreeing to bring back the label as a fully fledged operation with both reissues and new signings, including The King Is Blind and The Infernal Sea. And rather poetically, two decades later, Cacophonous finally released the original, unheard recording of Dusk… And Her Embrace by Cradle of Filth, featuring a completely different lineup than the version released in 1996.

“There are only two people who had the masters, Dani and myself, so if it had ever come out beforehand it would be pretty obvious who it was,” Neil laughs. “So I was always looking for a legitimate way to put those out. I hadn’t seen Dani for five years but we always hit it off and we always lapsed back into that 90s camaraderie.”

“It was a different era of the band,” says Dani of the unreleased album, “and that’s why it’s important it comes out. At the time we were very inspired by bands like Emperor and Immortal and this version harks more to that era than the more polished bombast of the MFN version. So it literally speaks of an era that will never be again. There were legal issues in the past but it’s been 20 years and 20 years is a long time – you get less for murder!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 281, March 2016

In April 1988, Angus Young was asked how it felt to be fashionable again. “Disgusting!” he replied, laughing.

The joke was typical of a man who has never given two hoots about what tastemakers have to say. But the question was entirely valid at a time when AC/DC were finally pulling out of their mid-80s slump.

Angus was talking to Sounds journalist Mary Anne Hobbs during the video shoot for the band’s single That’s The Way I Wanna Rock ’N’ Roll. Their previous release, the blistering, full-throttle rock’n’roll song Heatseeker, had recently reached No.12 on the UK chart – the biggest hit single of their entire career. Parent album Blow Up Your Video had hit number two. But the chart positions, while impressive, were only a part of the story.

What made AC/DC fashionable in 1988, and relevant to a younger rock audience, was the kudos they received from some of the rising stars of the era. “Suddenly AC/DC are in vogue and as a ripe as Zeppelin for plagiarism,” Hobbs wrote. “The renegades of the metalloid resurgence are quick to cite AC/DC’s influence, and regurgitate their riffs whole.”

Guns N’ Roses named AC/DC as a key inspiration alongside Aerosmith and the Sex Pistols, and performed Whole Lotta Rosie during their first UK gigs at London’s Marquee club in June 1987. The Cult, guided by future AC/DC producer Rick Rubin, made the transformation from goth heroes to a balls-out hard rock band with their 1987 album Electric, on which the opening track Wild Flower recycled the riff from AC/DC’s Rock ’N’ Roll Singer. And Metallica drummer Metallica’s Lars Ulrich proudly wore a Back In Black tour jacket given to him by his band’s co-manager Peter Mensch, who had previously worked with AC/DC.

Angus being Angus, he wasn’t going to make a song and dance about the band’s resurgence. “We’ve never been the critics’ love,” he said. “The audience were always the critics to me. If a kid came up to me and said, ‘I didn’t like your show’, that would break my heart. But if you make a record and your audience likes it, they buy it.”

Angus had been around long enough to know how the music business worked, how fashions come and go, how bands rise and fall. He said he hadn’t heard Guns N’ Roses or Metallica. He was still listening to the same stuff he’d always loved – Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Muddy Waters. He reiterated the simple philosophy that had served AC/DC since their inception. “Rock music is what we do best, nice and loud and tough.” But in the making of Blow Up Your Video, the band had made one significant change – and it would prove pivotal to the greater success that followed at the turn of the 90s.

AC/DC’s 1983 album Flick Of The Switch had been produced by the band. 1985 follow-up Fly On The Wall by Angus and Malcolm Young. Neither album had been anywhere near as good or as popular as those they had made with the brilliant producer ‘Mutt’ Lange: Highway To Hell, Back In Black and For Those About To Rock.

AC/DC wised up with Blow Up Your Video. It marked the return of the production team that had worked on every AC/DC album from 1975 to 1978: Harry Vanda and George Young, the latter the elder brother of Malcolm and Angus. In this was a tacit admission. When AC/DC were making records, they needed an extra pair of ears – or in this case, two.

In 1988, Malcolm Young gave a rare interview for Japanese TV in which he noted the success of Blow Up Your Video in the same nonchalant manner as Angus. “There’s still people out there that like us,” he smiled.

Malcolm explained that the album’s title was a wry comment on a generation of rock fans glued to MTV. “The idea was to get the kids out of their homes and down to the show. Don’t watch TV – come and see the real thing.” He also cocked a snook at the big-haired rock bands of the period, principally Whitesnake. “David Coverdale’s got success but he’s had to become a pop singer to get it,” he sneered. “There’s always your glamour bands and your denim-clad groups. And you usually find out that your denim-clad groups are still surviving and the glam ones fade away.”

Behind the scenes, however, Malcolm Young had his own problems. In May 1988 he was forced to step down from the North American leg of the Blow Up Your Video tour in order to undergo treatment for alcohol dependency. Standing in for Malcolm at those shows was his nephew Stevie Young, whose former band Starfighters had supported AC/DC in 1980.

“The funny thing was I never drunk heaps, I just drank consistently and it caught right up on me,” said Malcolm in 2004. “Angus was going, ‘I’m your brother; I don’t want to see you dead here. Remember Bon?’ So I took that break and cleaned myself up.”

And shortly after the tour finished in November 1988 came a permanent change in personnel, when drummer Simon Wright was sacked and replaced by Chris Slade, a bald veteran who had previously been a member of Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers’ brief-lived supergroup The Firm. AC/DC’s unsteady 80s was drawing to a close. The new decade was ahead of them, and there was everything to play for.

Classic Rock contributor since 2003. Twenty Five years in music industry (40 if you count teenage xerox fanzines). Bylines for Metal Hammer, Decibel. AOR, Hitlist, Carbon 14, The Noise, Boston Phoenix, and spurious publications of increasing obscurity. Award-winning television producer, radio host, and podcaster. Voted “Best Rock Critic” in Boston twice. Last time was 2002, but still. Has been in over four music videos. True story. 

Thanks to albums such as British Steel and Screaming For Vengeance, Judas Priest had ascended to metal’s premier division by the mid-80s. But they hit a bump in the road with 1986’s Turbo, an album that saw the veteran band trying out new technology but left many fans cold . In 2017, singer Rob Halford and bassist Ian Hill looked back on the darkness and tragedy that shaped their most divisive record.

Turbo is the sore thumb in the Judas Priest catalogue. Received wisdom pitches it somewhere between a cynical sell-out with one eye on the pop market and outright career suicide.

Neither is true. Turbo may have been a departure on the surface, but at heart it was a classic Priest album. On a commercial level, it was far from a flop thanks to mainstream American radio and MTV picking up on the singles Turbo Lover, Locked In and the anti-censorship broadside Parental Guidance. “It lost us some friends,” says Priest bassist Ian Hill, a mainstay of the band since their very beginning in Birmingham at the end of the 1960s. “But it made us as least as many as we’d lost.”

Priest were coming off the back of a stellar run of success when they began work on Turbo. While their late-70s and early-80s albums had enshrined them as one of Britain’s pre-eminent metal bands, the platinum-plated one-two of 1982’s Screaming For Vengeance and ’84’s Defenders Of The Faith had turned them into bona fide rock stars in America.

“We were on top of the world,” says Rob, a man whose drily lugubrious manner is amusingly at odds with his Metal God persona. “After slogging away for years, we’d suddenly reached that place all bands strive to get to, which is success. It was an amazing time, not only for Priest but for metal in general.”

After touring Defenders Of The Faith, the band gave themselves a much-needed break. When they reconvened in Marbella in southern Spain in early 1985, they were keen to throw themselves back into the fray. But the last thing they wanted to do was merely repeat past glories.

“Some people would have been absolutely over the moon if we’d done another Defenders Of The Faith,” says Ian. “But we felt like we’d reached the end of the line with that. Some bands get a formula and they stick to it, and people love them for it. But we’ve always moved forwards.”

As they soaked up the sun in Marbella, they began to realise that things had changed since they had been away. Launched just a few years earlier, MTV had become a music industry powerhouse with the power to make or break bands. Many of Priest’s peers had latched onto this and altered their approach to fit this revolutionary new format, chief among them ZZ Top and Billy Idol, who had begun incorporating the latest technology into their sound and serving up eye-catching videos to fit in the heavy rotation slots. “We were definitely aware of what was going on with MTV,” says Rob. “It was a gamechanger. It totally changed the face of music, which probably had some influence on the general outcome of Turbo.”

Understandably, when electronic instrument company Roland approached Priest to see if they would be interested in being the people to try out a brand new guitarsynthesizer they had developed, the band jumped at the chance.

“It basically took the straightforward sound that you normally get if you plug a guitar into a Marshall amp, but let you alter the sound completely,” says Rob. “It could give you a non-guitar sound. That was at the heart of Turbo. And that, I think, was part of the pushback from the purists in metal: ‘Why are you messing with the sound? That’s not the Priest we want to hear.’”

The band weren’t oblivious to the ramifications of what they were planning when they flew to the Bahamas to begin work on the album at Nassau’s Compass Point Studios with longtime producer ‘Colonel’ Tom Allom, but they were still determined to push forward. It wasn’t the only radical decision they had made. The original plan was that the new album would be a double, titled Twin Turbos.

“We wanted a double album for the price of a single one,” says Ian. “The label weren’t happy about that. They couldn’t manufacture the album and flog it for what we wanted them to sell it for. So about halfway through the writing process, we decided to go with it as a single album.”

Some of the tracks written for Twin Turbos would appear on their next album, 1988’s Ram It Down, while others would feature as bonus tracks on subsequent reissues.

But clashes with their record label were the least of Rob’s worries. The singer had his own battles to deal with. Ask him today what someone might have seen if they’d have walked in halfway through the sessions, and he laughs drily.

“I’d probably have been in the corner with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a mound of coke,” he says. “I was out of my fucking tree. That’s where I was at personally. It was a point where I needed help. I don’t know how the guys coped with me.”

“We all went over the top in the 80s,” says Ian. “If you weren’t going over the top, there was something wrong. But we didn’t realise quite how far gone Rob was.”

Rob’s state of mind wasn’t helped by the exotic location. “There were tremendous distractions,” he says. “We’d start work at six o’clock at night, then Tom Allom would have his gin and tonic and that was the end of the session. We’d all go down the pub and get loaded. We had to get the hell out of the Bahamas. Somebody said, ‘Why don’t we go to Miami instead?’ Oh yeah, great idea. ’Cos there were no distractions there either. Ha ha ha, oh my god.”

Instead, the band moved their base of operations to Los Angeles. It was there that Rob checked into rehab. “I came out after 30 days and my life had changed in a million ways,” he says. “The important part was my ability to understand that music is the most important thing in my life and that I don’t need any other chemical influence to do what I need to do.”

He may have been clean and sober, but life had one more tragic twist to throw at him. In 1986, Rob’s boyfriend at the time killed himself in front of the singer. He’s reluctant to talk about specifics, but his voice takes on an understandably solemn note when he recalls the impact it had on his life.

“I was with someone who was also dealing with their own self-destructive challenges,” he says. “That was my pledge, in the memory of that person, to stay clean and sober. In fact, I just passed my 31st birthday last week. But drug addiction and alcoholism is like a curse, man. Bands ask me about the drink and the drugs, and I say, ‘Fucking do it, it’s a rite of passage – I hope you have a good time with it and I hope it doesn’t kill you.’ Because it can, and it does.”

Ironically, given Rob’s own personal turmoil, Turbo is resolutely uplifting, defiant and even sex-obsessed. It’s there in the titles: Turbo Lover; Hot For Love; Reckless; Wild Nights, Hot And Crazy Days. Even the album’s cover illustration of a woman’s hand clutching a gear stick is a barely disguised visual innuendo.

It also features Parental Guidance, a winking dig at the PMRC, the censorship group who had included Priest’s song Eat Me Alive on their so-called ‘Filthy Fifteen’ – a list of songs that they claimed threatened the moral fabric of America. The PMRC successfully campaigned to put ‘Parental Guidance’ stickers on albums containing explicit material.

“We couldn’t believe our ears when we heard about it,” says Rob. “It’s one of those things that only happens in America. I remember the day we said, ‘We should write a song called Parental Guidance. Take a walk in my shoes and see what you’re afraid of – it’s not real. As it turns out, Turbo was a commercial success, one of the biggest ones Priest had. So the PMRC thing didn’t have any knock-on effect.”

That commercial success must have seemed a long way off when the album was released in April 1986. Initial reactions in the press were at best baffled and at worst outright hostile. More importantly, its synthesized sounds alienated a chunk of their fanbase who wanted Priest’s traditional steel-plated twin guitar attack.

“It was a bit of a kick in the balls. It’s not nice to make a record and somebody goes, ‘This is shit.’ But this is the balancing act – you have to write from the heart, for yourself. You need the opportunity to express yourself and bang into things when you do.”

Age has been kind to Turbo. Its unconventional approach may have scared the horses at the time, but today it sounds shockingly modern. And its opening four tracks – Turbo Lover, Locked In, Private Property and Parental Guidance – are stone cold pop-metal classics, guitar-synths or not.

“It was a grand experiment,” says Ian. “We weren’t sure what the reaction would be, but we believed we were doing the right thing. And that’s why it’s honest.”

“The original kickback has mellowed over the years,” adds Rob. “People appreciate it now for the songs. They’ve embraced it. We could bang out any of those tracks live now and they’d do the business. Judas Priest are this band that has many metal heads attached to its shoulders, and Turbo has become part of the legend.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 281, February 2017

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

Given the incendiary, fragile alchemy that made them such an explosively brilliant band, it’s no surprise that it took a few attempts to get the classic Guns N’Roses line-up right. It was a formula they had been trying to get right over the course of a few years, first with Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin’s band Hollywood Rose and then as they merged with fellow Los Angeles band L.A. Guns in early 1985. But still, something was amiss.

The line-up took its first steps towards their definitive crew with the addition of bassist Duff McKagan shortly before their first gig as Guns N’Roses at the Troubadour in March 1985. This version of the quintet did not last long, though. Instead, with a short tour of the Pacific Northwest planned for early summer fast approaching, it all looked like it might fall to pieces when lead guitarist Tracii and drummer Rob Gardner departed on the eve of the booked dates.

It was just two days before a previously-scheduled show at LA’s The Troubadour when Rose, Stradlin, Slash, McKagan and Adler got together in a rehearsal space in the city’s Silverlake neighbourhood to play together. This needed to work, or GN’R was over before it had even started. They dived into a rendition of Shadow Of Your Love, a rollicking, rattling rock tune that had been knocking around since Hollywood Rose, and all five of them immediately clocked that something electrifying was going on. “We could all hear and feel that the fit was right,” Duff wrote in his autobiography It’s So Easy (And Other Lies). “The chemistry was immediate, thunderous and soulful. It was amazing and all of us recognised it instantly.”

“We were playing Shadow Of Your Love and Axl showed up late,” Steven Adler recalled. “We were playing the song and right in the middle of it Axl showed up and grabbed the mic and was running up and down the walls screaming. I thought, ‘This is the greatest thing ever’. We knew right then what we had.”

Reminiscing about the rehearsal in Reckless Road, Duff said it was a live-changing moment. “That day was probably the most important day of our lives, as players and musicians,” he marvelled. “It definitely ranks up there because that’s when we all knew it was solidified. This was the best band that any of us had come close to being in.”

Their live debut had to be at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood venue from which a string of giant 80s rockers including Mötley Crüe and Poison had launched their careers. It was, as McKagan recounted, the epicentre of L.A. rock’n’roll. “Most bands started there in an opening slot on a Monday or Tuesday night,” he said. “If and when you began to draw in an audience, you could earn a chance to move up the bill, maybe even to a headlining slot, and you could shift to more desirable days of the week, and finally to weekend gigs.”

If you managed to headline on a Friday or Saturday, Duff said, you were on the cusp of something big, those slots an indicator that you had real momentum behind you. But GN’R weren’t there yet. “For now we were a little too dirty to get even an opening slot on those coveted Friday and Saturday night bills. We would have to start at the bottom and get there on our own.”

“The bottom” meant propping up the bill on Thursday 6 June, 1985, in support of Fineline and Mistreater, the band who would shortly be one of the world’s biggest and best groups taking to the stage in front of a sparse crowd.

One of those present in the audience was Slash’s old high school buddy Marc Canter, whose family ran a local deli often frequented by the band, and who took photos of the show so the band would have some promo snaps for their dates in the northwest. One of his pictures would go on to be used on the back cover of their Live! Like A Suicide EP.

With a polite “Thank you everyone for coming out tonight, we’re Guns N’ Roses” from Axl and a less polite “Come up here closer to the fucking stage, move your fucking asses!” from Slash, the classic line-up of GN’R was born, the group launching into a punchy 10-song set that included future classics Don’t Cry and Anything Goes alongside covers of Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Heartbreak Hotel.

“I definitely had a sense that something special was brewing,” Adler said. “Something permeated the show at the Troubadour, it went pretty well. We played for only about 10 people and it didn’t matter. We were playing for the music, for the sheer excitement of performing live.”

By the time they returned from the troubled run of dates in the northwest – a story for another day – they were all fully invested. It was a line-up that couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t last long, far too volatile for that, but one that would lay down a marker against which all subsequent rock bands would be measured. “We started rehearsing with a burning sense of purpose fuelled by the knowledge that each of us was all in,” said McKagan. World domination beckoned.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Of all the legendary heavy metal singers, Ronnie James Dio was the greatest of them all.

Born Ronald James Padavona on July 10, 1942 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he fronted a holy trinity of iconic bands – Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio. And while there were good times and bad in his lengthy career, the great man went out on a high. The last album he made before his death on May 16, 2010 was with Heaven & Hell – the band comprised of the same line-up that recorded the Black Sabbath album Mob Rules in 1981.

Dio was first introduced to the world stage in 1975 when he and three fellow members of the group Elf were absorbed into former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. Over three studio albums, Blackmore and Dio worked in perfect harmony, creating grandiose heavy rock enriched by Dio’s fantastic tales of sword and sorcery: a style later jokingly dubbed ‘castle rock’. But in 1978, Dio was out as Blackmore remodelled Rainbow as a mainstream radio-rock act.

Within a year, Dio had joined Black Sabbath, replacing the sacked Ozzy Osbourne. It was a controversial move: Ozzy was the people’s champion, Dio dismissed by one critic as a “standard American chest-beater”. But Dio wasn’t intimidated, his masterful performance on Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell rejuvenating a band that had been dying on its arse. It didn’t last, of course. A farcical feud over the mixing of the in-concert double Live Evil led to Dio quitting Sabbath and forming a new band in his own name.

The first Dio album, Holy Diver, was released in 1983 to universal acclaim. He went on to make another nine studio albums under the Dio name, plus the Sabbath reunion album Dehumanizer in 1992, and the Heaven & Hell album The Devil You Know in 2009.

Dio died in 2010, just five months after announcing that he’d been diagnosed with stomach cancer, but he left a mighty legacy. Here, we rank every studio album that Ronnie James Dio made, from worst to best.

20) Dio – Angry Machines (SPV/Steamhammer, 1996)

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In an era when traditional heavy metal had been marginalised by alternative rock, Ronnie’s attempt to modernise the Dio sound resulted in the weakest album of his career.

Produced by Ronnie himself, the album had a vaguely grungey feel in songs such as Black and Hunter Of The Heart. And while the band – guitarist Tracy Grijalva, aka Tracy G, former Dokken bassist Jeff Pilson and stalwart drummer Vinny Appice – played heavy, Ronnie’s gift for melody had deserted him. Angry Machines was a dour and dismal record, with only one song that rose above the gloom – This Is Your Life, a piano-led ballad reminiscent of vintage Queen.

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19) Elf – Trying To Burn The Sun (Purple, 1975)

The third and final Elf album was much the same as the two that came before it. Dio sounded great – a star in the making. But there was only so much he could with this band’s rather formulaic blues-based heavy rock. There was boogie power in the opening track Black Swampy Water, and a strong melodic sensibility in Wonderworld and Streetwalker, whereas Prentice Wood could have been a Neil Diamond song.

Sadly for guitarist Steve Edwards, he was the odd man out when Ritchie Blackmore absorbed the rest of the group into Rainbow.

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18) Elf – Elf (Epic, 1972)

On this debut album, the singer used his birth name of Ronald Padavona as a gesture to his parents. After that, he would always be known as Ronnie James Dio. The album was produced by the then former Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover, and featured on guitar Dave ‘Rock’ Feinstein, Dio’s cousin, who later went on to form power trio The Rods.

There was a funky swing to songs such as Hoochie Koochie Lady and Sit Down Honey, but only brief flashes of the heavy rock that would become Ronnie’s trademark. What was clearly evident was that Ronnie was too good for this band.

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17) Elf – Carolina County Ball (Purple, 1974)

Elf signed to Deep Purple’s vanity label for their second album, and also opened for Purple on a major UK tour. It wasn’t enough to make Carolina County Ball a hit, but the album was the best the band ever made.

The title track in particular had a real groove to it, and there was a blues number with a title that proved prophetic: Rainbow.

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16) Dio – Killing The Dragon (Spitfire, 2002)

Dio’s guitarist on Killing The Dragon was Doug Aldrich, who later went on to join Whitesnake and currently stars in The Dead Daisies. Alongside him were Jimmy Bain on bass and former AC/DC drummer Simon Wright, who first played with Dio on 1990’s Lock Up The Wolves.

With Aldrich shredding like Vivian Campbell did on the band’s early albums, Killing The Dragon was very much in the classic Dio tradition, best illustrated in a powerful title track and the blazing, fast-paced Before The Fall. On the downside, there were fillers, such as Guilty, in which Ronnie was running on autopilot.

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15) Dio – Master Of The Moon (SPV/Steamhammer, 2004)

It was the last Dio album, and the band ended as it began. Master Of The Moon had Ronnie backed by Simon Wright, Jeff Pilson and Craig Goldy, the guitarist whose debut was on 1987’s Dream Evil.

There were echoes of past glories in the full-throttle opening track One More For The Road – a natural successor to We Rock – and The Man Who Would Be King, an epic with shades of Dio’s All The Fools Sailed Away and Rainbow’s Stargazer. For Dio, the band, it proved a dignified end.

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14) Dio – Strange Highways (Vertigo, 1993)

Following a brief reunion with Black Sabbath, Ronnie and drummer Vinny Appice created the sixth Dio album with bassist Jeff Pilson and new guitarist Tracy G.

Strange Highways had a darker vibe to previous Dio albums – a tone set by the doomy Jesus, Mary & The Holy Ghost and carried over into a grinding title track as doom-laden as anything that Ronnie had recorded with Sabbath.

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13) Dio – Lock Up The Wolves (Vertigo, 1990)

At the turn of the 90s, Ronnie had a completely new band behind him. Following the departure of two founding members, bassist Jimmy Bain and drummer Vinny Appice, the new Dio line-up featured drummer Simon Wright, bassist Teddy Cook, keyboard player Jens Johansson and guitarist Rowan Robertson, who was just 18 at the time.

Lock Up The Wolves started impressively with Wild One, a fast, up-and-at-’em number in the vein of the debut album’s Stand Up And Shout, with Robertson ripping it up like Eddie Van Halen. Another standout track was Night Music, with Ronnie in full cry. But even he struggled to lift the overlong, plodding tracks that dominated the album.

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12) Dio – Magica (Spitfire, 2000)

After the mistep of Angry Machines there was another major overhaul in band personnel, with Ronnie reinstating Jimmy Bain, Craig Goldy and Simon Wright. What they created together in Magica was a heavyweight concept album and the best of Dio’s late-period works.

The singer said of the album’s narrative: “Magica is the saga of Blessing, a netherworld invaded by dark forces that vaporise people into pure, evil energy. I left the ending ambivalent because evil always exists, good doesn’t always triumph and that’s the universal balance.”

He related this tale in spoken word in the album’s 18-minute final track The Magica Story. The concept also inspired some great songs – notably Feed My Head and Turn To Stone – and from Ronnie a vocal performance to rank among his best.

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11) Dio – Dream Evil (Vertigo, 1987)

The fourth Dio album had former Rough Cutt guitarist Craig Goldy in place of the departed Vivian Campbell. Otherwise, it was business as usual.

And while Dream Evil did not match the band’s first three albums, its opening track, Night People, has a pulsating energy and a heavy atmosphere, and the ballad All The Fools Sailed Away is one of the most beautiful songs that Ronnie ever sang.

10) Black Sabbath – Dehumanizer (IRS, 1992)

Although Heaven & Hell’s The Devil You Know was a Black Sabbath album in all but name, Dehumanizer was, officially, Ronnie’s last work with Sabbath. The making of this album was a long and rather farcical process. Before Ronnie was invited to rejoin the band by guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler, they had already begun rehearsing for the album with drummer Cozy Powell – who had starred with Ronnie in Rainbow – and singer Tony ‘The Cat’ Martin, who had featured on three previous Sabbath albums.

Martin was fired, then briefly reinstated when Ronnie got cold feet, and then fired again when Ronnie committed to the project. Cozy had to pull out after suffering a broken hip in a horse-riding accident, and was replaced by Vinny Appice. As a result, Dehumanizer featured the line-up that first recorded together on the Sabs’ Mob Rules.

Produced by Reinhold Mack, famed for his work with Queen in the early 80s, the album was not as great as Heaven And Hell or Mob Rules, but two mighty tracks, Time Machine and I, were the best that Sabbath had recorded since Dio had last been in the band.

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9) Dio – Sacred Heart (Vertigo, 1985)

The third Dio album was the last to feature guitarist Vivian Campbell, who went on to star briefly in Whitesnake before settling in Def Leppard. Campbell and Dio parted acrimoniously, but to the end they achieved great things together. The best tracks on Sacred Heart are genuine Dio classics: two powerful anthems in Rock’N’Roll Children and Hungry For Heaven (the latter’s riff nicked from The Who’s Baba O’Riley), plus a typically monolithic title track, all sung as only Dio can.

The Scared Heart tour was Dio’s biggest stage production, in which our hero battled a giant rubber dragon to much hilarity. The press nicknamed the dragon Denzil. For Vivian Campbell, it was a joke too far.

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8) Heaven & Hell – The Devil You Know (Roadrunner, 2009)

Named after the first album that Ronnie made with Black Sabbath, Heaven & Hell featured the four men that had made the Sabbath albums Mob Rules and Dehumanizer: Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice.

Sadly, this album turned out to be Ronnie’s last, but it would serve as a fitting epitaph and a glorious end to a storied career. In tracks such as Atom & Evil and Bible Black, the old magic was still there – the band locked into heavy grooves, and Dio weaving his spells.

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7) Dio – The Last In Line (Vertigo, 1984)

Some conspiracy theorists claim that the Dio logo, when inverted, spells ‘Devil’. The jury is still out on that one. What is certain is that the eternal struggle between good and evil was a central theme in Ronnie’s lyrics since the early days of Rainbow, as illustrated by the cataclysmic title track on the second Dio album, on which he weighed opposing forces – “evil or divine”, “the Angel or the Beast” – like a man whose soul hung in the balance.

The Last In Line was the band’s first million seller and a worthy follow-up to Holy Diver. From the exultant We Rock to the fantastically overblown and brilliantly titled Egypt (The Chains Are On), it’s heroic stuff.

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6) Black Sabbath – Mob Rules (Vertigo, 1981)

If Dio’s second album with Black Sabbath wasn’t quite as great as the first, it remains a cult classic, as heavy in atmosphere as in sheer riff weight. Within the band, tension was building. Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler felt that Dio was trying to “take over”, a claim the singer strongly refuted.

What can’t be denied is that Dio gave everything he had to this album, his commitment palpable as he roared through the bludgeoning title track and cast a dark spell over The Sign Of The Southern Cross and the creepy Voodoo. But even this wasn’t enough for Tony and Geezer. Dio was driven out in 1982. A year later, Holy Diver delivered a defiant ‘fuck you’.

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5) Rainbow – Long Live Rock’N’Roll (Polydor, 1978)

The lyrics for this album’s title track proved strangely prescient. Dio sang of “writing on the wall”, and so it was. Long Live Rock’N’Roll would be Dio’s swansong for Rainbow, and he went out as he came in, throwing the horns and singing like a messenger of the gods.

Gates Of Babylon was this album’s Stargazer, another of Dio’s desert-themed epic tales. Kill The King had him crying treason as Blackmore drove the band at top speed. And the title track was one of the classic rock anthems. Dio left Rainbow as an iconic figure.

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4) Rainbow – Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow (Polydor, 1975)

Having quit Deep Purple when they got too funky for his taste, Ritchie Blackmore styled Rainbow as a more purist heavy rock band. Dio was a perfect foil, his richly expressive voice and fantasy imagery adding a mystical aura to the ‘castle rock’ archetypes Man On The Silver Mountain, The Temple Of The King and Sixteenth Century Greensleeves, the latter featuring his finest opening couplet: “It’s only been an hour/Since he locked her in the tower.”

After years of toiling in obscurity, working with Blackmore was Dio’s first golden opportunity, and he seized it as if it were the Holy Grail itself. From there, he never looked back.

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3) Rainbow – Rainbow Rising (Polydor, 1976)

The magnitude of Rainbow’s second album was perfectly illustrated by Ken Kelly’s cover art: a giant fist thrusting from a raging sea to grasp a rainbow. This was heavy rock on a colossal scale, and only Ronnie James Dio had the voice to match. Displaying characteristic ruthlessness, Ritchie Blackmore had brought in powerhouse drummer Cozy Powell, bassist Jimmy Bain and keyboard player Tony Carey to replace three ex-members of Elf, but Dio survived as Blackmore’s prize asset.

And as Blackmore attempted to outdo Zeppelin’s Kashmir with Stargazer – the towering centrepiece of Rainbow Rising, its neo-classical riff swelled by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra – Dio performed near-superhuman heroics to soar above the tumult. Sounds hailed Rainbow Rising as “thermo-nuclear rock’n’roll”. 40 years on, it’s power is undiminished.

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2) Dio – Holy Diver (Mercury, 1983)

One of the classic heavy metal debuts, Holy Diver is a work of such bravura and bombast that Sounds magazine stated emphatically: “Ronnie James Dio has thundered back.”

This was a new beginning for Ronnie, but his past was in evidence both in his choice of two former bandmates (ex Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, ex-Sabbath drummer Vinny Appice) and in the epic feel of the music. The little fella’s masterstroke was the acquisition of 19-year-old guitarist Vivian Campbell, the man who “put the fast in Belfast”, who gave the band a vital, contemporary edge.

With its electrifying opener Stand Up And Shout, its spooky title track and the majestic Rainbow In The Dark, Holy Diver was the album on which Dio, the man, was able to fully realise his own singular vision.

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1) Black Sabbath – Heaven And Hell (Vertigo, 1980)

Ozzy Osbourne is, irrefutably, the definitive Black Sabbath singer, but as Ozzy himself admitted recently, “Sabbath made some great records with Ronnie Dio”. Heaven And Hell is the best of them, a masterpiece to rival the band’s seminal early 70s work.

With Dio a commanding presence, Sabbath was a band reborn. The single Neon Knights was their clarion call, fast and brutally heavy, Dio hitting notes that Ozzy could only dream of. The sprawling title track proved that Tony Iommi, king of riffs, was also a brilliant lead guitarist. Children Of The Sea, the first song they wrote together, had an eerie, magical quality. And that power ran deep throughout the album, from the spine-tingling Die Young through to the monumental finale Lonely Is The World.

With this album, Ronnie James Dio made Black Sabbath great again. And for all the power and glory in Rainbow Rising and Holy Diver, this was, for heavy metal’s greatest singer, his defining statement.

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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!”