By Martin Popoff

SCORPIONS/ELECTRIC SUN wizard ULI JON ROTH is making a solo North American assault, after having dates fall through last year due to LESLIE WEST’s leg amputation and subsequent travel difficulties. It’s rare for us to see the amiable German, his sky guitar acrobatics, and his almost spiritual approach to life and hard rock (and HENDRIX?) on these shores, so make sure you get out and welcome him with open arms.

“Set lists and me are a moot point,” laughs Roth, asked about what we can expect on this tour. “I don’t tend to make them, except for say a festival where I’ve only got an hour or something like that. I like to keep it spur of the moment. What I tend to do is, I give a pool of songs to my musicians, and they learn that, and then we’re pulling them out, like a rabbit (laughs). So very often I will walk onto the stage really just knowing maybe the first couple of songs, and then the rest kind of tends to follow. There are certain songs that are almost always there, and there are others that are more rare. But it’s certainly going to be a rock type of show, so from my repertoire it will be more the stuff that is coming from my rock side, I guess. So there will be plenty of Scorpions, there will be Electric Sun, there will be some Hendrix, but there will also be stuff from my more recent albums, like a little bit from Under A Dark Sky, and maybe a couple of Sky Of Avalon pieces. So it will be a very mixed bag, that’s for sure. I tend to play for at least one-and-a-half hours, but normally it’s more like two hours, depending. If the audience likes it, we keep going. We play long encore sets.”

And to clear up a bit of errant info floating around (the culprit being an old tour poster, in fact), Francis Buchholz, ex-Scorpions bassist, is not part of the fold for this trip.

“No, Francis is not with me. You see, there was some horrible misunderstanding, because somebody just showed me a poster. I don’t know how that poster ended up, up there. I certainly didn’t send it out. This is the poster from the 2006 tour, and virtually all of the musicians that are on there are wrong. And I told the agents, when I came across it, which was two days ago; somebody sent me that, and they said, ‘Can that be right?’ And I said no, and I immediately contacted the agents and I wanted it rectified. With these tours, there’s always a lot of rumours going on. People make up things (laughs); I don’t know why that is…”

But the troupe that will be coming… well, for any axe-slingers out there, consider this an intense guitar clinic wrapped into a concert put on by a huge legend from the past, present and future, along with a certifiable new wave of musical genius. As Uli explains, “The one person who is there from the 2006 tour is Michael Ehre, on drums. He’s been a stalwart since 2006. He’s been on most of my tours and shows (newsflash – more recent reports have present Scorpions drummer James Kottak filling this role instead!). But other than that it’s a fresh lineup. For the recent years, I’ve changed my lineup, because it’s depending on availability. Because I don’t keep a fixed band, I tend to put bands together for projects or tours. And so I find that quite stimulating. Although I do have some of my favourites, and depending on their availability I will ask them for a particular tour.”

“Now this tour came together very much last-minute,” continues Roth, “because originally we had plans for a three guitar hero tour with Leslie West and MICHAEL SCHENKER. But that fell through quite spectacularly – or unspectacularly – because of health reasons, in the end. And so I was thinking, well, I really do want to play North America, so I was asking some people to see what could be done. And the agent said, ‘No problem, let’s put a tour together.’ And this is the upshot of that. So basically what I’m doing is, I’m bringing young musicians, some of whom I haven’t actually had on tour before. There are a couple of young guitarists from Germany who are very, very talented. Their names are David Lozinski and Andre Mertens, and the reason I’m bringing them, is because for the last couple of years, there’s been a guitar award in Germany, called the Robert Johnson Award, and it’s given very much to players who can actually really play with feeling and have the ability to capture people’s imaginations. And I was – or am still – part of the judges there, and I’m also sometimes doing Sky Academies for these guys. It’s basically the cream of the crop of all the young players in Germany, because it’s a nationwide award in Germany, a country of some 80 million people. So we were basically able to siphon off the very best, and these two guys are the winners, or among the three winners of this year’s award. And when I was teaching them in my Sky Academy seminar, which was exclusively for the awards, I really got to like these guys and I thought it would be a good idea to have them on tour. Because they might learn something and I also like their playing. Because we want to support the younger generation; that’s the idea behind that. So that is why I’m bringing these two guys.”

After the early dates of this tour, Roth will fulfill the promise of the early booked dates and welcome a recovering Leslie West back into the fold… “Leslie’s contribution has been tremendous, because he is one of the original founding fathers, really,” reflects Uli. “He was around at the time of Hendrix. He was around at the time of CREAM, and he was already writing music history at Woodstock, and so he was doing something that other people weren’t doing, at the time. He had a very rich guitar tone, the songs have lots of power chords, they were melodic, and he forged a certain sound that others got inspired by, and you can see influences of Leslie West left, right and center, in today’s music. Other people probably wouldn’t actually know that, because they don’t tend to look for the roots where things are coming from, but I can hear it and I know it’s there.”

“So for me it’s a privilege to be on stage with Leslie, and privately we get on very well anyway. I mean, we’re looking forward to that, and it’s a pleasure to play with him. One more thing, because Leslie is still recuperating from the operation, he’s not going to play like a whole set. It will be rather like a very special guest in my set, and he’ll do some things on his own, and some things with my band. So it’s not really like a full-on Leslie West show. I think he needs to get his bearings. I can’t even begin to imagine. He’s very brave.”

Visit Uli Jon Roth's concert and tours page here for all the dates and venues.