HEAVEN AND HELL's APPICE: 'It's Gonna Be Fun Playing These Old Songs Again'

Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine recently conducted an interview with Vinny Appice (HEAVEN AND HELL, BLACK SABBATH, DIO). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Metalshrine: I thought I'd start off with HEAVEN AND HELL. What's it like being back together after all these years?

Vinny: Well, I went over to England to play on the three new tracks that will be on this new CD and everybody was there. I walked in and Ronnie was singing and after he finished, you know, it was great seeing him. We hugged and talked for a while and Tony and Geezer walked in and it was like a big family reunion. It was fantastic, so I'm totally excited about this and I'm just glad to be part of this.

Metalshrine: When you start rehearsing for the HEAVEN AND HELL tour, will that be the four of you in a studio somewhere just jamming it out?

Vinny: We're going into a rehearsal place, a big room and we'll have a lot of amps and shit and we're gonna play at full volume. We'll have to relearn all these songs. We'll probably have a boom box, a cd player...and I didn't have "Heaven and Hell" on cd, so they just sent it to me. I'm sure we'll be playing these songs and making mistakes and laugh. "Oh, I forgot that part!" I spoke to Tony and we talked about some of the songs and some of the songs even he said "Wow, I forgot that it's so complicated!" about some of the stuff on "Dehumanizer". It's gonna be fun playing these old songs again.

Metalshrine: Do you think you'll alternate the setlist during the tour, or will it be a "fixed" set and that's it?

Vinny: Well, we always did a fixed set with SABBATH before, even with DIO, but I've gotten used to alternate lately, just with all the different projects I've done and so many different songs. I didn't like doing it before, but now I like it, so I don't know how everybody else feels, but maybe we will do that. "Alright, let's throw in this song!" The only problem is you've got different lighting ques and so on, so we have to rehearse those songs with the people that are involved.

Metalshrine: How long did it take for you [to lay down the drums tracks for the new songs on "The Dio Years" CD]? You come in and you have three songs to put down drums for, is that like a day's work?

Vinny: You know what? I flew in to England, so it's like an eight-hour time difference and I took a car up to Birmingham and that's another two hours. Got to the studio, or I mean got to the hotel and took a five minute nap and then they called "Hey, you want to come down to the studio?" And I said "Yeah!" So I go down to the studio and I hadn't slept and I had a big headache. We had a drink and we hung out, had a laugh and reminisce and all that stuff and then we listened to the songs. Then we were figuring on coming in the next day and start laying it down and listening to everything, because I'd never heard these songs. So we hung out for a while and then I told the engineer "Well, let's screw around with the drums and get some sort of sound!" So I started playing and getting the drum sound and then I started waking up, you know. So after about half and hour we got a cool drum sound and I went "Well, why don't you start one of the songs and I'll start playing to it!" I started doing that and within two hours I got the whole song down. We were able to do parts by parts and keeping them on ProTools, it's easy. I was able to finish those songs pretty quick. We did that song one night, one song the next day and finished some of the bass and vocals and then I did the last song the third day. We even did a photo session too.

Read the entire interview at Metalshrine.