Doogie White is a well-known Scottish vocalist who has worked with many bands during his career, including Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, Cornerstone, Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force, Michael Schenker's Temple of Rock and many others. Some may also remember him auditioning for the vocalist position in Iron Maiden in 1993, eventually losing to Blaze Baley in the final. Doogie's been lucky enough to tour the world many times over the past three decades, his latest venture in the USA and Canada this past March with Michael Schenker Fest.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mr. White in Helsinki on April 21st to talk about his career and why he was here in Finland in the first place as well as his schedule for the rest of the year.

Luxi: First off, I guess I should say welcome to Finland, Doogie, once again.

Doogie: I love it here... I love it here.

MICHAEL SCHENKER FEST TALK

Luxi: Last month you did 20 shows in Canada and the USA with Michael Schenker Fest. How would you summarize that tour? Having four gifted singers on the same tour undoubtedly offered some ear candy to the audience?

Doogie: Yes. Well, that was probably my eighth American tour with various people that I've played with, but that was undoubtedly the best. It was the most enjoyable. The audiences were great, the venues were fantastic, the band; superb and it was great to be on that tour. I've never really shared the stage with other singers before. That was a new thing for me. I've always done what worked for me because I don't move well, but we made it work.

I've known Graham for years and I had met Robin very briefly and I'd met Gary very briefly as well. Everybody was very supportive. There's always going to be that edge of competition, and if anybody tells you otherwise they're not telling you the truth, because nobody wants to let their side down, and so you find everybody pushing themselves a little bit more with the extra gas that maybe they didn't know that they had.

The whole game was raised to a great extent. I suppose it's a bit like a runner who's coming around the last bend and they're leading, and they think, "I've got nothing left in the tank," and then you just push. It was great to watch these guys working and here the difference in their voices, the differences in the songs that we'd all written.

To be supported by this fabulous band with everybody playing at the top of their game, and of course, Schenker's playing like a demon, like he's never played before, and he's enjoying it, and that brings another dynamic to the whole thing. When people had said to me, "You are going to go and work with Schenker. Oh, God!" I've never seen him the way people remember him. I see him now, and I see him as a man who's excited and enthusiastic and right at the top of his game in terms of stage performance, guitar playing, enthusiasm and just general joy, and it's great to be there and watching it.

He wants to be there. He's delivering every single night. The whole band of 11 we worked hard and you can rehearse as much as you like, but once you take it on the stage that's when the drama and the excitement and the fury come in. It's great.

Luxi: The fact that there were four great singers on this tour must have inspired Michael to give his best on the tour, right?

Doogie: Well, I've been working with him for the last five or six years now, and I've never seen him have a bad show. Michael has always been like I said, enthusiastic, which is different from the shy and insecure guy that everybody tells me and he says he was during the UFO years and during the early years of the Michael Schenker era. I've never seen him like that. He wants to go on stage, he wants to be there, he wants to interact with the audience, he wants to give them the best show - and because he's backed by such great musicians, we had great musicians with Wayne and Herman and Francis and Temple of Rock and now we have Steve Mann, and then we have Chris Glen and we have Ted McKenna and Chris and Ted are an amazing rhythm session.

When you get these guys, who have played together in the past they read each other. They know what they're going to do instinctively. That's the foundation, and then you build on that with the rest of the people in the band. The four singers got on gloriously well, and we sang backup vocals for everybody. Standing at the back, "The Schenkets." Standing there doing our little dance moves and we were happy to see everybody doing brilliantly. Everybody just stepped up there and, you know, because Gary has such a unique voice. That's the reason I got into MSG, Gary's voice. I knew it was Michael. I knew Roger Glover had produced it, but there was just something about Gary's voice that drew me in as a singer.

Then, of course, there's Graham whom I've been a fan of since 1979 when I first heard him in Rainbow. We've been mates for 10, 12 years now and we've done shows together so I knew what Graham could do and I know what he can bring in and what he delivers every night, but I'd never met Robin (McAuley). Robin is the most consistently brilliant singer I've worked with because he does Vegas show. He's in a Vegas show that's five, six, seven nights a week, so he's honed like an athlete when it comes to doing it. He just goes out there and he has discipline and he has quality and he knows everything that he's doing and he knows how to work with an audience. That was great to see him do that as well, and then you get me. How can you get disappointed really [*laughs*]?

Luxi: It sounds like you had perfect chemistry within the band during the whole tour?

Doogie: Yes, we did. We did. We really did. People didn't think it would work. Michael believed that it would work. I think what you do when you do things like this and I don't know any of these guys to have egos as such. You must have something to go on the stage and to do this. But no one's an egomaniac. We're there to do a job and we're there to entertain and we're there because the fans have paid the money to come and see us. Let's give the best we can. If that means me doing background vocals for Graham Bonnet, if that means me doing background vocals for Gary Barden or Robin McAuley, that's part of the gig. Do it, embrace it, enjoy it. If you don't want to do it, fuck off.

Luxi: Keep those simple rules.

Doogie: Well, if you don't want to be there, don't be there.

Luxi: Yes, exactly.

Doogie: If you're not getting any fun out of it or any enjoyment out of it, don't do it. People spend their hard-earned money. Come along, see it, be part of the show, leave your camera phones at home. That's the only thing that really bothers me is people come in and from this first song. There's people bringing iPads and holding them up blocking the views of people trying to film us on their iPhones. What are they thinking? What are they thinking?

Luxi: They are like little television screens indeed. Just keep your hands up high in the air, clap them against each other and enjoy. But just leave your "little televisions" home. Please...

Doogie: Yes, yes.

[*laughter*]

Doogie: Waving your phones around. That just seems to be the way that people want to take in the music. Now, I'd prefer if they took it in real time and became part of the show because there are a good 50% of it anyway, but that's the nature of the way the business has changed.

IN THE LAND OF NORTH, FINLAND

Luxi: The last time you were in Finland was in 2015 when you were doing the Purple Night: Tribute to Richie Blackmore at Tavastia Club, in Helsinki, the same year Ritchie turned 70. You had Kimmo Blom, Jari Tiura and Mauri Savolainen in the live line-up. What can you tell us about that special night?

Doogie: Well, it was an enjoyable event. They put together something that... I think it was to celebrate Richie's 70th birthday?

Luxi: Yes, it was his 70th B-day back then, in 2015.

Doogie: It was good to go along and hear all these different people singing different songs from his career, and different people playing the songs and the different interpretations you get. I've always enjoyed Helsinki. I've always enjoyed coming to Finland, and the people are amazing, the air is fresh. It's expensive, but it's great fun, and it's a great place to walk around. If you just want peace and quiet you can walk around, and I like it. I enjoyed it very much. I brought my wife over for that show and we had a great time. Everybody is very friendly, everybody's very respectful and everybody enjoys themselves. You can't ask any more than that, right?

Luxi: That's very true. Also, five years previously you did a tour here in Finland with some hired musicians. How much can you still remember from that tour?

Doogie: Yes. I was asked to do... I think that promoter at that time, his name was... Wait a sec, I think it was Marko, right? From Tampere. He contacted me and said, "Look we've had Joe Lynn Turner over, we've had Graham Bonnet over. Do you fancy coming over and doing some shows?" I came over and we had a great time doing it. Then Henry contacted me and said again, "Hey man, we can do that again. We can do it with different musicians and we can go on and we can play some other places." We did that.

It was made very clear at the outset that I am not trading on any Deep Purple songs or any Rainbow songs or any Yngwie songs or anything like that that I wasn't directly involved with, because you can go and see a Deep Purple cover band any night of the week or a Rainbow cover band any night of the week.

I've got a career that spans nearly 30 years, and many people have bought my records over the years, and many people want to hear different things. It's always interesting. Somebody came up to me last night and said, "You didn't do anything from your solo album." I thought, "God, I forgot all about that." Because you're putting a live set together, you want to put things together that are going to work, and something that I've tried and tested, and you want to push the boundaries, and I completely forgot about my solo album. Next time.

Luxi: There's always next time...

Doogie: Yes, indeed... There's always the next time.

Luxi: Yes. How did you come together and decide to do this tour here in Finland?

Henric: Well, I contacted Doogie and asked if he was interested in coming to Finland to do his solo show. Of course, he was interested. He is a nice guy and very humble and...

Doogie: And we have good fun.

Henric: Yes.

Luxi: OK, back to this current tour of yours. Yesterday, you played at Bar Bullgod in Riihimäki. How was that gig?

Henric: It was great.

Luxi: Was the place packed?

Doogie: It was packed, yes. It was a very small, small place, of course, but packed and people were very involved with the songs. They enjoyed themselves.

Luxi: Will the setlists all be different for each show, including some rarely heard stuff perhaps?

Doogie: I think the musicians were asked to take on a difficult task of songs that they didn't know. You get better by rehearsing them and playing them. I don't think that it's fair for anybody to be kicking the songs around and changing them around when they are unrehearsed. It's a definite set list that I have been doing now with White Noise, the Italian chapter that I will be doing in South America with White Noise, the Argentine chapter. It's these songs that I know inside out, and that I know work live and that I know that the musicians will enjoy playing, and that's set, so there are no surprises. We don't stick in some known and obvious stuff; we don't stick in "Stairway to Heaven", we don't stick in "Sweet Home Alabama". We just don't do that.

So, we have a set list and it doesn't change. The order doesn't change, the delivery doesn't change. Sometimes the musicians are free to go off and play off each other like they did last night. Henry and Sven were playing off each other last night, and that's good, because it stretches it out and it gets them to show their chops and what they can do, and that's good. Then we come back to the song, and so it all works like that. And because they're such great players they're really able to do that, and because they know each other so well they're able to do that as well.

Luxi: How difficult was it to learn these songs?

Henric: We got the songs from Doogie, the way he likes them done, and then we, of course, rehearsed them and, of course, they're pretty hard songs to learn, but I think we managed to pull them off pretty well actually.

Doogie: Yes.

Luxi: They all came together very well in the end?

Henric: Yes, and the root section is quite young guys, but they are educated, and they know their stuff so it was pretty easy for them.

Luxi: So, in other words, they've started understanding what old school Heavy and Hard Rock is all about.

[*laughter*]

Henric: I think I managed to get two more for the classic Hard Rock scene in Finland [*laughter*].

Doogie: That's a good thing.

Luxi: So, Doogie, what do you know about this Finnish Heavy Rock band named Wishing Well that is about to support you here in Helsinki tonight?

Doogie: I hadn't heard of them. I met them yesterday at the soundcheck. I came back just before we were going to go on last night because the venue was so small and there was no dressing room. It was a bathroom. It was a cupboard, wasn't it?

It was a cupboard, so there was nowhere for me to go, and I don't like standing in the venue watching other bands before I go on, because it distracts from what I'm trying to do, but I heard them. I said to Henry this morning, and I said, "These guys are playing their own stuff, right?" He went, "Yes." The last song that they played, I don't know what it was. I was sitting outside the venue and listening to them playing and they were really good.

That last song was really the song that I heard because I had a drunk man come out. He wandered out, right? He wandered out with us to have a cigarette, and I could see what was going to happen when he came over and sat on a chair at a table next to me. I could just see that the table only had one leg and it was never going to work. He fell over and he hit the chair which hit the table which hit me and he ended up on the ground under a pile of stuff.

Getting back to Wishing Well. Nice guys. The singer is really good. He is really good. That's the first thing that I lock onto, but the song that I heard was cracking. It was a cross between Maiden and Judas Priest and something else going on. I will get to see them if the venue allows. I don't want to be in there and-- this sounds really arsey. I don't want to be in there and people coming over and wanting autographs and photographs when there's another band playing. That's just bad for them. These guys are there to do their thing, I'll do my thing afterwards, but if I get a chance to see them I'd hear them where I can do it and not have the set interrupted by, "Excuse me," click, then I will.

TOURS AHEAD IN 2018

Luxi: After your gigs in Finland, you will join the Michael Schenker fest again, which includes shows in Sweden, Japan, Spain, UK, Germany and so on. Plus, you will do the White Noise thing in Argentina at the end of May, so all in all this year looks pretty busy and exciting for you right?

Doogie: Yes, it does. When I finish up here next Friday, I fly the next morning to Stockholm and I do a festival in Stockholm with Schenker, and then I fly home, and I'm home for two weeks. Then I'm off to Argentina for 10 days or so to do some shows down there. Then there's just little bits and pieces here and there, because we didn't get any summer festivals with the Schenker Fest this year, and we start again really in August until Christmas. We start in Japan and then we've got Europe and then I think we're coming to Scandinavia - and then we have the U.K., and then I'm back down to South America in December for another 10 or 12 shows doing something else with something called Metal Singers. It's been a busy year which was really good.

Luxi: What can you tell us about your involvement on the Resurrection album, which came out in March this year on Nuclear Blast Records? You did the lead vocals for the three songs on this record, which were "Take Me to the Church", "The Girl with the Stars in Her Eyes" and "Anchors Away"? How did you pick those three songs?

Doogie: Well, Michael called me up and he said, "How do you fancy?" and I said, "I do." He said, "You don't what I'm going to say yet." I said, "Yes, but whatever it is I'm up for it." He said, "Okay, we're going to do an album, a Schenker Fest album. Would you like to write some songs?" I said, "Yes." Within 24 hours he and Michael Voss sent me over six or seven ideas which I immediately got to work on. I had verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus to six or seven songs. Just roughs, sent them back and Michael said, "You can't do that. Pick three. You can only do three. We've got everybody else to think about," so I just picked the three that I thought I could work with. That's what I did. The rest of them were farmed out to other singers who did their thing.

Within a week, 10 days, I was over in Germany recording the vocals with Michael Voss and Schenker, and it was as quick as that. Then we did all the promo stuff for it, and then we went on tour in America. We're looking at touring again in America in a year's time. Time goes past very quickly now when you get into your mid-50s [*laughs*] Unless you're awake, this year will be over before you can blink an eye.

Luxi: Heh, that's all true.

Doogie: It's exciting. He makes things work. He has a vision and you have to think, "This is great. This is really going to work," and it does. It's exciting to be part of it and it's exciting to have three songs which I think are great songs on a great album.

Luxi: What was it like with all four of you singing on "Warrior"?

Doogie: Voss, he wrote that with Michael. We flew out to do the album photo shoot. We fly in and we go to a photographic studio and Voss is in another room with his pro tools or his logic set up, and a microphone and he said, "You need to sing the song." I said, "What song?" He said, "Warrior." I said, "Okay. How does it go?" He sang it to me and I went, "Okay." I had to sing my lines and then Graham sang his lines and Robin sang his lines. Voss did a quick mix of it and then we went down and we shot the video that afternoon [*laughs*].

It was as quick as that. He flew over to America and he rerecorded Robin's and Graham's vocals. The ones that you hear of me are the ones that I did in the room where we were doing the album cover shoot. That's how it went, and it was great fun. That was the first time we'd all been together. They had obviously gone off and they'd toured in Japan and they'd done festivals. This was the first time that we were all together. It was great. I'm the new boy in school again, and that's okay.

Luxi: The whole song is really catchy and powerful, especially the chorus part when you all shout together, "Warrior!".

Doogie: Then you have Graham's voice just tearing it up. He's got one of the unique voices in Rock music. There's nobody sounds like Graham Bonnet, and I've been following him around for years. I've followed him out at Rainbow, I followed him out at Yngwie's band and I followed him in Michael's band.

I always dreaded when they say, "We'll do an Alcatrazz song or we'll do..." I don't know any other song. Or we'll do an "Assault Attack" song and I'll sit and go, "Oh God," because I can't make it sound unique. I can't make it sound authentic is what I mean, because he's got such an edge to his voice and such a unique timbre to his voice that I just can't make it sound as good as he makes it sound, because of the way he approaches the songs and just because of his vocal style which is why we love him.

Luxi: The cover of Michael's Resurrection album kind of reminds me of the famous painting The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Have you noticed the same thing yourself?

Doogie: Yes. I think that's what it is. I think that's exactly the idea the artist had in mind. He positioned us all round this table, but individually. Then he pieced it all together. It looks really good. I'm really impressed with it.

Unless you're David Bowie or Madonna, I'm not really one for having a Heavy Rock band with just one guy on the sleeve and Yngwie used to do it. Here's an Yngwie album, there's Yngwie. It was always just photographs of Yngwie throughout the whole thing.

If you're going to set it up as a band, have the band on the front cover or better still, don't have the band on the front cover. Have something interesting. Which is what we did with the Temple of Rock, the second album we did; Spirit on A Mission. It's like, let's not have a picture of the band. Let's have something that will look good on a t-shirt and look good in a backdrop that's not a photograph of an artist. It worked, but this sleeve is something else. It looks great on t-shirts, it looks great on posters and it will look great as a backdrop as well.

IT ALL STARTED FROM LA PAZ

Luxi: Let's move on to talk about your very first band, La Paz. As Yet Untitled was the first solo album of yours, which came out in 2011, containing both new material and reworked old songs of La Paz. Have you perhaps any plans to do another album with La Paz in the future?

Doogie: Chic and I have known each other since 1984, and it's pretty much the same guys. The drummer has changed a few times, but drummers always do that.

Luxi: Drummers seem to be cursed in bands, ha!

Doogie: Yes, but Paul McManus, he is also the drummer in Gun. We had Paul in the band when he was 17 years old. He came and he left and went and joined somebody that he thought would be more successful in that field. He came back, but it was the record company that wanted to put it out as Doogie White and La Paz. It's really not. McSherry and I wrote the songs, as it always was, and there are no plans to do any more La Paz albums. Although Chic and I may write some songs together, there are no plans for La Paz albums. The other guys are businessmen. They're way too busy for the nonsense of Rock and Roll.

[*laughter*]

Luxi: Well, shame on them then.

Doogie: They've got proper jobs.

Luxi: All of them?

Doggie: Yes.

SOME RAINBOW TALK

Luxi: Then, a bit of Rainbow talk. Ritchie Blackmore has been doing a few well-selected concerts here in Europe lately, under this "Memories in Rock" theme. They played here in Finland just last Saturday in front of a sold-out audience. I was wondering if you saw any of those shows yourself?

Doogie No, not on his tour. I went to the first one in Birmingham when he played. What was it? Two or three years ago maybe. I went to that. I bought tickets for that. My brother and my wife and I went, and we saw that. There are split opinions on what he's done. If people enjoy it that's great. I wish nothing but happiness for him. He's doing it for whatever reasons he's doing it and that's okay. There's not really much to say about it. There are enough people who have opinions about it without me doing it because anything that I say that's honest will be twisted and turned and made into, "bitter, former band member," rather than, "A fan who just doesn't think it's very good".

It's really not for me to say. If people go and enjoy it, then that's great. I'm a fan of Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian writer. I've loved his books, and I was very excited when they decided that they were going to make a movie of The Snowman. They made the movie of The Snowman, and I hated it. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't like Jo Nesbo anymore. It just means that what someone else did with his work wasn't to my taste. Some people liked it, but then maybe they had never read the books. That's as good an analogy as you can get.

Many people under the age of 35 will never have seen Ritchie play Rock. They will never have heard Rainbow. And I know what it's like to stand there and listen to "Land of Hope and Glory", the old version, and Judy Garland does nothing. Even when I was in the band, I would be standing there and my heart would be racing. I know how that feels. I just don't feel that anymore. I didn't feel that in Birmingham, and not because it wasn't me. I felt it in Birmingham, the anticipation and within seven minutes it was just like, "Ah."

THE YNGWIE MALMSTEEN YEARS 2002-2007

Luxi: You worked with Yngwie between the years 2002-2007. How were those years?

Doogie: Yes, I was with Yngwie for a while. I had a great time with Yngwie as well. We've gone back to the ego thing. I just leave my ego in a wee bag at home. There's no place. When you're working with guys like that there's no place for ego. One is enough, right? One is enough. I don't follow particularly what Richie or Yngwie or any of the guys that I worked with are doing.

Nick Marinovich, who is Yngwie's keyboard player and vocalist when Yngwie is not singing on his own apparently, contacted me and said, "Look, we're coming to London, do you want to come along?" I said, "Yes, that would be great." He said, "Okay, I'll let you know where we're staying. Yngwie would love to see you, it'll be fantastic. You might be able to sing a song." I said, "That's great. Yes, that'll be brilliant. Then, of course, he had this very public falling out with Jeff Scott Soto, Joe Lynn Turner, Mike Voss and all these guys on the internet, and so I phone up and said, "Where are you staying?" "You've been uninvited. Yngwie is not speaking to any of his former singers anymore."

[*laughter*]

I'm like, "Okay. All right." I didn't get to go and see him, and I really didn't know much about him until I played with him and then I knew what my role was. It was just to go in and be a foil for his guitar playing, and I accepted it. It is very nice to be in a band now where my writing is appreciated and my stagecraft is appreciated, my vocals are appreciated. I'm very happy where I am now, and I'll work with Michael as long as he wants to work with me. There is no butting of heads. We're older, we're more relaxed, we enjoy what we're doing. I don't bust his ass about, "Tell me about how you came up with this and that?" We never do that. I never did that anyway with anybody really.

I just let him be and he lets me be and move on with it. Something that needs to be said, it gets said, but the most important thing is that 90 minutes or, in this case with them, nearly three hours on stage. That's all that counts. I'm a sociable guy, but I don't socialize. I've got no interest in going and hanging out in a bar. I've got no interest in going for dinner or anything like that. I just do my own thing. I just wander around on my own and do my own thing. I don't get in anybody's face, and that works for me.

BEING GOOD AT WHAT YOU DO

Luxi: I feel like you are a very lucky man, having been able to work with many talented artists for over two decades. Would you say you are blessed to be able to make your living singing in so many great bands?

Doogie: If I wasn't any good I wouldn't get the jobs. I'm good at what I do. Maybe not to everybody's taste, but I'm good at what I do, and like I say, I don't bring ego, I don't bring attitude. I bring professionalism to the situation. I don't complain. I get on and I do what I'm doing because I'm happy to be there. If you hear me complaining, it's because I'm not happy - and if I'm not happy I'll tell you why I'm not happy and we'll address it and we'll fix it, but how can I not be happy being here in Finland doing this, playing my songs with great musicians to audiences who want to come and see what I'm doing.

How can I not be happy working with Michael Schenker who's a glorious guitar player and great to be around with and has a great band and a great back catalog of songs as well as the stuff that we've done together and to get to sing with my mates. That's a great life.

Luxi: I must agree with you. Just be happy with what you have got. You have got your voice that so many people like.

Doogie: Yes. In some ways, you create your own luck, and I'll always be grateful to Richie for taking a chance on me. No matter the silliness that he spouts now which is all just nonsense, and he knows that. But he has his reasons for doing it, and those reasons will remain with him. He gave me an opportunity, he put me on a world stage, and it afforded me opportunities to work within Yngwie.

Working with Michael Schenker has nothing to do with Richie or Yngwie. That was a completely separate thing. UFO, Scorpions, Deep Purple, Whitesnake, Rainbow, it doesn't do that. The cogs in the wheel are coming from different places. The UFO, Scorpions, MSG guys had no idea what I'd done in the past because they don't follow that. Some of the Rainbow fans don't know what I've done in the past. He's getting 15,000 people turning up for his shows now. He's not playing any of the songs that we did together. All he does is slag me off in the press [*laughs*]

Luxi: Wow, now that's a bad attitude.

Doogie: It's a very British thing. Rather than taking credit for the work that he's done, because we don't like to take credit. When you see how... I sit and say, "Oh God." He slags off all his former bandmates to a man. He doesn't see anything positive about anybody, which says more about him than it does about the people that he's slaughtering at every turn.

Luxi: Well, that doesn't sound like a smart attitude.

Doogie: That's him. What's disturbing is that people think that's the truth or that's gospel, and you know it's really not. It's really not. I don't follow what he does, but people send me things. I read it and I go, "Really? Really?" I just sit and say, "why would you waste your energy doing that? Why don't chalk up your new band and see how brilliant they are and how well they play the songs and how great the light show was and how great the sound is, how great the audience says it." Not, "Doogie White." Oh God...!

[*laughter*]

You know it's a circle. What are you talking about man?

TONY IOMMI'S CALL

Luxi: OK, I think it's time for the last question; If you had the opportunity to choose musicians for a so-called "dream lineup", who would they be?

Doogie: Hmm... Let me think. My brothers are singing as well. My brother Ian is a singer, and we always thought it would really be cool to be backing vocalists for David Bowie or James Taylor. I don't know. I've never really looked at it like that. There was one time before the Heaven and Hell album, the band, Heaven and Hell, Tony Iommi and Ronnie did. Tony called me up and he said, "What are you doing?" What I should've said was, "Hi Tony. What do you need?" I didn't man.

[*laughter*]

I said, "I'm just packing my bags. I'm going on tour with Yngwie for two months."

[*laughter*]

He said, "I'm sitting here with a whole load of songs, and I'm either going to give them to Ozzy or give them to Ronnie, and I thought you might be interested in seeing what you could do." He ended up going with Ronnie in the end and doing the Heaven and Hell so that was the "Bible Black" and all those kind of things. Talk about giving the wrong answer... I couldn't believe it.

Then they did the tribute at Victoria Park with Jørn Lande they're doing it, and I think Jørn Lande did some demos with him at that same time that he had contacted me. Jørn and Glen did the show, the Heaven and Hell show. I met Tony afterwards and he was like, "I'm sorry man," and he went...

[*chuckling*]

I think that would be somebody that I would have liked to have locked musical horns with. I think we could have done something interesting. The stuff that he did with Ozzy and the stuff that he did with Tony Martin and the stuff that he did with Dio, is just phenomenal. That won't happen now. I don't have that.

I would have loved to have been the back vocals for Bowie. Even more so now that I'm backing vocalist for Graham Bonnet, Gary Barden, and Robin McAuley because I never saw myself in that role. I always thought that that would be really boring. It's actually quite exciting because I get to stand at the side of the stage and appreciate Michael's playing on the guitar, because I'm not thinking about, "Am I coming in now? What' the start? What's the first line for the next verse? What are we doing next?" I'm just getting to see as a fan and suck it in.

Watching him every night is quite extraordinary - again, like Graham Bonnet vocally. As for Michael, you wouldn't want guitar lessons from him, because his technique is so off the wall. He does a song called "Captain Nemo", and, I think, "How the fuck does he play that?" I sit, and I watch him every night doing it because he does it just before McAuley comes on. I sit and watch him. I still can't get figured out what he's doing, because he has no effects. He has two delays and a wah-wah. Just by his positioning of the pick changes the attack on the strings.

It's incredible to watch, not just to listen to it. When you watch guitar players, you know, as a non-guitar player I love watching them to see what they do and see how they get those different sounds and it's brilliant.

Luxi: OK. That was a very interesting discussion about things with you, Doogie. Thanks again.

Doogie: The rant is over. Thank you as well.

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