It’s all very well the three of us sitting in front of a screen every week and spending three or four hours shuffling up and down rock and metal’s Memory Lane in our carpet slippers, a cut loaf tucked under one arm, trying to remember where the hell we live and why we’re out after dusk, but sometimes it’s good to hear what really happened, from the people who were actually there.

So, occasionally we’re lucky enough to have the honour - and it really is an honour - of talking to some of our heroes (and presumably yours) who over the years have helped to define the music we love.

We publish these conversations as special editions of the Enter Sadmen podcast, but we also ask our guests to do two things for us. First, we ask them to share their 10 all-time favourite albums with us (not necessarily rock or metal, because we want to know what inspires them more than to confirm we like the same noise)

And then we ask them to decide which albums we’ll listen to for the next regular edition of the podcast.

The special editions are playable directly from your browser from within the pages below. You’ll have to listen to the interviews to get the lowdown on real life in a rock and roll band - and the link will be at the end of each Special Guest Top Ten as soon as it’s available, so keep checking back.

Mark 5/26/21 Mark 5/26/21

John Verity - Guitarist & Producer

Here at Enter Sadmen HQ we don’t have many rules, but there are two that we’re pretty intransigent about: we don’t review Greatest Hits or compilation albums, and we generally only consider albums released between 1970 and 1995 (though between you and me, we’ll probably make an exception in the cases of both Zeppelin and Purple … ).

But that means we risk missing out on some of the legendary behaviour and music of the decade that ultimately gave birth to the entire heavy rock genre - the Swinging Sixties, where rock and roll was subversive and anarchic and loud and grubby. All the things, in fact, that drew us to it in the first place.

Luckily, we occasionally get to sit down and chat with people who fuelled that underground swell, riding in on the vapour trails of distortion created by BB King and Hendrix et al. And just as well, really, because it meant we had the chance to spend a couple of hours one evening with John Verity, front man for the John Verity Band who had some hilarious tales of derring-do to share from his early days on the scene during the mid- to late-Sixties all the way to the trials and tribulations of his transition to record producer during the Eighties.

Over the course of our chat John, who counts spells with Argent, Phoenix and The Dave Berry Band and an ill-tempered support slot for Jimi Hendrix on his CV, recounts the night a member of Hendrix’s road crew tried to sabotage their set, how their manager was dropped four floors from an apartment block by Miami cops in a drug bust, being ‘persuaded’ to leave the United States by the US immigration service, how record execs at Carrere managed to review Saxon’s debut album played at the wrong speed, and the moment he thought (wrongly) that Motorhead manager Doug Richards would fire him from a production job on an early 80s live album …

You can listen to the episode by clicking the player below (or find it in all the usual places, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcliud, Tunein, Pandora and Iheartradio). You can also scroll down to discover the top 10 albums that have inspired John along the way, and tune in to the episode to hear him talk about why they’re his desert island picks.

John’s latest album, Passion, is available to buy, stream and download now and you can keep up to date with tour news and all things JV on Facebook at www.facebook.com/johnveritymusic

John’s Top 10 Albums of All Time

**10. The Beatles - Rubber Soul (1965)**

“This was the moment they moved away from beiing a pop band. The stuff on here has got some substance and I suppose it lit the songwriting flame in me - all of a sudden, things were changing.”

**9. BB King - Live At The Regal (1965)**

“A lot of musicians say this is one of the things that started them off. The audience is going bananas all the way through it and it makes you think, *Wow … this is what it could be like!*
"The adulation is there and he’s just on fire. It leaps out of the speakers, you know? The guy had chops.”

**8. BB King - Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970)**

“One of the nicest things about this album is he’s working with a real rock producer - Bill Szymczyk - who did stuff with Joe Walsh and the James Gang, and he brought modern musicians in with BB - and it just really works.”

**7. Joe Walsh - The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get (1973)**

“When I signed to ABC I got sent all their stuff and that turned me on to a load of different things. It was great! Anyway, I’d never heard of Joe Walsh and this album dropped through my door and I put it on … and it was fantastic. There’s some brilliant stuff on here.”

johnmayallericclapto_bluesbreakerswitheri_21m5 (1).jpg — **6. John Mayall & The Blues Breakers - Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (1966)**

“Most guitarists will own up that this changed their lives, really. maybe not at the younger end, but for us older guys this was the first time any of us had heard a Les Paul through a Marshall amp and what it could sound like. It was unbelievable.
“People are vey unkind about Eric Clapton, but he changed *everything*.”

**5. Jeff Beck- The Jeff Beck Group (1972)**

“The first two Jeff Beck albums were really the template for Led Zeppelin. Beck must have been really pissed off when Jimmy Page put Zeppelin together because it was basicall The Jeff Beck Group with Robert Plant.
“Zeppelin even lifted a couple of songs off the first two Beck albums!”

**4. Terry Reid - Superlungs (1973)**

“Terry Reid was supposed to be the singer in Led Zeppelin - he was offered the gig first. In the late 60s he was quite hot and he was probably the first rock artist to be produced by Mickie Most.
”He had this amazing voice. We opened for Terry when I was with the Dave Berry Band and he had the same high register as me - and it was then that I realised I could be a singer, too.”

**3. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin (1969)**

“I don’t think people now can really appreciate what the first Zeppelin album did - it was really ground breaking.
“It was so powerful compared to how everything else sounded then. Everyrthing was really big - the way Bonham played, the big sound. Everything was ambient - nothing about the sound was dead.”

**2. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland (1968)**

“Hendrix was in a typical production situation in that he was being forced to be a pop artist, and he wasn’t that. But his record company was trying to make him write 3 minute pop singles like *The Wind Cries Mary*.
“When he did this, he was let loose and as a result the album is amazing. I saw him on his first club tour of the UK and the place was full of other guitarists with their chins on the floor. It was just killer.”

jacksonbrowne_lateforthesky_2mw6 (1).jpg — **1. Jackson Browne - Anything by Jackson* Browne**

“If you write songs for a living, listening to Jackson Browne can make you feel like giving up. His songs can either bring you down or inspire you.
“You find yourself listening to his work and thinking, *Where did he get that from?*”
*** *John didn’t specify any one album, but* Late For The Sky *is widely seen as Jackson Browne’s best recorded work, and so we have chosen that album cover to reflect the scope of his output.***

Mark Norman 5/25/21 Mark Norman 5/25/21

Doro Pesch - Warlock / Doro

When Warlock first hitched their wagon to hard rock’s runaway train back in ‘84 with their debut Burning The Witches there was only one person the journos from the world’s music press were interested in hearing from: the band’s then iconic siren, the 19-year-old Doro Pesch.

When Warlock first hitched their wagon to hard rock’s runaway train back in ‘84 with their debut Burning The Witches there was only one person the journos from the world’s music press were interested in hearing from: the band’s iconic siren, the then 19-year-old Doro Pesch.

Burning The Witches was a cacophonous whirlwind of brute force riffery and superior melodies, delivered by an immediately and identifiably unique voice that managed to somehow balance raw power and beguiling lyricism. That Doro was backed by some kick-ass musicians was, at that time, perpetually in danger of becoming a sidebar to the main story: the emergence of a new powerhouse in German hard rock.

Warlock, as a brand at least, is now defunct, the innocent victim of a legal wrangle with the band’s previous management, but its legacy and principles live on with Doro the now long-time solo artist who is still backed by fabulously kick-ass musicians and who still brings that same seductive Jekyll and Hyde blend of the angelic and the defiant to her vocal performance.

In truth, the Doro of 2021, caged like all of us in a virtual world during lockdown, is not so very different to the young woman who found herself quite by accident to be the new darling of the rock music press all those years ago.

Older, yes - though her unfailing authenticity and undimmed enthusiasm for her music makes her ageless, somehow. Wiser? Certainly - life in a rock band has given her survival instincts and resilience a sharpness that is more than a match for the cut-throat politics of the music biz.

It’s also a Doro who has viewed the world through the lens of rock and roll and has found it wanting, igniting in her a compassion and kindness that have long informed the code by which she lives: a committed vegan whose vocal advocacy of ethical practice is as loud and compelling as the music that still drives and warms her soul - just as it ensures her leather stagewear is, in fact, not leather at all, but rather hand-tailored non-animal materials to look like the real deal.

There are many things that personify the Doro the boys meet over Zoom towards the end of lockdown. The first thing is that she smiles and laughs. A lot. Far from eroding her capacity for answering questions about her life, the passing years seem to have bequeathed her an indefatigable appetite for the opportunity to share her life and her passion.

And while the Sadmen may delude themselves - perhaps justifiably, perhaps not - that their questions were hardly from the same journalism buffet table at which Doro may have been forced to dine in the past, what ensued was a converrsation that was wonderfully candid, totally guileless and full of good humour.

In the interview, which you can listen to below, Doro talks about how her lack of English in the early days of Warlock's global success made her self-conscious and anxious; the wild excitement she felt at appearing on the Donington Monsters of Rock tour in 1986; how Lemmy, that been-there-seen-it-drank-the-tee-shirt scion of rock and roll royalty, took her under his wing and became one of her closest allies, confidantes and friends (and how she keeps a part of him close to her to this day … quite literally!); her love of Ronnie James Dio and the paralysing grief she felt upon hearing news of his death; and how W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless temporarily slipped off his artistic cloak of misogyny and objectification to look after her when she fell ill before a show.

We also count down Doro’s top 10 albums of all time …

A remastered edition of Doro’s 1998 album Love Me In Black is now available in multiple formats