‘Holy Diver’, ‘The Last In Line’ and ‘Sacred Heart’ are regulars on the Iron Fist HQ turntable and while Dio’s passing in 2010 means that as a band Dio will never reform, however LAST IN LINE are as close as we’ll get. Formed in 2011 to play the songs they wrote between 1982 and 1985, Vinny Appice, Jimmy Bain and Vivian Campbell – the original Dio band – got together after 25 years along with Lynch Mob frontman Andrew Freeman to simply play the “hits”. But in 2013 they were offered a record deal that changed the way they viewed their future. Heading for the studio, the making of ‘Heavy Crown’ was to be the project to spur bassist Jimmy Bain into battling his substance abuse demons. Writing while in rehab he won and had been sober for over a year. But fate was the deal another card, as the band prepared to release the album they’d been working on for three years Jimmy Bain passed away. Devastated by the news, and wanting to STAND UP AND SHOUT that Last In Line are a band that deserve to be celebrated, we caught up with guitarist VIVIAN CAMPBELL to ask him what lies ahead for this … Read More

With their recent self-titled album hitting the shops earlier this year, the British rock legends Def Leppard are enjoying an “indian summer” according to guitarist, Phil Collen.

The band who formed in 1977, right at the beginning of the burgeoning post-punk/new wave of British heavy metal movement, are currently on tour around the UK and headline Wembley Arena in London with Whitesnake and Black Star Riders this Friday.

Iron Fist spoke to Hackney-born guitarist Phil, who joined the band in 1982, about their “unnecessary” new album, sounding like Michael Jackson and how music needs a much needed boot in the backside if it’s going to produce future arena-filling headline acts.

Before ‘Def Leppard’, the album, was released singer Joe Elliot said that “It doesn’t sound like any one specific era of Def Leppard. It’s got everything. You’ll listen and go ‘Oh that sounds like Led Zeppelin or Queen’, and he’s right, this is a massively diverse album and sounds like you had so much fun making it. What expectations did you have going in to do this new record?

“You don’t really have to make albums anymore, not in this day and age. They don’t really serve a purpose. A … Read More

Freed Guantanamo Bay prisoner Shaker Aamer has spoken to the BBC about being tortured in the cruel camp, but that Whitesnake gave him hope.

In a moving interview with journalist Victoria Derbyshire, Aamer talked of what it was like to be detained in the prison while falsely accused of links with terror group, Al Queda.

The last British detainee of the camp is now back home in the UK, and confirmed that the soldiers and guards would use rock music to torture and displace their prisoners. However, one particular song did not have the desired affect on the Saudi national, who moved to the UK in 1996.

He told the BBC: “I used to [sing it a lot], because the words, I thought the words fits me. The words makes me feel like, yeah, it’s me again. [It goes] ‘Like a drifter I was born to walk alone, ’cause I know what it means to walk alone the lonely street of dreams.’ And it’s true because it’s just dreams. Dreams that I would be home one day, dreams that I would be free, dreams that Guantanamo would be closed.”

Iron Fist is not a political magazine, we are a music magazine, but are shocked and … Read More

We can hear the hound dogs on our trail. All hell breaks loose, alarms and sirens wail, and it gives Iron Fist the utmost pleasure to have THIN LIZZY gracing its cover for issue number 14. Within its pages, we chat to SCOTT GORHAM, the man who helped birth the style of glorious twin-guitar harmony that would resonate throughout so many of our cherished slabs of wax, and resided in the eye of this life-affirming band’s particular hurricane for its glory years and beyond.

For all that band’s turbulent and tragic history, THIN LIZZY’s grit, balls and outlaw chutzpah remain central to Heavy Metal, and there are plenty of other tales of trials and tribulations tackled and often overcome in this issue, and of artists elevated by the all-consuming power of their music to levels bordering on the realm of mythical superheroes. Jon-Mikl THOR’s is one of these, and the legendary thundergod’s story in this issue is proof positive that the love for his chosen steel-bending metier could triumph against all adversity. Similarly stirring is the tale of GIRLSCHOOL’s KIM MCAULIFFE and ENID WILLIAMS, who spill the beans on four full decades of tireless and inspirational hard rocking in often somewhat … Read More