Monday, December 04, 2017

RAY GILLEN - The Fire Still Burns

RAY GILLEN - The Fire Still Burns
This year marks 20 years since the death of RAY GILLEN, one of the greatest singers from the eighties / nineties international Hard Rock scene. The American vocalist had a short but fruitful career which is covered in its entirety in this blog humble tribute.
Every project where Gillen was involved is present here: from his first official recording as part of Bobby Rondinelli's band to his final, posthumous released work with Sun Red Sun. He was featured as guest in a Savatage track, but as he only appears in a vocal duet at the end of the song I chose to leave out this one.

We have Ray's guest leads in the Atsushi Yokozeki Project and George Lynch's solo album, his wonderful participation in Phenomena as main vocalist and of course his own US band Badlands.
But as this tribute was done in a first place because a reader of this blog requested some Gillen's unreleased material, I offer you some rare stuff as well.
Ray was called by Tony Iommi to record Black Sabbath's album 'The Eternal Idol' in 1986, an although recorded most of the tracks he quit before the album was ever released due to internal troubles never clarified.

Gillen was eventually replaced by Tony Martin (another great singer), but Ray's pre-production takes are really awesome. These sessions finally saw the light of day in the 2-disc expanded set of the album released few years ago. I have chosen "Nightmare", a monster of a song.
Ray toured extensively during his stay in Sabbath and some of these concerts were caught on tape, but never released. Just listen Ray's performance on the classic "War Pigs", it is truly thrilling.

Also featured here is a rare early demo of "Stop" - one of the best tracks from the Phenomena album 'Dream Runner' (1987) - in a more 'aural' version.
There's also a demo, a never released song from the Badlands days, and the only known track recorded by Gillen as part of John Sykes' Blue Murder. He was in the band only few months, leaving the project when Sykes decided to handle vocals himself.
All these unreleased tracks were sonically cleaned by me, and I also did a really nice artwork to accompany this deserved tribute to one of the greatest shouters in Hard Rock history.

Tracklist, CLICK HERE:




RAY GILLEN - The Fire Still Burns - HERE

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7 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Can't wait to hear this ...
Regards
Kammenos....
I wrote ya a mail about Romeo's Daughter demos....Do you have them...??

Unknown said...

fantastico,una gran compilacion muchas gracias.

Anonymous said...

Ray was the MAN. He's buried up the road from my old house in Cliffside Park, NJ. Listen to The Last Time by Badlands...no one could hit it like Ray could. Put him right up there with Tate and Coverdale. No dis to Tony Martin, but Ray owned him on Eternal Idol.

Anonymous said...

Loved his voice on Idol, so this is a treat! Thank you.

PE_35 said...

i seen Ray with Sabbath in Montreal in 1986, he was fantaqstic, even met him near the forum after the show at the Mustache ( club near the forum) , he was with Eric Singer....he was able to sing Ozzy, Dio, Hughes songs....no problem....

Canadian Music said...

hello re-load somewhere eh?

analogkid610 said...

It would be be nice to find this somewhere. I should say It Will cause im gonna search. To bad this blog seems to be dead