Drummer Simon Wright discussed leaving AC/DC and joining Dio in a new Talking Metal podcast interview. Blabbermouth transcribed his comments.
“It was about 1990. Basically, it sounds a little crazy, but I really lost my enthusiasm for things. You can’t really be like that in a band like that — you’ve gotta give 110 percent — and my enthusiasm had become a bit complacent, and it wasn’t fair on them, and it definitely wasn’t fair on the fans and people coming to the shows. So I started thinking, ‘I’ve gotta move on here.’ And luckily, through a friend of a friend of a friend, or whatever, I managed to meet up with Ronnie [James Dio]. We did some rehearsals. It was mainly for the new album that he had going on, called ‘Lock Up The Wolves’. ‘Cause it was straight into recording, basically, before we did any shows. And we did that. And it kind of worked out. I’d met Ronnie a couple of times in the past before that, and I thought he was such a clever, funny, intelligent guy. And I’d loved his singing, obviously, with [Black] Sabbath and Rainbow and his own stuff and everything. And it just kind of worked out. Yeah, it was a great time.”
He also discussed recording three new songs — “Who Made Who” and the instrumentals “D.T.” and “Chase The Ace” — for the AC/DC 1986 soundtrack album “Who Made Who” to accompany the Stephen King film “Maximum Overdrive”.
“They booked a studio in the Bahamas — Compass Point — where they did some of ‘Back In Black’, I guess, if not all of it; I’m not sure. But they’d been there before anyway. Again, it was down to business. I thought it was great, that song [‘Who Made Who’]. It had a great rhythm and good feel and catchy chorus. It was pretty cool. But the tracks for the movie that were kind of the instrumental things, that was a little weird. They put TVs up in the studio to play to, and Angus [Young] would do some blues licks. It was kind of a jumbled up album. I was hoping that we could have done just a normal album without anything to do with a movie. But that wasn’t my call. There were a lot of things in that band that weren’t my call. So I just went along with it… As for the movie, well, I’m not sure about that one. [Laughs] [It was] kind of a cult classic, I guess you’d get away with calling it. [Laughs]”
