In Part One, Andrew Freeman talked about custodianship and celebration and the new DIO Rules project. In Part Two, the conversation gets a little more complicated. Last In Line have not played a gig in two years and Vinny Appice has been giving interviews. Freeman is remarkably measured about all of it. Mostly.
First, we talk about Jimmy Bain. It is a good place to start, and as it turns out, a thread that runs through everything that follows.
From Stargazer to Starmaker, Jimmy Bain was integral to the formation of Last In Line. “He wasn’t the type of guy that would just walk in and start telling you,” Andrew Freeman says when asked if Jimmy talked about the Rainbow days. “He wasn’t a bragger. He’s a quiet guy, usually, but then he could lean into you and tell you a story. You’ll be talking about something and he would just chime in.
“The only real big story I know about Jimmy is that he told me he set Richie Blackmore’s bed on fire. That’s why he got fired from Rainbow. I don’t know if you ever talked to Jimmy, but he’s just got this delivery. He was a really naturally funny guy. I guess they were partying one night, and he went into Richie’s room, and he set Richie’s bed on fire. I think Richie was in bed. So he got fired the next day. He said, ‘I don’t understand why I got fired.'”
It is a great story, told with obvious affection. The mood shifts a little when the conversation turns to where Last In Line actually stands right now.
As discussed in Part One of this interview, it has been 16 years since Andrew Freeman joined Jimmy, Vinny Appice and Vivian Campbell in Last In Line. While recent Appice interviews suggested that the band are looking for a new singer, the fact remains that since Jericho was released just over three years ago, nothing else has really happened.
“Last In Line is not really doing anything,” Andrew says when asked to describe his role in the band now. “They haven’t done anything in two years. I heard that they’re looking for a new singer, but there’s been no official announcement besides his [Vinny’s] Eddie Trunk interview and a couple of other ones.
“The press didn’t really pick up on it. Who knows what’s going on with that? He was also talking about chemtrails and other conspiracy theories.
“I am a free agent, as you would say, and I’ve always been a free agent. One thing he did say, which I thought was kind of complimentary and maybe it wasn’t meant to be, is that I’m my own thing. He’s right. I am my own thing.
“We haven’t done a gig in two years. Literally two years this weekend. We were working on a record, and that’s stalled. So, I don’t know. Anything that is going on with those guys could be settled with a conversation, as far as I’m concerned, because I really have no… I was not really given any reason at all about what happened.
“So, after that many years, I kind of find it, and I don’t wanna say it the wrong way, but it’s just not smart from a business standpoint. You have established a brand over 14 years. You have brought a guy in who was accepted by your fans.
“After all that time and three albums and an EP and all that touring and all that branding and promotion, now you’re gonna bring somebody else in when you don’t really work that much. I don’t understand it.
“But I’m not really questioning it either. I’ve given up a lot of really good gigs to stay with that band and stay loyal to that band for a long time, and at the loss of financial gain. I’ve invested a lot of time and money into that project, which doesn’t really serve me in a sense. It serves them.
“If you read the articles, the interviews, the reviews, it’s always about how great it is to see and hear Vivian and Vinny and Jimmy playing together. I’m the side guy basically.
“But I’m not the side guy. I’m an owner of the name, an owner of the business, so it’s gonna be difficult for them to do that. The amount of time they invest in it is really not going to [do anything].
“If they invest the same amount of time they’ve been investing in it in the past six years… It was even less in the past six years, but before that, it was minimal as well. In my opinion, they’re not gonna do much, unless there’s some grand plan that I don’t know about. But as long as Def Leppard is a viable touring act, that band is good for about five to ten shows a year.”
Jericho was a superb album. Vivan Campbell finally had that fire behind his guitar playing and was able to play with thinner strings, and all four members were on fire. For me, it seems a waste. The album came out, and then nothing.
“Well, in that time, Viv got sick, had a cancer diagnosis and had treatment,” Andrew Freeman says. “He had pretty intense cancer treatment and was out of commission for a while. Obviously, we all agreed his health comes first.
“Again, this is a side project, so we’re not gonna push him. We want him to be healthy.
“I don’t know where to go with it. It wasn’t all about, we’re not working. I don’t see where it’s gonna be a viable thing. If you have people in place that know what to expect, then maybe, I don’t know, maybe it would go, who knows?”
With Ghost Town and Bastard Son, there were awesome tracks on the album. For me, it was a jump in class from the previous two records. Andrew Freeman had worked very hard on Jericho. Hurricane Orlagh was a track that seemed out of place on the album. It turned out that this was a leftover track from II. That it seemed out of place was, for me, a massive marker for the quality of the rest of the album.
Burning Bridges was the epic. This was a highlight, with that Campbell outro solo that harked back to ’80s Dio in style. There is no detail behind the album on Wikipedia. The Last In Line webpage footer has not been updated for ten years.
“Yeah, Jericho, I agree with you, was a great album,” Andrew says. “I think we just wrote whatever we wanted to write. It’s funny you bring up Burning Bridges. We were talking about releasing that as a single, in preparation for the new record to come out.
“I had a guy who did the Ghost Town video, and he also was embedded with us on the Jericho tour for some dates. He’s a friend of ours from Northern Ireland, and he came over and basically hung out with us the whole time, filming.
“So we had a bunch of footage from that, and we were gonna do a video for Burning Bridges. That kind of fell by the wayside because nobody was interested. None of the guys were really interested in doing it.
“Phil [Soussan] and I had decided to, because we didn’t have the budget for a lot of videos for Jericho… We had a budget for one. We did that under budget and were able to get that done because Mark again came over and did it on the cheap, and did a great job.
“So then we’re like, we need to really push this even more. So I ended up doing the video, which I’ve never done before, for Do The Work. Learned how to video edit basically as I was doing it. Phil did Bastard Son, and then I did Not Today Satan. Again, we did these videos remotely. The only one we did together was Bastard Son.
“But all the other ones were filmed. Vivian was filmed on the road by Def Leppard’s social media guy, and I sent somebody over to Vinny’s house to record that. We put a lot of work into it on our own and out of our own pockets.
“So it’s just a little disappointing that Burning Bridges video didn’t get finished. I kind of lost interest in it because I’ve been the cheerleader for this band for a really long time. Like, what are we doing? Why aren’t we playing here? You guys have all these contacts. I don’t have the contacts these guys have. Why are we not getting on this tour? Why are we not talking to this guy and trying to get on that tour?
“When Steve Strange was alive, who was our manager at the time, he got us on some Megadeth dates and put us on tour with Saxon. We did the UFO run, and there was really good stuff happening. Then the pandemic hit, and it was really hard to get back into the flow of things.
“So yeah, it’s disappointing, but you know, great albums usually have a sad story.”
For now, the energy is pointed firmly forward. The July dates with DIO Rules are going to be special. There is then the intention to bring it across America and ultimately the UK and Europe. “I have a friend who I know through Steve Strange, who’s a promoter out of Edinburgh,” Andrew Freeman says. “I’m trying to get him behind it.
“It’s expensive to tour, and it’s extremely expensive to tour in the UK. We will see what kind of interest it has. National bands with records can’t really get touring over there. It’s tough to do. So we’ll see what happens.
“We’re doing this with the utmost respect. We’re donating money to the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund. It’s really important for us, I think, to have a relationship with them, because I didn’t have one with the Last In Line guys.
“That’s OK because that’s their fight. I don’t wanna be involved in that because I have no issue with that whole camp. We’re friends, and I’m friends with most of them. We’re trying to bring DIO Rules out as a celebration and something that’s fun to do with some really great players.
“Hopefully, it will get picked up around the world, and people will dig it. With the help of guys like you, it gives us a real international flair.”
For many, DIO Rules is an exciting project given the qualities of the players. There is a strong argument that Andrew Freeman is carrying Ronnie James Dio’s legacy forward in terms of keeping his music out there. I cannot think of anyone who is doing this at this kind of level.
“Well, I appreciate that,” Andrew says. “I don’t wanna sound arrogant because many times I do when I say stuff like this. I just feel like I’ve been the voice of this music for the past 14 years. I’ve been out touring this music with the guys who wrote it, the DIO end of it anyway. The co-writers, the co-conspirators. The guys that he [Dio] picked.
“I’ve been approved by these guys and approved by the audiences around the world, for the most part. Of course, there are some naysayers. There always are. But for the most part, I’ve been accepted as the guy, and I’ve been consistently doing it, like I said, for 14 years.
“It just makes sense to continue doing it, if people will allow it, and people will come out and see it. I take it very seriously, and I really want it to be right.”
Which makes what Vinny Appice said in a recent interview all the more puzzling to him. “The other thing, getting back to the Vinny interview. He said that I didn’t like doing this music and I never wanted to play this music with them, which is actually not the truth.
“We always went off of what Vivian wanted to do, because he doesn’t really have to do it. He doesn’t need the money. He doesn’t need the accolades. He doesn’t need the work. So, for him, it was a labour of love.
“He just really liked playing with Vinny, and they have a brotherhood sort of relationship that goes back years. They always wanted to facilitate that. I would be like, hey, why aren’t we doing, you know, Shame On The Night. It’s my favourite Dio song. It’s a great song. We should do this one.
“Then it just got this consensus of, well, not consensus. Vivian wanted to do our material. He really wanted to do our stuff. There were nights where we would play and our stuff wouldn’t always, if we did too much of it together, like if we did like three or four of our songs together, we’d kind of lose the audience a little bit. Though a lot of them wanted to hear it. Some of them didn’t want to hear it.
“So, I would say, we really gotta draft this better. We come out, we do maybe one of our songs first because we can treat it as a throwaway. We can find one of the tunes that’s just that exciting to do. We would open with Landslide. We’d have that intro at the top, great opening song, and then we’d bust into Stand Up And Shout and go into two Dio songs, our song, two Dio songs, our song. That was the idea.
“You try to space them out, so you win the crowd over, the ones that aren’t believing in the new stuff yet. That’s how you develop it. But it got to the point where we were doing Download Festival, and we played with Def Leppard. We were the first on the bill. Def Leppard was a headliner, and Viv did double duty.
“He wanted to do all of our songs. He wanted to do all original stuff, and I was like, I don’t know if we should do that. ‘No, no, that’s what we should do because we’re a fucking original band.’ I was like, well, maybe we should do one? Maybe we’ll close with Rainbow, or we’ll close with We Rock. And that’s what we did.
The 2019 Last In Line Download set was their original music, with Rainbow In The Dark as the last track. “It was a great set,” Andrew Freeman says. “We went over great. We got really good reviews, and that’s the first time we did that. The last shows that we did, the set list was half Dio stuff, half Last In Line.
“That’s why it was kind of weird to me for him to say something like that, because I know Vinny likes playing all that stuff. I do too. He was the guy who brought me in, and I always followed his lead.
“But I think, you know, when you have an opinion, and then people start to say, who the fuck is this guy? Why are we taking his opinion when he’s not the guy from back in the day?
“But a lot of times, my opinion came from nobody else having an opinion. There was even a little bit of a, hey, maybe we should do Shot In The Dark because Phil was in the band. I’m like, yeah, sure, let’s do it, you know. Why not? But nobody wanted to do it.
“We could get into a whole thing about finger-pointing and all that stuff, but no, man, I’m all about this music. I’m all about it. I was all about doing this gig from day one. I wasn’t afraid of taking on the critics and even the ex-members and whatever.
“I’ll do whatever gig I think I’m capable of doing and do as good a job as I can, because it’s a job. It’s a job. But I’m also passionate about my job. I don’t really get scared by this stuff. But by him saying that, it was probably one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard. Like, dude, are you kidding? [laughs] You’re kidding, right?”
Looking back at Download, and playing Last In Line songs, and even in the beginning, when Vivian, Jimmy and Vinny called to get up on those stages, must have taken balls to do this.
“The biggest balls ever, Steve,” Andrew Freeman laughs. “The biggest American balls ever. The biggest, most obnoxious American balls ever. I didn’t think about it.”
“I was playing with Vinny in Lynch Mob. We were playing with George Lynch for a while. That’s how I met him. We had this run that was 11 shows in a row, and it was like 600 miles between each show. We had a bus. Two-hour gigs every night. This was a time when George would just play and play and play. Nobody wanted to cut him off.
“Now, when he starts that shit, I’m like, stop. You gotta stop. We gotta reel this in, ’cause I know you wanna go home too. So let’s get this done. Keep it tight and good.
“I got up in the morning, and I basically came out and made coffee. Vinny would be sitting in the lounge cause he would get up early too. I’d be like, ‘Hi, Vinny, what’s going on?’
“He said to me, and this is way before we even talked about Last In Line. He said, ‘You’re the only singer I’ve ever worked with besides Ronnie, who can get up and sing every morning. Does a show like that and gets up and is able to sing and be able to talk the next morning.’
“I took that as a huge compliment. It was 2006, and George was really my first big, notable gig that I had done. I was just blown away by that, because you know, fuck, Vinny Appice is telling me I have the same resolve as Ronnie Dio. One of my idols. And this is when Ronnie was still alive
“Him and I had conversations on that tour, like, well, what’s going on? Why don’t you guys get back together and do something? He’s like, well, Vivian won’t do it, blah, blah, blah.
“However many years later, probably about five years later, I got the call to go down and do that. Honestly, I had another session that day. I was working with Simon Phillips and Leland Sklar and all these big LA session guys. So I couldn’t really leave.
“We were doing these 35 cover songs, for what became the Raiding The Rock Vault show. So I had to get out of that session. We’re banging out three songs a day. Luckily, we’re talking like LA, so it’s like trying to get across London.
“So I had to race over there. Vinny was like, ‘Hey, do you wanna come? We’re doing this jam thing.’ I didn’t even think about it. It’s like, that’s cool. I can do it, but I can only stay for half an hour. So I’ve already given them my terms.
“I think it was because I had played with Jimmy and I had played with Vinny, and I knew Claude [Schnell] ’cause uh I had worked with him on one of his projects for about five minutes. I knew everybody except Vivian, so it was very comfortable walking in the room.
“I basically went in, we did, Rainbow, and I can’t remember the other two songs we did. We did three songs, and I was like, all right, I gotta go and I ran out the door. Viv was like, ‘Oh, OK’. There was no audition process.
“They didn’t bring anybody else in. They were very happy with what I did right away. It wasn’t so much the size of my balls as it was the size of my apathetic attitude. I had other work that day, and I basically said to Vinny when he asked me, I can do it any day but this day. And I’ll be goddamned if that wasn’t the day that they chose.”
Andrew Freeman is back working with George Lynch, the man who probably holds the world record for the shortest retirement.
“I was doing Lynch Mob, 2023/2024, and that’s when I got the call to do the Great White gig for that hot minute. The shortest singer in the Great White Project. So I left George. Then, recently, they did that whole final album thing, and I saw on one of the news sites that he was putting this new thing together, George Lynch And The Mob. I’m famous for playing the George’s side projects, outside of Lynch Mob.
“We did Electric Freedom, and I wrote six songs on his Souls Of We record that he did back in 2008. So I’ve worked with him on other projects. I was never on the Lynch Mob records, but I did do a lot of Lynch Mob shows.
“He had a couple of shows under George Lynch And The Mob. But I guess what happened was that he announced his retirement and then decided to do some just sporadic shows under this name. Eddie Trunk made a comment on his show about, I don’t understand why George is doing this. This is his brand name, blah, blah, blah, blah.
“I get why George wants to retire the Lynch Mob name. There’s a whole movement to get rid of all these bad, not thought-out names. So I get it, and I struggle with it, too. I’ve had those instances where, ‘What band are you in?’ when you’re in an airport. You wouldn’t wanna say that you’re in a band called Lynch Mob.”
Recently, Brian Tichy and Jaron Gulino were playing with George Lynch, and there were a couple of gigs where they had no singer, and Andrew was available. “By the time I got there, on the marquee, it was George Lynch And The Mob,” he says. “But he was, no, we’re going back to Lynch Mob. So it lasted a day.”
Andrew is back with George, though Gabriel Colón will cover for a couple of dates in July, for which Andrew is unavailable. “I think it’s a great idea because they’re promoting an album right now with Gabriel. But the thing that sucks about it is it’s a Vegas show. It’s about five minutes from my house, and I’m going somewhere else.”
Lynch Mob release The Final Ride Live on 29 May 2026 via Frontiers Music s.r.l., and George is fantastic on this. You would not think he is of retirement age. “71,” Andrew says. “He takes really good care of himself, eats right, works out. He’s always been a fitness guy. For me personally, when I’m on the road with him, I tend to emulate what he does. We’re not eating shit unless we’re all drunk at the end of the night. If we’re all pissed at the end of the night, we end up at the kebab shop.”
For now, focus turns to the East Coast DIO Rules shows in July, where a portion of every ticket sold will benefit the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up And Shout Cancer Fund, supporting cancer research and awareness.
If Ronnie James Dio walked in halfway through their set, which song would Andrew Freeman most want him to hear, and which song might make him a little nervous?
“I think I would do Stargazer,” he says. “I learned Stargazer with a little bit of grit and a little bit of an attitude because of the situation that I was in a couple of years ago. I feel that song. It kind of takes me over in a sense. What one would I want him not to hear me do? Stargazer!
“I find that song is the epitome of Ronnie, and, also, I have a special connection to it through Jimmy Bain. His headstone has From Stargazer To Starmaker on it. To have that on there is a pretty big deal.
“During the Last In Line shows, we always did a dedication to Jimmy Bain, put an image up, and we’d play Starmaker. So I really wanna keep that in the mix because I feel like he just doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.
“I haven’t checked, but Jimmy told me he wrote Stargazer. When I brought the Starmaker song into the Last In Line session, I said, I got these lyrics to the song. I think it really works. The only problem is I wanna call it Starmaker. We could work on the title.
“He said, ‘I don’t give a shit. I wrote the song. It’s fine.’ What do you say when you get that seal of approval? Singing Ronnie’s songs next to Jimmy, who was with him since Rainbow, to me, that was the ultimate compliment.
“He loved what I did, and we were good friends. So if Ronnie came in the room, I think that would be the one. But I’d be afraid to do the same song.
“That’s what adrenaline is, right? It’s a combination of fear and balls.”
For tickets to the July shows and much more, you can find DIO Rules on Facebook. A portion of every ticket sold will benefit the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up And Shout Cancer Fund, supporting cancer research and awareness. See also the new website, diorulesband.com.
DIO RULES – July Dates
July 8 – Sellersville Theater, Sellersville PA
July 9 – The Suffolk, Riverhead NY
July 10 – Tupelo Music Hall, Derry NH
July 11 – The Newton Theatre, Newton NJ
