Page 8 - ROCKNATION ISSUE 26

PAGE 8 ROCKNATION ISSUE 26

Photo credit - Fran Strine Interview with Tim “Ripper” Owens & Keri Kelli by Ernest Skinner

Ok, here we go; A New Revenge is the latest hard rock & heavy metal hitting band to form and release a studio album this year.
Enemies & Lovers was released March 29, via Golden Robot Records. Before getting into the deep end, let’s just wade in a bit. First of
all, every member of this supergroup are the creme de la creme of the music, and certainly hard rock circles.

Lead singer Tim “Ripper” Owens came out of nowhere on the international stage and replaced Rob Halford for about 7 years as the
frontman for Judas Priest. Guitarist Keri Kelli is an energetic professional guitar player, having played in numerous bands over the
years, such as Ratt, the Vince Neil Band, Alice Cooper etc. Currently, he gets his exercise as Night Ranger’s full time touring guitar
player. The elusive James Kottack (inside joke haha ) is everybody’s’ favourite lightning bolt on the drums having sowed his oats with
the Scorpions, and currently is back in the lineup with Kingdom Come on their 30th-anniversary tour…., and finally last but least….on the
bass guitar, we have THEEEEEEE Rudy Sarzo. I won’t explain anything about Rudy because if you don’t know who he is, you need to
either spend 15 minutes reading his Wikipedia or stop pretending you like hard rock. Rudy is like the soil to the earth or air to the
atmosphere.

“Well last but not least”......is actually not accurate; band photo pics show Rudy at times and Phil Soussan at other times. Due to the
possibility of scheduling conflicts with Rudy who works full time touring with The Guess Who band, Phil was tapped to tour when/if the
dates get aligned. Phil, as we all know, has decades of experience as the go-to guy for Ozzy, Billy Idol, Steve Lukather and many more.
Either way you slice it, this band is full of elite talent.

I recently had the chance to chat with Ripper about the new material and early on in the conversation, I had to ask him if he was in his
vehicle as per the constant click click of what appeared to me was the signal light or hazards sound.

“yes, I’m carpooling my son and daughter from school right now” Well, it must be pretty cool for your son especially to have his
rockstar Dad pick him up right? “Ummm, no, not really” (laughter) he replied. By the way, I confirmed he was Bluetoothing and in no
way involved in distracted driving. There is no need for the PoPo to pull him over as we are in the middle of an important interview.

After some small talk, I asked him to kind of describe the sound of the new album to the readers who haven’t grabbed a copy yet.

“Style-wise, I guess you could say it’s West Coast meets East Coast (hard rock),…Keri has a different writing style as he came
out of Orange County and it has a different flare than mine. I mean he has worked with Slash and Alice Cooper, so he has that
influence.....and then you have me as a singer who is strictly a heavy metal hard rock singer (from the East coast), and so you
can tell the little subtleties between us and our writing” …R/O