Guitarist Doug Aldrich says KISS would have sounded “similar” in the early 1980s if he had beaten Vinnie Vincent to the job of replacing Ace Frehley. Aldrich, now with American-Australian supergroup The Dead Daisies, was still a teenager when he auditioned for the self-styled “hottest band in the world” in 1982.

“At the time, everyone was looking for guitar players who had a little more chops, in the early eighties,” says Aldrich, now 54, on the White Line Fever podcast.

“Whitesnake did it, they got John Sykes. Ozzy… Tony Iommi is amazing, he’s the riff-master but Randy Rhoads, he’s more of a soloist. Everybody wanted to have an Eddie Van Halen so KISS also… they were having trouble with Ace or whatever and I think they wanted someone who was also had a little bit more of a technical style, maybe.”

Asked how KISS would have sounded with him instead of Vincent, Aldrich answers: “Vinnie is very technical and I think we were all kind of going down the same road at that time. It probably would have been similar at that time. But I really like that stuff that Vinnie did with them. That was some of my - aside from the Ace classics - favourite stuff that they did."

Aldrich also tells the story of using Gene Simmons' phone number, obtained via the audition, to try to get backstage passes for himself and a group of friends.

“It was funny. It’s so long ago but my mates were with me and we were going to try and get backstage, first time. There was a party at his house, you could hear it. They were partying. I called him and he was, like, ‘lose this number’. I was crushed, I was devastated. I turned around and I was, like, ‘I’m sorry guys, I don’t think we’re going to make it to the show’. Actually, I don’t have his number anymore but I know how to get hold of him. I have his email.”

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