Singer DOOGIE WHITE Talks About Auditioning For IRON MAIDEN

Metal-Rules.com recently conducted an interview with former RAINBOW and current YNGWIE MALMSTEEN singer Doogie White. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Metal-Rules: You auditioned for IRON MAIDEN after Bruce Dickinson left back in the early '90s. How was it?

Doogie White: "Long time ago, man... 1993 I think it was, November or something, certainly coming up to Christmas, because they ruined my Christmas when they gave the job to Blaze [Bayley]. [laughter] But the thing is, I didn't get the job with MAIDEN, and they went for a definite sound with Blaze, and if I had gotten the job I never would have gotten the gig with RAINBOW. Working with [Ritchie] Blackmore was really a passion for me, it was really exciting, it didn't go on as long as I would have wanted, but he had other plans. Had we done another album, who known what would have happened. Some of the stuff that ended up on the CORNERSTONE album was actually stuff that I wrote for the next RAINBOW album."

Metal-Rules: Do you remember which songs you played with MAIDEN in the audition?

Doogie White: "They had two live albums out at the time, and it was all of them... 'Be Quick or Be Dead', 'From Here to Eternity', 'Can I Play with Madness', 'Iron Maiden', 'The Clairvoyant'... I did 22 songs with them, TWICE."

Metal-Rules: How much did you practice for that gig?

Doogie White: "This was funny, I was gonna go to Scotland on Saturday morning and Dickie Bell, who was their tour manager at the time, turned up at my door on a Friday night with a tape and the lyrics and said you'll be singing at one o'clock on Monday for IRON MAIDEN. And that was because Blaze couldn't make it, because Blaze was doing something else. So I went in and sang on the Monday and they felt that it was unfair that I'd had such sort notice and they though that I had done well enough to warrant another comeback, so I went back and sang it again ten days later, so I was better prepared the second time than I was the first time. I knew the stuff, like you probably know 'Kashmir' from LED ZEPPELIN but you couldn't get up and sing it, you know."

Metal-Rules: You did one album "Stranger In Us All" with RAINBOW. Did you mention earlier that you had actually already had plans for another RAINBOW album?

Doogie White: "Yeah, he [Ritchie Blackmore] said to me that we're gonna do another album, once he had finished. He was gonna do the first BLACKMORE'S NIGHT album and tour with that and then at the end of 1997 going into 1998 we were gonna go back into studio and start to work again. So when we played Esbjerg on the west coast of Denmark, which was the very last show we ever played, I gave him a tape with half a dozen ideas on it, and we have never spoken since. That was it... it was over.Then some years later I gave that tape for Steen [Morgensen] and then some of those ideas were later used for CORNERSTONE's 'Human Stain' album."

Metal-Rules: So after the Esbjerg show in Denmark that was it?

Doogie White: "Yes, the European gigs that were announced for Eastern Europe, Greece and these kind of places, were cancelled, I don't know why. And because it [Esbjerg] turned out to be a single show a couple of members of the band asked for more money and of course Ritchie [Blackmore] didn't like that. You know, all those one-off shows, you get paid for the one show, but you're away from home for a week. He told me if I didn't like the situation I could fuck off, so I did. I just went home and phoned Carol [Stevens, Candice Night's mother and the current manager of BLACKMORE'S NIGHT and at the time RAINBOW] and said that there are certain things we need to resolve and if I don't hear from you within 48 hours, you can consider that my resignation, and I never heard from them again. So that's just how that went."

Read the entire interview at Metal-Rules.com.