Metal-Rules.com (www.metal-rules.com) has issued an interview with former SCORPIONS bassist Francis Buchholz, currently touring with "old friend and fellow ex-Scorpions member" ULI JON ROTH. The following is an excerpt from the interview, conducted by Marko Syrjälä:

Q: Can you briefly tell the best and worst things about being in the Scorpions?

A: "We had so many great moments that I can not say that this was the greatest or that was the greatest. Of course the Peace Music Festival in Moscow was a great day, a great moment, but so were all the other shows, we did so many great shows, thousands of shows. Sometimes places in very small cities you play great shows and then again you play in a big place, which is very important and you have all these people and press and then you play not that good, you know. I'd rather play great and not worry about the business stuff, so I can not really say which is the best or the worst show."

Q: Do you have a favourite Scorpions tour?

A: "I'll tell you this, for me when I play good, I'm verry happy, I feel great. When I play shitty, this happens sometimes, or if I play 5% under what I can play, then I think it was not such a great gig even if everybody else is telling You played a great show!'"

Q: When you did the World Wide Live live album, you didn't play any of the old '70s stuff, why was that?

A: "Because, when Uli left the band, nobody could play the stuff that he had played, so we didn't play the songs."

Q: Speaking of Uli leaving the band, after he was gone the band's sound changed, was it a conscious decision to go into a new, I guess a heavier, direction or would it have happened anyway?

A: "I don't know. Uli left because he wanted to do his own thing, he didn't feel comfortable in the band anymore because he was too limited and he wanted to go in a different direction. So he felt that he should do his own thing and leave the band, I was very unhappy about that because I always respected him as a great musician and we lost a great guitar player and a wonderful human being. I put an ad in a London music magazine "A german heavy rock band looking for a lead guitar player", and we looked through over a hundred guitar players, auditions, you know. Sometimes the person open the door, comes in and you know right away that this is not the guy that we want even before he plays. So we ended up not finding anybody and I knew that there was a great guitar player in Hannover, Matthias Jabs, who I had helped with mathematics in school making some money on the side. We didn't make so much money at the time, so I though children and youngsters mathematics. So I told that I knew this guy who plays great guitar and that we should try him. The others though we should get someone from America or England, but he came to a rehearsal, he fit in and could play everything, so that's how Matthias came in. And because you have different chemistry, different people and then the sound of these different people, you hear on the album that you have groups. The same happened when I left the group, I listened to the next album Face The Heat and it's totally different, it sounds different."

Q: But that was not the first times that you had left the band, was it?

A: "I left for the first time. In every band you sometimes have problems, you have good times and you have bad times."

See the full interview at this location.