Dio left Black Sabbath with intentions to form a new band with fellow former Black Sabbath member Vinny Appice, the band's drummer. Music videos: - Holy Diver - Rainbow in the Dark Recording information: Disc 1: Recorded at: Sound City, Los Angeles. It's Holy Diver, in its sequential entirety (for the most part) played live, and the second disc contains some of Dio's tunes from Rainbow, Black Sabbath and his solo career. They were on retainers, whether they worked or not. AC/DC, Nirvana, Pink Floyd and Queen are among the UK’s best-selling artists on vinyl, Watch one-handed guitar player play two Guns N' Roses solos, Bill Wyman interview: stories of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Keith Moon and more, Jimi Hendrix's Dolly Dagger: the story behind the song. Now they would be forced to re-mortgage the property to fund Dio’s own project. And work it did. Holy Diver Tour THE BAND Ronnie James Dio vocals Vivian Campbell guitar Jimmy Bain bass Vinny Appice drums Claude Schnell keyboards SET LIST 1 Intro 2 Stand Up & Shout 3 Shame On The Night 4 Children Of The Sea (tape pause edit at 15:15 real time) 5 Holy Diver 6 Rainbow In The Dark 7 Man On The Silver Mountain with Starstruck But unless youâre a Dio fan already, youâre not missing anything special. The oldest and most experienced of the three musicians recruited by Dio, he above all resented the lack of recognition he felt the band had received for their part in creating Holy Diver – not least from Ronnie and Wendy. Dioâs voice has its ups and downs. All rights reserved. Vivian Campbell was asleep when he got the call about joining Dio. Goldy, with his black reverse headstock ESP dialed into a couple stacks of Marshall amps, has the classic tone. I check out, discuss, and react to Liliac covering Dio's Holy Diver. “Ronnie was great at melodies but he could never have written that riff on his own.”. I’d get up in the morning and there’d be strangers laying around, wasted off their fucking tits.”, Bain’s party-hard lifestyle didn’t mask his own concerns with the set-up. We had the fucking song written in 10 minutes.”. In the wake of the split with Sabbath, Wendy had become Ronnie’s manager. 9 23836-1; Vinyl LP). And we’d record it on cassette.”. I love the album, I listen to it frequently, but it is way overplayed and extremely overrated. “He used to bring people back to the apartment,” says Campbell. Ronnie has an attachment to Holy Diver mostly because it was his first effort as an independent producer who basically ran the whole show. He said: ‘That’s the shit! Packaged in a typical early-80s metal cover, featuring a devil and a drowning priest, Holy Diver was released on May 25, 1983 to a standing ovation from both fans and media alike – more than can be said for the albums released the same year by Ronnie’s old bands Rainbow and Black Sabbath. 191 likes. Based in Cardiff we perform across the UK. You will receive a verification email shortly. 1 talking about this. The band is in fine form throughout, with âGypsyâ and âShame on the Nightâ containing drum and guitar solos, respectively, which are lengthy but remain interesting throughout. All those other people were unknown.”. And no, I still don’t feel we got a fair shake of the stick when it came to the money or, later, the music. “I’d rather have been called The Carpets than Dio.”, According to Wendy, the name was chosen for purely practical reasons. Music videos: - Holy Diver - Rainbow in the Dark Reissued by Mercury Records on October 3rd 2005 remastered with an extended booklet and an interview with Ronnie James Dio.. Recording information: Recorded at Sound City, Los Angeles, CA. I’d never seen anyone do cocaine, let alone melt it on a spoon over a can. The last time I had spoken to Ronnie had been four years before when I was Sabbath’s publicist. But they don’t say any of that. It was released in August 1983 as the lead single from the band's debut album of the same name . If there is a silver lining into what is otherwise more of the same yet again, it is that Doug Aldrich, who lit up the stage during the âKilling the Dragonâ tour, plays circles around everyone else who has every performed these songs. Simon Wright makes a hell of a racket throughout the whole performance and Scott Warren is so animated behind that keyboard that I almost wish that Dio would let the guy use a keytar, despite how goofy it would probably look. Fuck yeah!’” says Appice today. “I got a great vibe off the fans,” he says, “so I put his name forward. We arranged to meet at [London rehearsal studio] John Henry’s. Such concerns were parked when the band entered Sound City at six o’clock every night. Ronnie probably would have done it.”. Although Dio already had two songs written – Holy Diver and Don’t Talk To Strangers – the other tracks that would appear on their debut album were all concocted at these sessions. “She was always murmuring in his ear: ‘You don’t need Ritchie, you can be out on your own, blah blah blah,’” he recalls. All of the instruments can be heard clearly along with Dio. “The idea was to have two American and two British guys in a band,” he says. It started playing, and we all sat there laughing, going: ‘You asshole!’ But then we started saying: ‘Wait a minute, that sounds good!’ So we wound up learning the riff backwards. He was down but not out.”. On the face of it, they worked well together. “I didn’t join the band as a hired hand, I was under the impression we were a proper band,” he says. HOLY DIVER started in 1997 and is still going strong. “He said he’d left Sabbath and did I know of a guitar player?”. “Then the next night we came in, we smoked a whole bunch of pot and our soundman put the tape in backwards. “There were great songs and great playing too.”. Liliac does an incredible job with this cover without question. The director goes: ‘Great! Bain was finishing up some Wild Horses dates in Ireland when he got a call from Dio. The bassist knew Ronnie and Wendy from his days in Rainbow. Another part I enjoyed was the end of the song âGypsyâ after the drum solo; a pre-recorded version of Holstâs âJupiter, the Bringer of Jollityâ bursts out and the drummer plays along with it. What more could I ask for?”. Sacramento’s Holy Diver is stepping up this week to help us co-host the Band Together concert series. Wendy Dio says her husband was always a leader, even as a child. Within weeks the four of them were in LA, working at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, a courtyard with a rehearsal room on one side and a recording studio on the other. Certainly the album’s other centrepiece, Rainbow In The Dark, was a collaborative effort. I could tell it was all about her and him and fuck everybody else.”.