GRAHAM BONNET Talks To METAL RULES! TV About RITCHIE BLACKMORE, MICHAEL SCHENKER (Video)

Metal Rules! TV recently conducted an interview with legendary rock singer Graham Bonnet (RAINBOW, MICHAEL SCHENKER GROUP, ALCATRAZZ). You can now watch the chat below.

In a 2013 interview with Songfacts, Bonnet stated about how he originally crossed paths with Ritchie Blackmore: "That was through Roger Glover. One of my friends, Mickey Moody, was playing for WHITESNAKE at that time, and I think Roger was producing their album. This is 1970-something. Mickey told Roger that I was doing some solo stuff, which was successful in places like Australia and New Zealand. Weird places — everywhere but England. Roger wanted to know what I was doing, so they invited me over to this chateau on the border of Switzerland and France, and they gave me a song to learn. I had to learn a song called 'Mistreated', which I didn't know anything about. I didn't know anything about RAINBOW at all, to be honest with you. So I had to buy the albums and learn one song as an audition. Roger phoned me up and said, 'Will you come over and do a song with us?' And so I went over there and sang at them and they gave me the job. That was it, really. Then I went home, thought about it, and I said to my manger, 'I'm not right for this. I'm not like these other guys, long hair and all the rest of it. I don't fit.' But I did in the end."

During the same chat, Bonnet was asked to set the record straight once and for all regarding if Yngwie was hard to work with or not. "He wasn't at first," Graham laughed. "But he became... he suddenly was engulfed by people telling him how wonderful he was. And when a kid is 19 years old and everybody's telling you how marvelous you are and you could be better than this, how you could be the next Jimi Hendrix, it was very tempting for him, and his ego suddenly inflated. He became not a bandmember anymore — he wanted to go off on his own. And eventually, he did. It just wasn't working. I could see it happening."