In a new interview with Portsmouth.co.uk, world-renowned guitar virtuoso, Joe Satriani talks about the European leg of his G3 success story, teaming up with former Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth and Dream Theater’s John Petrucci. Roth replaces Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen who played on the North American leg of the tour.

“It’s a combination of sending out feelers and invitations - it has to be done pretty far in advance because you’re pulling people out of their normal schedule – like in Phil’s case, it’s a world-famous stadium playing band – and that band plans well in advance.”

Phil had joined Joe at his G4 Experience summer guitar camp last summer for the first time. 

“We had a really great time, I was so impressed with his musicianship and his personality and how flexible he was with the enormous talent he has. I knew he was a pro, but I didn’t know how deep his playing went and how much he enjoyed sharing it. When we came up with the idea of starting this album’s touring cycle with a couple of G3 runs, we started looking around and I think it was Phil who had thrown his hat in the ring. He said he was up for it and available, but could only do the US run. I loved idea of having John Petrucci and Phil Collen standing next to each other – part of the thrill of G3 is that you have players with some connections and similarities but also these big differences in what they can do because then that creates this very interesting energy between all of us.” 

“But when we got to the Europe leg we thought, well what are we going to do now? John and I had done a few of these G3 runs now, so I was thinking about some of the other guys who had done one and hadn’t done one for a while, and I’d done one with Uli and Michael Schenker back in '98, but we hadn’t done one in a while. It was natural to reach out to Uli and see if he was up for it, and he had that opening that enabled him to do it, and again Jon had never played with Uli before so I thought this is great – this is exactly the kind of recipe we want. Ever since I started G3 in 96, the way we operate the show is that there’s three bands, three solo artists, each of them does a set of 45 minutes to an hour - that depends on the venue and how long we can play. I’m always the last guy on and at the end of our set, I bring out the other two to play with us.”

Read more at Portsmouth.co.uk.

G3 Tour entity began March 16th in Moscow and winds up on April 30th in Birmingham playing shows in many European countries, including the UK. France, Italy, Spain, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland and more.

For all dates visit Satriani’s site here.

Check out a trailer below featuring Uli Jon Roth: