Ricky Warwick / Christmas Cheer At The Gibson Garage

With the new solo album Blood Ties out on 14 March 2025 via Earache Records, Ricky Warwick hit the Gibson Garage for an acoustic afternoon to spread some Christmas cheer. We’ve already heard his new single Don’t Leave Me In The Dark, which features Lita Ford and All I Want For Christmas… Is Christmas! But armed with just an acoustic guitar, he brought these two tunes and a couple of surprises to a delighted gathering.

Ricky has been 998 days without alcohol and introduces the debut of his new song, Angels Of Desolation, to the Gibson Garage. With capo on fret two, it’s a really great opening. The sound quality in the Gibson Garage for these acoustic sessions is really well done, and, of course, Ricky is the natural host.

The tale of life, love, booze, sadness and happiness moves into the debut of The Crickets Stayed In Clovis, another debut and a song about Buddy Holly and the plane crash. Again, in this natural setting, the songs work really well. Ricky assures us the Blood Ties album is a proper guitar rocker of an album. 

We then get Don’t Leave Me In The Dark, the first single from the new album. There is no Lita Ford at the Gibson Garage, but Ricky regales us with tales of a melting Lita and drive-by shootings on the video film day.

Celebrating Sinking follows, and this older song tells of the Northern Ireland natural way of dealing with people who have success who return in a natural and down-to-earth way. Of course, Ricky tells the story better than I do.

To finish, Ricky presents two Christmas songs. 

Around the time The Almighty were preparing the Soul Destruction album, label management Warwick and Stumpy were talking about Christmas songs and how there were few aggressive ones. “Being alone at Christmas, having no money and reaching out for help,” Ricky told the Gibson Garage, “there’s people with drug problems or alcohol problems just looking for help. All these things just seem a million times worse at Christmas because they seem to get magnified. So we wrote the song about that. We demoed it and we took it to the platform.”

Ricky says they were expecting the label to say how terrible it was, asking what they were thinking. “He’s blasting it through the speakers in the office,” Ricky says. “I’m just waiting for it to finish. But he goes, it’s magical. I just need some little jingly jam.”

When Soul Destruction came out, The Almighty were still in Glasgow. “We were rehearsing in Glasgow. That’s where we were based. We would go to a place called the Cat Club every weekend, which was a hard rock/Metal club. We knew a lot of people there. Obviously, things had taken off for the band, and it was great fun.

“There’s a girl called Shelly who used to work on the door. Big Jim was the head of security there. The week the album came out, we went to the club to celebrate. She’s going, Jim wants to see you up in his office. He seems awfully pissed off and upset about something.”

Ricky describes Big Jim as massive. “A full-on Scottish maniac psychopathic. I’m starting to sweat. The guy’s gonna kill me. Does he really hate it that much? He goes, ‘There’s a track on the album. You’ve no idea what you’ve done to my heart. The track Bandaged Knees. Oh God, Ricky. God has destroyed me. Every fibre of my being. 

“I was like, I’m sorry, man. He goes, no, you do not know the hell I’ve had with both of these knees for the last year.”

We close with All I Want For Christmas….Is Christmas, the studio version of which features Billy Duffy of The Cult on guitar and guest vocals from Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott.

“I just loved all the old… Slade, Wizard T-Rex, The Greedies [to laughs]. All those great rock ‘n’ roll Christmas songs that really didn’t have a lot of substance to them. But they had a ton of substance to them because they were just Christmas songs with no agenda. That’s why I tried to do this. I didn’t necessarily give it much thought. I did. It took me fucking ages. The cheesy songs are always the hardest ones to write.”

It was the afternoon, but Ricky was not letting us out easy, so we received our singing instructions with glee and did our part. There was a mid-song stop so we could nail the Noddy part, and that finally got me in the Christmas mood.

Ricky Warwick is great at these. With his natural gift of the gab, Gibson guitar in hand, you could easily spend an hour or two enjoying this.

All I Want For Christmas… Is Christmas! was released last Friday. Blood Ties is out on 14th March 2025 via Earache Records and is available to pre-order from here.

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