Brian recorded an interview with Liz Barnes on Monday 9 December 2013 , which was broadcast this evening (19 January)…
Enjoy!
Brian May Planet Rock with Liz Barnes 19 01 2014
– http://youtu.be/TQeJjhanpmk
Brian May visited Planet Rock Radio on Monday 9 December, which was broadcast Sunday 19 January 2014
Brian covered a number of subjects: his Diableries book, getting his PhD, why he chose strings instead of drums or other instrument and what got him first thinking that rock music was what he wanted to get into… Also, Freddie, and the Montreux Studio Experience, touring with Kerry Ellis which may even go to Malta and South Africa, and possible touring with Queen this year… plus the Queen film – how did he feel about someone portraying himself…? Also the proposed album with Tony Iommi – and played out with Black Sabbath ‘Paranoia. ===========
TRANSCRIPT
by Jen Tunney – brianmay.com (E&OE) –
PART 1
=========================
TRACK <TIE YOUR MOTHER DOWN> Plays in.
LIZ BARNES: <Preamble>
Welcome to “My Planet Rocks”, Brian May.
BRIAN MAY: Thank you very much.
LIZ: It’s wonderful. Wonderful to have you on the show.
BRIAN: Oh thank you.
LIZ: I think we could probably do about a week.
BRIAN: Alright. We’ll settle in.
LIZ: (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Have you brought some food? But we’ve only got an hour so we’re gonna talk about all sorts. But before any of that, you have this incredible – I don’t even want to call it ‘a book’ – because I feel like I’m doing a disservice if I just say you’ve written this book…
BRIAN MAY: It’s a toy, yeah.
LIZ: I don’t even know how to say it properly?
BRIAN: “Diableries”.
LIZ: Diableries okay.
BRIAN: Well that’s a very – even that’s a very English way saying it. You know, my partner, Denis Pellerin, would call it “Diablerie” (in a French accent) …
LIZ: Okay.
BRIAN: … without the ‘s’, because the s is silent in French, of course, but Diableries is kind of devilments, and that’s what it’s about. It’s about… do you want me to tell you what it’s about?
LIZ: Yeah… absolutely – more interesting if you say than I do.
BRIAN: It’s easier when you have it in your hand, actually, isn’t it, you know, rather than talking about it. It’s a 3-D book and what it does is channel images from the 1860s in France, which sounds a bit obscure, doesn’t it, but actually it’s very relevant to today because these images are devils and skeletons and Satan himself, of course, all having a great time in Hell. And these things were depicted for fun and for a little bit of sort of religious overtone, but also, more than anything, satirically and seditiously because they were all about overthrowing the government of their day. So it’s very relevant to today. That’s what I do, you know I work on overthrowing governments (laughs) when I can in odd moments. But these images have fascinated me for 40 years. They’re extraordinary. They were made by sculptors and photographed in 3-D, because 3-D in the 1860s was well advanced. Anything that can be done in 3-D was done by the 1860s.
The book comes with a stereoscope – my patent OWL stereoscope – so you get incredible 3-D imaging, very immersive, even more than going to the cinema and seeing ‘Avatar’ I think, really. And we have every Diablerie image in there except two, which we couldn’t find, so there’s 180 and there should be 182, but you can enjoy the experience. You can read it as a book because there’s lots of research in there about what these things actually mean, because the Devil is portraying Napoleon the Third, in fact, and all these little things that they get up to. I mean they get up to extraordinary things in Hell. They do ice skating and firefighting.
LIZ: But I actually, I’m ashamed to say, when I was going through the book, genuinely I don’t think I knew anything about it. I was literally like ‘What the heck is this?’. I don’t think it’s ever….
BRIAN: ‘What the Hell is this?’
LIZ: Yeah well exactly, literally, but it’s totally fascinating. I mean what first… how did it first appear to you? How did you get interested?
BRIAN: It was years ago. I was a student and I used to go down Portobello Road and search for anything 3-D, ’cause it’s always been a fascination of mine. I could pick up old viewers and things, and then suddenly in a pile of stereo cards there was this one skeleton view and I was fascinated from the beginning. I thought ‘What on earth is this? What is it saying? What was it made for?’ And then I realised it was a tissue, so you hold it up to the light and instead of it being black and white, it turned into glorious colour, and the eyes glow at you in a very mysterious way, ’cause the technology from the 1860s was incredible actually. They painted these things on the back and pricked out all the eyes and all the jewellery and things that would glitter, and so when you hold it up to the light, it transforms from day into night.
LIZ: Wow!
BRIAN: I’ll tell you what – all the technology we have in the 21st century, I have tried to duplicate this and you just can’t. It’s incredible all the work they put in. So I started collecting these things, I say 40 years ago, and now I have almost all of them, but not quite all of them, but I know people who have other ones, you know, so I’ve been able to scan everything, and of course, you use modern technology – digital scanning and restoring in PhotoShop – and you can restore these things to their former beauty. So you will see in this book, the Diableries as they were meant to be seen, in complete 3-D and in colour, and people just to ‘Wow’, and I knew they would. I knew once we actually channelled this in the 21st century, that people would get excited and they do seem to be.
LIZ: It’s almost like a… it’s a little bit like an underground secret, isn’t it?
BRIAN: Yeah. In 140 years, very little has been known about it. There’s never been a book like this which gathered them all together. The secret is seeing them in 3-D in their stereoscopic splendour and that’s why I had to design my own viewer to go with the book.
LIZ: I mean it looks beautiful. When I got it out the bookcase and I was looking through it, it kind of felt it’s not just a book, it’s an experience. It’s so fascinating… so fascinating, especially when you know, I said I really wasn’t aware of it at all, so it was genuinely I was sat in the office – ‘I should do some work today… no hang on a minute’. (laughs)
Brian I want you to pick a track, I’m not going to make it difficult at all. I’m not gonna to this time – I won’t ask you to pick one of yours. I’m just going to ask you to pick a really good guitar track by someone you think is, you know, worth it.
BRIAN: What just popped into my head, “Since You’ve Been Gone”, ’cause I think it’s a quintessential, I suppose you’d call it ‘pop rock’ in a sense, but it’s uncompromising, you know. It’s a great song and it’s brilliantly played. I mean the drums, my dear friend, Cozy Powell, of course long gone and I worked with him. It was a wonderful experience working with that guy, you know. He had rock all the way through him, you know – an amazing guy – and of course Ritchie Blackmore playing guitars, who’s extraordinary. You know, people don’t talk about Ritchie Blackmore enough. I don’t know why, but know he was such a trailblazer and technically incredible, unpredictable in every possible way. It’s great. That’s what you love, isn’t it. You go to a gig and you want to see something which is not predictable, which is not like just reproducing. So you never knew what you were gonna see when you went to see Purple, when Blackmore was in it, but also Rainbow. You know, this as his own thing and it was wild and dangerous. And this is a good pop record, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s great rock music, in my opinion. I think it’s perfect.
TRACK <SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE> plays.
PART 2
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LIZ: Rainbow on Planet Rock and our very special guest this week is Mr Brian May.
BRIAN: Doctor Brian May.
LIZ: Doc… Actually, yes. Dr Brian May.
BRIAN: I won’t let anybody call me Mister these days, because if you go through that torture, you never want to be called Mister.
LIZ: D’you know what? Both of us doing it. Dr Brian May. (laughs) BRIAN: Thank you very much.
LIZ: Look, I did mention of course, before that the thing that we hold you all dear to our hearts [for] is Queen, and very recently in Montreux you opened The Queen Studio Experience. Now I didn’t actually know anything about this till I read about the opening, but tell us about it, ’cause it just sounds incredible.
BRIAN: It’s nice – yeah something I would never have thought would happen, you know. You go through these things. We used to turn up every day in Montreux. We loved it there. It was a very good escape from sort of the pressures of our home lives in London. You know, we would be there working away, going in the same door every day and I went back there last week – it opened The Studio Experience – and suddenly it all got sort of converted into a museum in a sense. Like being at your own funeral. I’m trying to make it sound positive, aren’t I? (both laugh) But it’s actually a great thing, you know. We worked there for many years and made more or less six albums there in this little studio in the corner of the Casino on the banks of Lake Geneva in a sleepy little town called Montreux. And Montreux is very quiet normally, you know. A little bit of tourism goes on, but when the Jazz Festival comes on it’s massively crowded and nice actually. It’s a nice event and in fact Kerry and I just played it this last July, and we have a DVD coming out of that performance, which is nice – but I digress.
We went there and we stayed there and David Richards became our sort of regular engineer and producer and did a fantastic job, so you find a formula – not a formula – you find a situation, which works for you. You carry on with it. Freddie loved it because it enabled him to get away from the Press intrusion, particularly towards the end of his life, you know, ’cause people were sticking cameras through his toilet windows when he was sick, which was really awful. So in Montreux he really did get peace and privacy and he bought a place there. And there we would work very – how can I say – gently, but it wasn’t gentle (laughs), you know it was quite turbulent, but there have been a trickle of people who go there like a pilgrimage. I don’t know if you know the Freddie statue …
LiZ: Yeah, of course.
BRIAN: … is actually there as well, nearby, on the shores of the lake, which is beautiful. So people go there to see Queen in as sense. They see the statue and to have a look around the studio and see what it was like. So in response to that demand, the Casino and the town and some of our people put together this experience, which is basically there’s loads of our stuff there, instruments, and you can see where we worked, and in the control room, which has been restored to what it looked like when we were there, apart from it being filled with smoke (laughs), which was crazy. The desk has been restored and you can sit there and you can mix the tracks. So there’s a few Queen tracks there and you can sit there and work the faders and do your own mix, which is….
LIZ: That’s really interesting.
BRIAN: Yeah. It’s a nice thing, you know. So people – I’ve seen them have a lot of fun with it and….
LIZ: ‘Cause that’s part of the magic of I think, of as a music fan, what happens in the studio when people’s individual parts become, you know, that thing that you love. That must be amazing for people to actually have a go. What tracks are they, do you know?
BRIAN: One of them is ‘Made In Heaven’, which is very much a quintessential Queen track. It’s one of the biggest we ever did. It was never a single, strange enough. It’s one of my favourite tracks.
LIZ: Was it not?
BRIAN: No. Perhaps it should be.
LIZ: Yeah, yeah.
BRIAN: ‘Made In Heaven’ is so enormous. We could play it if you like?
LIZ: Yeah – let’s have a listen.
TRACK <MADE IN HEAVEN> plays.
PART 3
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LIZ: ‘Made In Heaven’ on Planet Rock and my guest this week is Dr Brian May. (laughs) Got it right this time.
BRIAN: Thank you, darling.
LIZ: I just want to talk to you really briefly, ’cause I can’t have you sitting here and not talk about the guitar. I actually, genuinely, do not know how you ended up playing the guitar. I genuinely don’t know the story of how you ended up playing the guitar and not the drums or the piano.
BRIAN: Oh, I see.
LIZ: What led you to six strings?
BRIAN: Well, Buddy Holly, really. I think that was the moment I thought “ACHT, that’s what I wanna do”, when I heard that incredible jangling noise. We can play a bit of that if you like? Buddy Holly and the Crickets I used to listen to on my little crystal set, under the covers when I was pretending to be asleep, you know and it was MAGIC to me, because in the world that I grew up in, it was the world of soft classical music, and the big band era, and Johnnie Ray, ballads, Bing Crosby, and this guy comes along with this jangling sound and this amazingly spooky sound of the backing harmonies as well. I was just blown away and I still am every time I hear it.
LIZ: From hearing that thinking, ‘That’s what I wanna do’, and actually putting that into practice – obviously lots of people dream of doing something, but very few actually, you know, get to the endgame – once you actually got hold of a guitar, how quickly did realise ‘Actually. I can do it. I can do this’?
BRIAN: I suppose it was gradually, really. I was lucky, ’cause my Dad was musical and he taught me ukulele chords, so when I asked for a guitar for my, I don’t know, probably ninth or tenth birthday, I got a guitar and I was able to make some kind of noise with it that made sense. But for years I just played rhythm and I would sing and play rhythm, so that’s my grounding, and I’m happy that that happened ‘ cause these days people delve into, you know, playing only very quickly. You now, people get into playing sing-songs, but the rhythm stuff is very important. That’s your grounding, really. But yeah, I could do something, you know, and I had kids around me of my age who felt the same and were passionate about it, so we would go like and hide in the cycle sheds and play riffs to each other and swap ideas and techniques and stuff, and so it happened very quickly. You know, by the age of I don’t know, 16 or so, I could play a lot of what I can play now, you know. You develop those skills quite quickly, but the inspiration was all around us. Rock and roll was just burgeoning everywhere – it’s incredible – and I was listening to people like James Burton on ‘Hello Mary Lou’, Ricky Nelson records. I didn’t know his name or who he was. I just heard this guitar, not just doing the jangling think, and not just making a big noise, but speaking. He could bend notes, James Burton (demonstrates “WAH-DIT”) and I was just entranced because that transformed the guitar from a rhythm instrument into a lead instrument on a parallel with a lead vocalist, so that really just made the hairs on my back stand up and that’s what I wanted to do.
LIZ: Do you wanna play a Buddy Holly track then?
BRIAN: Probably ‘Maybe Baby’.
LIZ: Okay then.
BRIAN: Yeah.
LIZ: Lets have ‘Maybe Baby’.
BRIAN: I remember them so clearly, these records, ’cause it was vinyl in those days, and this was black vinyl, done very cheap with a black label in the middle with very little on it except the title and the artist, and they were in a brown paper bag (chuckle) with a hole in. It was very kind of cheapo, but God, the magic was in there you know, and I can still smell what it was like (laughs)… perfume, these vinyl singles. And, you know, you put it on your record player and my God, the magic just leapt out at you.
LIZ: Well let’s listen to Buddy Holly and ‘Maybe Baby’, right after this.
<Commercials>
My Planet Rocks on Planet Rocks…
<MAYBE BABY> plays.
PART 4
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LIZ: Buddy Holly and Maybe Baby on Planet Rock, and my guest week is Brian May.
Brian, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your work with Kerry Ellis, ’cause we’ve talked to you and Kerry before, but the two of you first met on We Will Rock You, didn’t you?
BRIAN: Well, she was the original Meat, yeah. She actually came in to audition when we were putting the show together for the first time, you know, very tentatively, ’cause we didn’t really know what we were doing. (laughs) We were learning very fast. But Kerry came in and sang ‘No One But You’ and just slaughtered us all. It was amazing, so she got the part. I had actually seen her. I kind of poached her in a sense ’cause I’d seen her in My Fair Lady of all things, something very different, but she was astounding in that as an understudy, and so I think it was me who actually asked her to come in and audition for the part, which is incredible, and created that role, and I immediately thought, ‘Ah, this is the kind of voice I would like to work with’, because, you know, I don’t have Freddie any more, and she’s just a very inspiring interpreter of material. So gradually over years and years we, because we’re both incredibly busy, you know, we found time to just put some tracks together, [I] produced some tracks for her, and we made that first album, ‘Anthems’ album, and then we figured we could go out on tour. So in various forms we’ve been on tour, and it’s GREAT for me. It’s very different to the expectation of being Queen, which is kind of a release for me, you know. I love being Queen, but, you know, not all the time. Sometimes it’s nice to get out and just be fresh and different, so we did go out… the last thing we did was our Acoustic By Candlelight tour, which is great, ’cause it’s very intimate. We can tell stories and have a joke with the audience and it’s turned out to be something very good, so we’ll do some more of that. I think we start end of February this year, doing some gigs in England. We have some gigs in Russia and in Malta and I think maybe South Africa, I’m not sure. So I enjoy that, it’s great, and you know it’s stimulating for me. It’s a way of having a very fresh look at things.
We play a couple of Queen songs, and I do actually play some electric guitar, even though it’s called Acoustic by Candlelight. But it’s very intimate. It’s very different from the huge, grand Queen experience, which we may be doing again. I think we may do some Queen gigs later on this year. I’m probably not supposed to say this, (laughs) but we’re looking at doing something, you know, and of course, Adam Lambert is a great frontman and we know already that works, so we would be looking towards doing some gigs with Adam, hopefully. I’m excited about that, if it happens – IF it happens.
LIZ: D’you know what? I’m gonna make you hold that thought really quickly and I’m gonna ask you a little bit more about that – if you just pick me a track of you and Kerry, and then I’ll ask you the big Queen question.
BRIAN: Yeah okay. The track I would pick is called ‘Anthem’ and it’s from the Chess musical, and it is something which I grabbed hold of because I thought this is really a rock track and this is what I shall make it with Kerry – and she’s got this enormous voice and so we did our own adaptation, and I’m very proud of this as an arrangement. Its very ‘rock’, you know. It’s got loads of loud guitars on it, which is kind of what I do, I suppose. (laughs) It’s also got a nice, very big orchestral arrangement, which I did with Steve Sidwell, which I’m also very proud of, and on top of it sits Kerry with this extraordinary passionate delivery. Yeah, so this is something, we actually performed this at The Festival of Remembrance a couple of years ago and it was a great moment really. This is the kind of thing which I strive for. I love to make events happen, you know, and something special happen, so yeah, this is ‘Anthem’.
TRACK <ANTHEM> plays.
PART 5
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LIZ: You just heard ‘Anthem’ on My Planet Rocks. Kerry Ellis and Brian May, or Brian May and Kerry Ellis – I’m not sure which way round? …
BRIAN: It can be either way.
LIZ: Either way. Great stuff. Now just as we were talking then, you casually mentioned that there might be a little Queen action later on this year. Um… Wow !! (laughs)
BRIAN: Well we have a busy year coming up, ’cause we are doing this Freddie musical and that’s now, the engine has started rolling.
LIZ: And is this the biopic, or is that ….?
BRIAN: Yes, the biopic, and it’s about Freddie and, of course it has to be about us as well, and I think it’s gonna be a really interesting film, you know. We’ve been through various alleyways, you know. We’ve been through all kind of thoughts as to what the film actually should be, and I think it’s now very clear to us. We have a great director and we think we have a great guy playing Freddie, but we feel that we understand what our brief is now, because it’s a film about Queen as a family in a sense, because there’s the group like us forms organically in a sense, you know. We weren’t put together from the outside. We just evolved very luckily into a unit which democratically worked, organically, was created – and the sum of its parts were greater than the parts, if you know what I mean.
But also it’s very much a family, because we were all together longer than any of our relationships (laughs) outside – our marriages and stuff, and so the film is a kind of exploration of the dynamics of that kind of family and what happens, how it comes together and how what happens when it gets disrupted and out of balance and how it can regain its integrity. So it’s a fascinating project really and I think the script is reflecting those thoughts. And, of course, it’s about Freddie. It’s about how he functioned in this environment.
LIZ: And the thing is, lots of people know ‘that’ Freddie, you know, the on-stage or feel they know him because that was the only bit they saw.
BRIAN: Yeah.
LIZ: But I’m sure, obviously you knew him so well, there must have been a million other facets of him?
BRIAN: Yeah. The Freddie we knew was pretty shy, really, but he had an extraordinary way of using his talents and also very good at bringing out other peoples’ talents, you know, and by that I include me and Roger and John. He was… he had very generous nature, I think, and also a very far-seeing nature – very focussed, because he realised that if he got the best out of everyone around him, that would benefit everyone. So yeah – a very unusual person, Freddie.
LIZ: And I guess finding someone to represent that is equally difficult. I’m not gonna make you tell me who it is, but… (laughs)
BRIAN: Well, the rumours are out there, I know. (laughs)
LIZ: Everyone can Google it. What about someone playing you? Have you ever had anyone play you before?
BRIAN: No, not really. (laughs) That’s an interesting thought. We have someone, I think, on the cards, you know I don’t think, I probably can’t reveal this either, but I’m excited about the guy who’s at the moment the front runner for playing me. It’s gonna be weird, I mean, that is very weird, and I… to be honest, that’s one of the things which has stopped us doing this before, I think, you know. I don’t know if we were ready for this. I remember coming up with the same thing in the musical. The musical originally, We Will Rock You, was gonna be a bio musical. It was gonna be about the history of Queen and stuff, you know, and history of Freddie, and we actually workshopped it that way, and then we just hated it. We just didn’t think it felt comfortable to portray us on stage that way, so that’s why We Will Rock You became about the future and kids in the future, and thank God for Ben Elton who had the vision to make it happen that way. ‘Cause We Will Rock You‘s much much more interesting than a sort of biographic musical, I think, and it’s a good story. You know, it’s funny, it’s satirical, but it has warmth to it, so I think when people come out from We Will Rock You they feel like they’ve kind of seen us and they know us in a strange way. And they feel like they’ve been on some kind of journey and they wanna do it again. That’s why We Will Rock You‘s still there after 11 years.
LIZ: Is there a track that appears in the show that we can play now – seeing as we’ve talked about Freddie, we’ve talked about We Will Rock You – what track shall we play that appears in the musical?
BRIAN: (chuckles) ‘I Want It All’ is interesting. I guess ‘I Want It All’ is a sort of cornerstone of the play, you know, of the story of the musical, because it’s about kids wanting it all, and the song was about reaching out and grasping what you want in life and really that’s kind of the theme of We Will Rock You. So, it’s funny how the songs that we had – ‘I Want To Break Free’s another example – the songs actually dovetailed into a story like this very easily, ’cause a lot of Queen’s music was about normal people, like you and me are normal people, you know, with normal dreams and normal frustrations, trying to grab the kernel of life, so ‘I Want It All’ sums that up quite well.
<I WANT IT ALL> plays.
PART 6 – FINAL
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LIZ: ‘I Want It All’ from Queen, who else, on Planet Rock and my guest this week, Brian May and Dr Brian May… (laughs)
BRIAN: You got it right.
LIZ: I don’t want to say it now without the Dr .. So, we were talking before about more live Queen shows this year. How difficult is it to crank that machine back into action, ’cause I assume it’s quite a machine?
BRIAN: It’s slightly frightening because it’s big. You know, as soon as the word ‘Queen’ is over the top, then things change in scale and we do have some great people we can call up, but from the moment you press that button you feel this sort of energy starting up again. You feel the engine start to turn, and it’s exciting. I mean, I can feel excitement at the thought that we may be going out, and it’s energising.
It also brings other stuff. Being Queen, sort of stepping back into that sort of battleground (laughs). Internal battleground. You know it’s not that easy for me, ’cause I’m used to getting me own way, I suppose, and Roger and I always see things completely differently. We’re like brother’s you know. There is a certain amount of love there, but there’s a certain amount of hatred as well… not hatred… but we pull in opposite directions the whole time, which is partly the strength of Queen, I suppose, but to step back into that arena can be quite hard, I know for him as well as me.
We don’t have John any more,you know, ’cause he’s opted out. He’s quite reclusive really and we respect that. We don’t have Freddie, so you know, here we are, and I think there’s always a big question mark. Lot of people think we shouldn’t be trying to be Queen or whatever, but, you know, it’s in us – that’s what we spent half our lives building and the demand is there. People want to see Queen in some form and we can give it.
Someone like Adam Lambert comes along, and formerly Paul Rodgers, which was a great success, but Adam Lambert is I suppose a little bit more like Freddie in some ways, you know. He has that extraordinary sort of theatricality to him, which Freddie had as well. He doesn’t copy Freddie in any sense whatsoever, which is great. I would hate to do it with a copyist. But Adam has an amazing range. He’s one of the few singers in the world – male singers – who can handle all those vocals at their original pitch. And he’s an entertainer and he’s nice to be around. You know, this is so important. You’ve got to work with people that you like and feel comfortable with and he definitely qualifies for that. So I , you know, if it happens this year, it will be with Adam, and …[makes noise]. you know. (laughs) I can feel the warm drafts beneath my feet. (Both laugh)
LIZ: I like that. That’s a good way to put it. I was just thinking there, it’s kind of a shame this isn’t TV to see the lookt on your face, then, something changed ..
BRIAN: It is kinda scary, but you know, most of the best things in life are scary, aren’t they?
LIZ: Yeah. Makes you feel alive, definitely, definitely. Well I think we will all, and i can speak for everyone here at Planet Rock as well, to say that we will all – we’ll be there on the front row most definitely.
BRIAN: Brilliant. Well thank you to Planet Rock, ’cause you do us good and we appreciate it.
LIZ: Well there wouldn’t be much Planet Rock, to be honest, if it hadn’t been for Queen, so thank you. I think I say that from our listeners as well.
BRAN: Ah… that’s great.
LIZ: I just want to play out with one track before we go, and I think the last time you were really on the airwaves on Planet Rock was with our good friend,well not my good friend, your good friend, Tony Iommi. Good friend of the station.
BRIAN: Yeah… Tony’s great and he’s one of my very few real friends in the business, you know, and he’s a great, great, great friend. He’s just, I think one of the people who, well obviously, he’s kind of the ‘Father of Heavy Metal’ really. This man came up with a million riffs, which are the cornerstone of heavy metal music, but he’s totally modest. You know, he’d laugh – he does laugh when I say that. And in fact he has so many riffs that didn’t get used, we’ve talked about project of putting those riffs all together.
LIZ: That rings a bell.
BRIAN: Yeah – it’s something, we haven’t had time to do it yet, but when we do get a moment, that’s what we’re gonna do – sit down and in fact we’ve laid… we’ve done some preparation and so, you know, there’s a lot of these tracks we haven’t listened to, and he just had so many riffs that not all of them got converted into Black Sabbath songs, or even solo songs, you know, so we thought how interesting it would be to have this stuff out there and maybe other people could use ’em.
LIZ: The lost riffs of rock.
BRIAN: They will love it, yeah, really – Tony Iommi’s riffs. How does he do it?
LIZ: Well shall we bring it, I’m gonna bring it back to the beginning and I’m just gonna remind everyone that your book, “Diableries” … “Diableries” – I’m gonna say it in a Northern accent (laughs) that’s the only way I know – Brian’s book “Daibleries” is out now and…
BRIAN: “Stereoscopic Adventures In Hell”.
LIZ: And I think a good sort of soundtrack for that would be a Black Sabbath track.
BRIAN: I think it would. Yeah.
LIZ: So what shall we play out with?
BRIAN: I wouldn’t mind “Paranoid” meself actually. It just always does it, don’t it really.
LIZ: Yeah let’s have a …
BRIAN: Is that okay? Are we allowed?
LIZ: I think we’re 100% allowed and I’m sure Tony will be pleased. Brian, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you on Planet Rock.
BRIAN: Thank you again. Nice to be here.
<PARANOID> track plays.