Although a key asset to the New Wave Of British Heavy movement, Tygers Of Pan Tang struggled to make strides on North America shores, although one alumni made it into the annals of hard rock history with three bands. A young blonde-maned flash guitarist named John Sykes, who joined the UK outfit in the early ‘80s and released two albums with them, namely Spellbound and Crazy Nights. But before he was bandmates with Thin Lizzy, Whitesnake and Blue Murder, he was founding Tygers axe Robb Weir’s partner in the cage.
Weir spoke to BraveWords recently about meeting, working and playing with John Sykes in an excerpt from our upcoming feature.
"OK, we had just recorded Wildcat (1980), at Morgan Studios, with Chris Tsangarides, and that was at the end of about six support slots that we had done throughout 1980,” the guitarist explains the history dating back nearly 45 years! “So we started off with Magnum – they are a bit of an enigma, so we'll put them off to one side because they're fabulous, but they only had one guitar player, but they had a keyboard player. I'll explain why I said that. So, we did the Lovedrive tour with the Scorpions - two guitar players; we did the Wheels Of Steel tour with Saxon - two guitar players; we played shows with Iron Maiden - two guitar players; we did the On Through The Night tour with Def Leppard – two guitar players. So, you see where this is going? Our agent at the time, Rod MacSween from ITB, and our management, got together and they decided - and I knew nothing about it - that we needed a second guitar player to make the sound bigger, live. Because obviously one guitar player and one bass player, you don't have that - when you're not playing guitar you don't have that spectrum of something behind you to fill the sound out. And because we toured with all of these two-guitar bands, that was their reasoning. So, the idea was floated to me, which I didn't really like, but anyway, it went ahead and happened. We advertised for guitar players, they hired Tower Bridge Studios in London, just on the south side, and I think 120 people from all over the globe turned up, people claiming they've been in the Scorpions, claiming they'd been in this, that, and the other band. I'm not the worlds best guitar player, I'll be the first one to tell you that, but I can write a canny tune and I can nearly play, I'm learning. And along came two standout guitar players. One was John Sykes and the other one Steve Mann, and it was between the two of them. The general sense of opinion came down to John, so John was in, and John's first show we played under the name of the Wildcats, up in the Northeast in this community hall. It was sold out, I think they were about 200 people there. It was a little hole above some shops. Back in those days we didn't have the refinements or the special effects we have these days, and our road crew had smoke bombs, these little smoke bombs which you lit and it was like an indoor firework, and you just get a prolific amount of smoke. So they had them along the front of the stage, and they set the smoke bombs off. It was quite a small stage, probably no bigger than this room. Intro comes on, lights go down, and then smoke. Of course, when we started playing, we couldn't see anybody. For 20 minutes. They couldn't see us, we couldn't see them. It was just that thick, solid, choking white smoke. So I think the road crew overdid it a little bit. John Sykes was doing this all the time (waving hand) to try and see people. It was 20 minutes, no word of a lie, before anybody could see anybody. They could hear us but they couldn't see us. So that was his first show the second show was at Reading, in front of 72,000 people."
BraveWords: Reading, wow. So what did you think when you heard Thin Lizzy’s Thunder And Lightning, Whitesnake '87, and Blue Murder, all considered metal classics? And now he's virtually a recluse, no one has seen him.
Weir: "He is, yeah. Well, I speak to him, he speaks to me, and I've tried to get his music out there and help him, and get the last album - which we will never see now - signed to our record company, but to no avail unfortunately. He feels he's done what he needs to do musically, and he doesn't need to do anymore. He's comfortable."
Watch for the complete Tigers tale with Robb Weir in the upcoming days!
