BLACK STAR RIDERS Frontman: 'There's A Lot Of Energy And Chemistry In This Band'

Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine recently conducted an interview with THIN LIZZY and BLACK STAR RIDERS frontman Ricky Warwick. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metalshrine: Writing for [the debut BLACK STAR RIDERS] album, was any of you the main guy chipping in ideas or was it more of a group effort?

Ricky: Honestly… I mean, I wrote all the lyrics so I was the guy going, "I've got an idea for a song." Scott [Gorham, guitar] and Damon [Johnson, guitar] would throw me riffs and I'd be singing like a melody or something. A lot of it was written by me and Damon, and Scott was involved in a lot as well, so I would say the three of us pretty much wrote the album. The album was written before Jimmy [DeGrasso] joined us on drums.

Metalshrine: Did you write separately or in a room facing each other?

Ricky: What would happen is… last year when LIZZY was on tour, a lot of the guys liked to stay at the hotel, but Damon and I like to hang out at the gig and stuff like that. We would make a point of getting together in the dressing room, so a lot of it was written in the dressing room or in the back of the bus and hotel rooms. You get an idea at a certain point and you go, "Hey, guys, what do you think of this? Do you like this? Is it crap? Do you want to change anything?" and that's what we do. We get something worked out to the point where we thought it was presentable and show the other guys. Scott was just coming up with killer riffs and I'd go, "Play that again!" and I'd record it and take it away and then go from there. It was written really quickly and when you're fired up and excited, the ideas come pretty fast.

Metalshrine: I read that you got the name for the band from watching the movie "Tombstone".

Ricky: I got part of the name from that. I got "black star" but the "riders" came later. I needed something that would complete it. I wanted something that was Wild West-y and gangy and I wrote down a few other words that I thought were cool and "riders" was one of them. I read about David Bowie and how he used the cut out technique and threw all the words on the floor like a jigsaw. So I thought "Fuck it, I'll do it!" and I threw them on the floor and BLACK STAR RIDERS came up and it was, like, "Fuck, that's great!". [laughs] That's honestly how it happened. It's simple as that and I threw it out to the other guys and everybody really liked it. Scott took a few days to come around to it. I think because of a little bit of fear of the unknown and what was going on, which is understandable, but everybody else was really vibing on it and the more we thought about it, nobody could really come up with anything better that fitted it and eventually Scott, after four days, popped in and said, "I'm fucking loving it! Let's call the band BLACK STAR RIDERS!"

Metalshrine: I guess you guys see this album as one of many to come, right?

Ricky: Yeah, but nothing's for certain. Fuck, we're musicians and we live with doubt and you don't take anything for granted and we've all learned that the hard way. I think there's a lot of fuel left in the tank and there's a lot of energy and chemistry in this band and we're just beginning our history right now and the band's only three months old. I would like to think that we'll be in this situation, making a record, absolutely next year. I've already got ideas with Damon and we have a few songs that didn't quite make it onto this one and I still think are worth working on. I'd like to think that this is the start of something really cool and hopefully a long road, but who knows?

Read the entire interview from Metalshrine.

"Bound For Glory" lyric video: