Dublin born guitarist Bernie Torme has returned to the fray by teaming up with his ex-Gillan band mate John McCoy and drummer Robin Guy to record the album ‘Bitter & Twisted’ under the moniker GMT. A real stripped down, no-frills power trio they have been getting great reviews everywhere. You can read our review of the album here:- 

As some of our older readers will no doubt be aware, Bernie has had an interesting and varied career. When first coming to London he attracted a cult following on the Punk scene before joining Gillan for the ‘Mr Universe’ album. Gillan went on to enjoy a period of commercial success that included the albums ‘Glory Road’ and ‘Future Shock’ and the singles ‘Trouble’ and ‘New Orleans’ before Bernie departed to be replaced by Janick Gers. He was due to embark on a solo career when he got the call to replace the late Randy Rhoads in Ozzy Osbourne’s band, touring Arenas in the US in a band that also included Rudy Sarzo and Tommy Aldridge . Following the Ozzy dates, Bernie eventually started his own band that for a time included Girl / LA Guns vocalist Phil Lewis.  

I was delighted to get the chance to chat with Bernie about his latest project and also to reminisce with him about the past. We kicked off the interview by talking about the music industry, and in particular some of the changes that have come about as a result of the Internet:- 

It really has changed things a great deal and it’s been really noticeable for us in terms of this release. In the past if you weren’t on a major label it was really hard to get any attention at all. And that has changed now in as much as we were able to get the album up on Amazon all over the world and on ITunes and loads of places. The Internet has made it proportionally a lot easier to buy an album by a band that isn’t a really big band and hasn’t got the support of a major label.

And it’s also nice in terms of having peoples reactions because in the past it was really just down to the review in Kerrang and then later Classic Rock when that arrived and that was it basically – you never got to hear anyone else’s opinion. 

Sure – and I know that you are very much into interacting with your fanbase through the Web 

Absolutely. We have a MySpace page and of course our own Web Site and we get lots of reactions in that way which I am really keen on because it keeps it kind of close and Punky which I really like. 

I noticed that there is a fan campaign on the Yahoo Group to try and get you across to play some gigs in the States 

That’s right, it hasn’t actually happened yet but it is an idea that has been dragging on for a while. It’s a different approach in trying to get a band across, and I would really love to go. The last time I was there was around 1990 and so it’s been a long time now and over the years people have been born and grown up and brought CD’s (laughs). 

I don’t know if you are aware of the band Marillion but they had a similar situation a few years ago when their American fans were involved in the organization and financing of a tour 

Yes, I was aware of that. I know that they have always had a very tightly run fan club and kept it all really close to home and I think they have handled the whole thing of keeping in very close contact with their fanbase really really well. 

So let talk about GMT. You must be really pleased with the reviews so far? 

I'm bloody knocked out mate! The first album I recorded was back in ‘78 in the punk era and across all of the albums I've played on since then I have never ever had press like this – it’s amazing, critical acclaim at last.  I just hope that it can turn into some sales (laughs) 

How did you go about getting back together with John again? 

Well John and I have always kept in touch, we've known each other since the days of the dinosaurs basically - we both played together prior to Gillan and over the years we've always spoken and had our fallings out, then patched it up and carried on. Every year around Christmas John would call up or I would call him because one of us hadn't sent a Christmas card and for about 10 years it was like “we have to get together and have a play this year”. Then of course the year would pass and nothing would happen. A few years ago Paul Samson, who was a mate of both of ours, passed away and it became very apparent that time takes it toll so we talked about having a blow and John finally arranged a date and we got together with (former Gillan drummer) Mick Underwood and it was great. 

We decided to try recording and it didn't really work out and I think a lot of it was because it was the same three people; I wasn't at all keen to go down the road of the nostalgia route because the problem is…..well I’m not exactly Pavarotti and so for us to have found a vocalist to have replaced Ian just wasn't possible really. Both John and I wanted to keep it as a power trio because they tend to have a very loose jam kind of feel about them that larger bands lose; the larger the band is the harder it is to keep it loose. So we felt it wasn't really happening, it was sounding a bit jaded. I was really off the whole idea and John said there has to be an alternative to help kick us around. So about 2 weeks later the band Anti-Product were at my studio in Kent and they had Robin Guy doing a session with them. Alex Kane suggested I come and see Robin and he was keeping amazing time and not missing a beat and he was a very inspiring player. 

So John and I got together with Robin and had a blow and it really gelled - we all basically played off each other and that turned into another recording session. We had the backing tracks done in about 7 or 8 days; it was really painless and it was a great experience. 

And you ended up with an album of very few overdubs… 

Hardly any at all; in the past I have done albums and there was always this kind of “you have to have an airplay” track or “you have to have a commercial rock track” and you know all of us have tried and it never happened and so basically we all ignored it. So it was just the three of us playing in a room and being the sort of players we are all of us play in all of the holes in all of the places, there isn't any sparseness about it. When we recorded it, it sounded exciting, quite classic and new. Having said all that we approached every fucking record label on the planet and no one had any interest - they wouldn't even offer to put it out for nothing, they all just basically told us to piss off. No one was willing to give it a chance at all and so we ended up using this little catalogue label that I have for old product of mine. So we used that and it’s been doing bloody amazingly well which is great. 

There’s one song on there, ‘Rocky Road’, where the lyrics are very autobiographical, and there are a couple of lines that say you “Could've been diggin' ditches, Or carryin' the hod” if you hadn’t learned to play the guitar

Yes (laughs). That was a track that came out of the way Robin played because he did that tribal, Celtic thing and I heard him playing it and thought “wait a minute I could do something with that”, and it took about half a day to write and came together really quickly. I don’t know if I would have ended up digging ditches though, I kind of hope that I wouldn’t have. The lyrics for that one really came out of the whole Irish cliché thing. 

Tell me about the time you first started to play the guitar, who was it that inspired you to want to be a musician? 

I picked up the guitar in the 60’s and at the time it was The Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds and The Who and I suppose the biggest influence on me at the time was Jeff Back. He was playing all of these great solos on pop singles like ‘Shapes of Things’ and I had never heard anyone do anything like that before and then it was Clapton and The Bluesbreakers and later Cream. After that, Jimi Hendrix turned up and I was like “Wow, fucking hell” (laughs) and he was just the best ever. Then, around ’68 or ’69 I came across Rory Gallagher and he was a big influence to me, being Irish, playing a Strat and being great and then in Dublin along came Skid Row with Gary Moore who was just an astronomical player. So Dublin was a great place to play the guitar in, there were all of these great players around, another one was Eric Bell of course. And so you were able to go out to small clubs with just a handful of people in the audience and see all of these great guitarists. 

My favourite song on the album has to be ‘Summerland’. It has a great laid back vibe to it that reminds me of Robbie Robertson 

Really? I like him; I think he’s a genius. It was kind of an attempt to write about….well basically John and I are pretty old now and it’s not a subject that is addressed very often in Rock and so it was an attempt to write about the experience of time passing. And it is something that you kind of think about, you know you don’t grow up but you do grow old (laughs). 

Talking of John how does it fell to be back on stage with him again 

Well he’s isn’t really like any other bass player I’ve ever played with; he’s fat, he’s bald and he’s too loud (laughs). He is just a great guy for me to play with because its almost like we are operating out of the same drug addled brain and we don’t have to arrange an awful lot it just kind of happens between us. And that’s an experience I have rarely had with any other players. GMT really is my ideal band, it’s the best band I have ever played in. 

So we can expect to see you gigging around the UK soon? 

Yeah, that’s the plan. We hope to get out at the beginning of February and then again at the end of March. It’s pretty hard in the UK at the moment in terms of being a Rock act and going out and trying to play what is mostly an original set because there just isn’t the kind of circuit there any more. And the other problem is that we all live about a hundred miles or so apart so it isn’t really a cheap option and it becomes pretty complicated to try and get us all in the same place. But the plan is definitely to get out and play next year and then hopefully play one or two festivals in the summer. 

And as far as the set list goes; are you playing all of the album plus a few songs from the past? 

We don’t play every track on the album, although we’ve had them all in and out. ‘No Justice’ and ‘Vincenzo’ have been occasional encores. We play a couple of my old tracks and the Mammoth track ‘Fatman’ and we play ‘New Orleans’, ‘Trouble’ and ‘Smoke On The Water’ because…well, we had to play it every bloody night (laughs) so why not carry on. Although, actually I quite enjoy playing it now. 

Talking of Gillan how do you view that part of your career now and he albums that you made with the band 

It was a great experience; of all the ones we did the album I like the most is ‘Mr Universe’ because it was the one that really had the most complete set of songs. The other albums, even though they sold well, had some patchy moments on them and, in terms of the band, I don’t think that they had the same amount of enthusiasm. It’s all a matter of opinion of course and I’m seeing it in the light of being present at the time and now looking back with hindsight. But I’m eternally grateful for having had the chance to play with Gillan because it established me as a name in whatever small way I am known. There was the continuous arguments about being promised royalties which never got paid, which is true. But at the end of the day it is in the past now and I am awfully glad that it happened and that I was asked. Because I was only a kid at the time, I was basically clueless really (laughs). 

And of course you were plucked from the Punk scene to be recruited into the band… 

Yes, that probably got me more attention at the time. Had I been just an ordinary HM guitarist then I don’t think people would have given it the amount of attention that they did. But it all panned out OK really. 

Tell me about the Ozzy dates that you did; it must have been a very difficult situation to be in 

Again, it was a great honour to be asked. At the time I was just sorting out the Electric Gypsies project and I had a deal for that so I wasn’t awfully keen to bail out on that. And so originally I said no because I had other obligations and I had no idea just how big Ozzy was in the US at the time. I thought he was probably playing 2000 or 3000 seaters but they came back to me and offered me a decent amount of money, and I was really skint at the time, and they also explained it was only for a short period of time and wasn’t a permanent gig. Sharon and Ozzy are lovely people and Ozzy is a great bloke but it wasn’t a band, it was basically Ozzy and hired hands and to me the kind of thing I enjoy is a band.  

I hadn’t really heard any of the material apart from ‘Mr Crowley’, which I heard on the radio once. So I listened to the albums before I went and thought “fucking hell, how I am I going to learn this in this short amount of time” and it was a 90 minute set. And the only track I really knew in it was ‘Paranoid’ so I was up all night trying to learn the rest and I was able to get a basic handle on the arrangements but the live arrangements were different from the recorded ones so it was really hard. And at the beginning I had no chance of trying to play any of Randy’s parts in the solos because I hadn’t had anywhere near enough time to learn them. I would be there on stage in the middle of a track thinking “What the fuck happens next?” and so because it was a large production and the stage was half the size of Hammersmith Apollo I wasn’t able to hear Rudy, or Tommy’s snare or what Ozzy was singing. And I hadn’t anyone I was able to cling to and say “What’s the next chord”. Of course everyone in the band was just enormously depressed and every time they looked over at me they were no doubt thinking I wish he wasn’t there and I wish Randy was and so it was a very difficult situation. But anyway, I went out and did some gigs and then it seemed that the tour was going to drag on and I was conscious of my other obligations which I really wanted to see through. 

You’ve had a pretty varied career – have you ever thought about writing a book 

Funnily enough I started on a couple of chapters but I’m a guitarist really and I just couldn’t be arsed. I don’t think that it’s all that interesting though really, I have a few anecdotes but I don’t know if people would be interested in reading it. So it probably wouldn’t sell all that many copies (laughs).  

For a time you tried to get the project Desperado off the ground with Twisted Sister vocalist Dee Snider; was it ultimately down to record company politics that it failed? 

Yeah, completely, we spent ages writing and sorting out the band, too long really it was almost two years. And then we ended up recording the album at enormous expense which was par for the course in those times. So it was all about to happen and the A&R who had signed us left and because of that the label just sat on it, so it was a very difficult experience. It got to the stage where we had the photographs done and I was in talking to the video director who was an American and I was in there explaining our ideas and in the middle of the meeting he took a phone call and then said “I can’t speak to you anymore and I can’t tell you why, you have to go home and phone the management”. So I phoned them and it was “You’ve been dropped” which was a real shock and it was no pay cheque…it was a real shame because Dee is just outstanding, a great guy, great singer and an amazing performer. He really is incredible and Clive (Burr) was great too. 

So when not playing or writing what sort of stuff to enjoy listening to? 

I listen to everything, not just guitarists or Rock albums. I listen to classical, jazz and folk. What I play is Rock but even if you go back to Zeppelin they dragged in a lot of influences and played it as Rock and that to me is the only way of doing it. Because if you just concentrate on playing to or listening to just Rock then it becomes very incestuous so I listen to all of it. 

And, finally, is there anything you wanted to add about GMT that we haven’t already covered or say to someone who might be thinking of checking you out 

Well it’s the best band I’ve ever been in and people seem to agree with me. I think it’s raw, exciting, classic and new. And it Rocks… 

It certainly does. Many thanks to Bernie for his time and also to Steve for giving me the opportunity to handle the interview. If you are looking to add an album to the Christmas list then do yourselves a favour and check out GMT; a great band and an excellent debut album.

To find out more about Bernie & GMT then you can visit their website at www.gmtrocks.com or the MySpace site via www.myspace.com/gmtrocks