It is a quite different THIN LIZZY line-up that will hit the road on the recently-announced 2011 UK tour; drummer Brian Downey, Scott Gorham and DEF LEPPARD’s Vivian Campbell on guitars, Darren Wharton on keyboards, Marco Mendoza (WHITESNAKE/TED NUGENT) on bass and lead vocal duties taken by Ricky Warwick from THE ALMIGHTY.

“It will never be Thin Lizzy really without Phil,” admits Downey to Ian Harvey from here . ”But what it does have is, it has the basic quality that we used to have.”

He explains how the tour came about: “I got a call from Scott and we just had a little chat and we decided maybe we should do something for the 25th anniversary. And this is the result of it.

Vivian Campbell has been around for quite a while. He actually played in a bad called SWEET SAVAGE who supported Thin Lizzy back in the day. He’s a friend from Belfast we’ve known for quite a long time. He plays with Def Leppard as you know, he was off the road and we were scheduled to do this tour and he was doing nothing in those two months.

The original idea was to get Robbo (Brian Robertson) back believe it or not. I still have contact with Brian. But he was kind of busy doing something on his own, recording his own album and thinking of going out on tour with his own band. So that didn’t really happen the way I wanted it to happen. The best alternative would have been Vivian. He’s a great guy and a friend and also a big Lizzy fan. He knew all the songs and he knew all the basic solos we used to play so he was the obvious choice.

We went out to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks rehearsal and it sounded fantastic.

I think Ricky did a great job at rehearsals. He’s got his work cut out to get these songs together. We didn’t want him to be a carbon copy of Phil, he has his own way of singing these songs. Most of the time he interprets the songs the way he wants to do it, and that’s fine with me. But there are some parts where you have to phrase them right and he’s got that pretty down to a ‘t’. So he does bring his own stamp to the songs as well.”

Read the entire interview here.