Kicking up an ink

“I was shitting myself. I tried it a couple of times and then said, ‘Sorry mate, but I can’t do it with you in the control room.’ I told him to sling his hook and go play a game of pool!”

Ricky Warwick is describing the performance anxiety he felt when he walked into the studio and found that the producer had invited Scott Gorham to help out with the guitar parts. The producer being Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott who’s got a 48-track tucked away in his South County Dublin home.
“I’ve known Joe years, he’s like a brother, but Scott Gorham was in fucking Thin Lizzy,” Warwick resumes. “That makes him rock ‘n’ roll royalty.”
Gorham plays on four songs from Tattoo & Alibis, Warwick’s solo debut and a record which signals his transition from full-blown rocker – he used to be lead singer in The Almighty – to Steve Earle-style purveyor of Americana. Steve Earle before he went into rehab that is!
“It happened by accident really,” the Ringsend resident reflects. “I’d written this song called ‘Church Of Paranoia’ which I played to Darragh Kettle, the M.D. of peermusic Ireland, and he immediately offered me a publishing deal. Steve Earle, Springsteen, Paul Westerberg, Johnny Cash…I’ve always been into that sort of thing but it wasn’t until I spent a year mucking around in my room with an acoustic guitar that I realised I could do it myself.”
Darragh Kettle wasn’t the only one blown away by Warwick’s acoustic troubadouring.
“When he told me the sort of record he was planning, I said, ‘Don’t even think of getting anyone else to produce it,” Joe Elliott enthuses. “The World Cup was on when we did the first bit of recording, so we structured everything round the games. It was open house – in addition to Scott, we had in Peter O’Toole from the Hothouse Flowers, a brilliant pianist I’d worked with before called Dick Decent, Ronan McHugh and his Uncle Phil who brought his fiddle along.”
Not wanting the party to stop – “We managed to squeeze the odd bottle of wine in along the way!” – Elliott invited Ricky to open for the Leps on their 2003 World Tour.
“It started as a one-off in Japan where they don’t normally have support acts,” Joe continues. “I rang Mr. Udo, our promoter there, and said, ‘It’s just him and a guitar so it won’t be any trouble.’ He loved it, the crowd loved it and we loved it because it was back to that old ’70s thing of Long John Baldry going out with Zeppelin, or Van Der Graf Generator opening for Deep Purple. Same attitude, different type of music.”
Despite regular incursions into the UK top 10 with The Almighty, Warwick admits that he wasn’t prepared for how mega the Leps are in the States.
“One minute you’re playing to a handful of people in De Barra’s of Clonakility – which is a great venue by the way – and the next you’re in Vegas with 10,000 screaming Def Leppard fans in front of you,” he reflects. “It was seriously scary at first because you’ve nothing apart from a guitar to hide behind but now I love it! There have been some amazing nights – the whole of Bon Jovi came along to the Chicago show. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw were in, Ian Hunter, Earl Slick, Daniel Rey…it’s been a blast.”

Ricky Warwick gives his Tattoos & Alibis album a live airing at Auntie Annie’s, Belfast (Dec 1); Whelan’s, Dublin (2); Forum, Waterford (3); Lobby, Cork (5); Arthur’s Bar, Armagh (6); and Spirit Store, Dundalk (14).