Dio speaks to Hammer about what you can expect from his forthcoming solo dates in November. Get tickets for Dio here!

“Well, of course, we have so much material to draw upon,” says Dio, who has already revealed that the band will be playing a new track on the tour. “We won’t be doing any Sabbath or Heaven And Hell songs because that’s something we’ll rekindle again when Tony’s back. As you either know or don’t know, he had an operation on the tendons of his hand. So when that comes around and Tony’s okay we have plans to start up again. So this gave me a wonderful opportunity to play those songs that I haven’t done in four years, almost five years, with the same guys that I love to play with…Simon Wright on drums, Rudy Sarzo on bass and this time, Doug Aldrich on guitar and Scott Warren on keyboards.”

“We’ll do Holy Diver and Rainbow In The Dark and a few others, but we’ll try to do a few different things this time,” he continues. “A couple of Rainbow songs that we haven’t approached, almost since the beginning, so we’ll give them a try because we don’t want the show to be exactly the same. But also we’ve just recorded one track to be released while we’re there. It’s a song from the album…from what will be Magica II and III, because Magica was always meant to be a trilogy. We’ve done the first part and I wanted to do the next two, and I’ve been working on those things since we’ve been off from doing Heaven And Hell…because I believe that they’re going to release some kind of retrospective album and I didn’t want it to be another regurgitated thing, another one where we’ve heard all these songs before, so I wanted to include something else. This time I don’t think they’re going to include it on the album. It will be available just by itself, but it is one of the songs from Magica.”

Is it inspiring to see a new generation of kids turning up to see you play every time you tour?

“Yes, it is. I’ve always been surprised through all the years to see so many young people in the audience. Certainly in the old days I was one of those young people. I just happened to be on the stage so it really didn’t make that much of an impact, but certainly it does now, after all these years. God, it’s been a long, long time! To go to a show and see someone so young who has absolutely no connection with what you did back in those days, it’s just really heart-warming to know that the music we made really transcends any kind of age gap. I think that’s the most important thing.”

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