Phone calls in the dead of night rarely bring good news. In rural areas of the North of Ireland in the early 1980s, the shrill ring of a household rotary phone breaking the silence in the wee small hours usually signified either a) the solemn announcement of a death in the family, b) a neighbourly warning about escaped livestock or c) an alert from the Royal Ulster Constabulary with concerns over paramilitary activity in the area.
But the incoming call which forced Vivian Campbell Snr. from his marital bed at 2am one day in September 1982, heralded none of the above.
"My father came into my bedroom and said, 'There's a drunken Scotsman on the phone for you, son'," Vivian 'son of Vivian' Campbell told me in 2019. "I went downstairs to take the call and it was Jimmy Bain on the phone. He goes, 'Viv! Viv! I'm here in a hotel in London with Ronnie Dio and Vinny Appice. They've quit Black Sabbath and they're here looking for a guitar player. Can you be in London tomorrow night to audition?' I said, I'll make it happen. I didn't know how the fuck I was going to make it happen, given that I had no money, but I knew this was my shot."
Ironically, Bain, who'd previously played bass alongside Ronnie James Dio in Rainbow, had never actually heard Vivian Campbell play guitar. Though Sweet Savage, the NWOBHM band which Campbell formed after being asked to leave Rathmore Grammar School at age 16, had backed Bain's Wild Horses on what the guitarist remembers as being “half a dozen” shows, the mercurial, party-loving Scotsman was always far too busy carousing backstage to check out the support act.
Word had it though that the 20-year-old guitarist from Magheragall had serious chops. So when asked to nominate a couple of hotshot six-stringers to audition for Ronnie James Dio's new project, Bain put Campbell on his shortlist, alongside former Tygers Of Pan Tang ‘shredder’ John Sykes.
The young Irish guitarist remembers his younger self “chomping at the bit” for such an opportunity.
“Sweet Savage had peaked,” he admitted. “We’d knocked on the door enough times, and it wasn’t going to happen for us. We got on the Renegade tour with Thin Lizzy, but still no one really cared. Even before the Dio opportunity arose, I was thinking I might move to London because it wasn’t going to happen for me in Belfast. I’d given it my best shot. We all had. So when my chance came, I was absolutely ready.”
Borrowing the price of a return flight from Belfast to London from his father, Campbell headed to the capital the following morning with just his Gibson Les Paul as hand luggage. Dio, Appice and Bain, who’d invited himself along to the auditions to play bass, were waiting for him at John Henry’s rehearsal rooms in North London.
“I was nervous as fuck,” Campbell admits. "I was a Rainbow fan, and, although I wasn’t a big Sabbath fan until Ronnie joined, by total coincidence I was listening to Heaven And Hell on cassette in the car a lot around then.
"So I’m walking into this room, to meet a bona fide rock legend who I’d been listening to for years. And they were all stoned off their tits! But Ronnie picked up the bass and played me the Holy Diver riff, and we just started playing. And right from the minute we started playing, there was the sound of the band. There was no fucking around trying to get things to happen, it just locked, this immediate chemistry.”
At the end of a four hour rehearsal, the 20-year-old guitarist was offered the gig.
“Ronnie said, ‘Look, here’s the deal: I’ve left Sabbath, and I’ve been offered a solo deal, but I don’t want to do a solo record, I want to do a band project. But for name recognition purposes I’m going to call the band Dio.’
"He said, ‘I have no money, so I can only pay you a pittance to make this record, but if we’re successful, when the contract is renegotiated after the third album, we’ll make it an equitable situation.’ There was no ink on a contract, but we looked each other in the eye, and shook hands on it.
"And, just like that, I was in.”
![Dio - Holy Diver (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/2lvs2FzF64o/maxresdefault.jpg)
