Gus G

Gus G – SCREAM For Shred!

By: Brian Tarquin

Gus G has played the biggest stages worldwide between 2009 and 2017 as a member of superstar Ozzy Osbourne‘s band and recorded Ozzy’s album Scream (Expanded Edition) (2010). In addition, Gus is the founder of the melodic power metal band Firewind for some twenty years. His work as a solo artist has been successful with his three much acclaimed albums, I Am the Fire (2014) and Brand New Revolution (2015) and Fearless (2018). He has also managed to find time to perform worldwide with acts as diverse as Arch Enemy and Dream Evil. If that’s not enough Jackson guitars paid homage to the guitarist with his very own Jackson USA Signature Gus G Star, which offers a fresh new take on one of Jackson’s original avant-garde body shapes. After designing several products with some of the biggest manufacturers in the business, Gus G teamed up with Blackfire Pickups to produce his own signature series called Immortal & Proteus.

Tarquin: I had the pleasure of sitting down with the Greek Guitar Shredder and Ozzy’s guitarist from his album Scream Gus G. Now, Gus has won two Metal Hammer Awards, God of Riffs and Best Shredder. So, he explains his influences as a young lad in Greece.

Gus G: I grew up in Greece. Obviously, the culture here is mainly Greek folk music. My father was singing during the weekends. That was not his profession – it was kind of like his second side gig. He was a teacher in high school, but he was singing and writing music. And we had a lot of records at home, primarily Greek music, but he also had some rock vinyls. He had some Pink Floyd stuff, Queen and The Eagles. I mean that’s how I got acquainted with rock music through my dad, you know, by listening to The Beatles and Pink Floyd. And there was a record that he had Frampton Comes Alive. He was listening to the song “Do You Feel Like I Do” one day and I was just a kid, you know, like nine years old. And I thought it was incredible. And it blew my mind. And it’s like one of those things where you have this vision, that’s what I envision myself doing, like standing up on that stage playing guitar.

Later my dad got me a classical guitar and I started taking lessons at a local music school. I didn’t like the fact that I got classical guitar because I wanted an electric. Anyways I started playing around the age of 10. And just went to a local music school. My teacher was a sweet lady, you know, she can play a little bit of piano, a little bit guitar, little bit of chords and kind of like a little bit of everything. So, it was just like a lot of basic stuff the first four years until I got an electric guitar and then I got heavily into practicing and studying. When I was that young, I didn’t understand much. Like when I became a teenager, I felt the urge to explore more of the guitar and I went to a Conservatory here in the Thessaloniki where I live. And, you know, luckily I had really good teachers. I learned theory properly and studied a bit of jazz harmony. I took ear training lessons and of course, you know, I had a really good teacher and learned how to sight read and about a lot of things basically. I had a teacher who inspired me to do a lot of my own searching. Of course, I was getting into heavy metal stuff and all that and listening to shred guitar players. And that was like a revelation to me.

Tarquin: Did you go to the USA and attend Berkeley College of Music?

Gus G: I went to Berkeley right after that. I mean, I went to a Conservatory here for about 3 years and then I had an audition for Berkeley. They went to some countries around Europe and just auditioned kids. And I went to this audition, and I got a scholarship for this summer program they had. So, I spent the summer of ‘97 in Boston. I went to Berkeley College, and I made friends there and was excited. I wanted to go back and study full time. I came back to Greece and finished high school. Right after I graduated, I flew back to America. I got another scholarship to study full time, at 18 years old. I came out to Boston to go to college and I dropped out after one month – Ha Ha.

I think I went through a period where I just was done with academic stuff, just like studying. And I was just done with it, man. I just wanted to walk out, I just wanted to form a band and write songs. I was ready for the experience, not sit at another desk and write another exercise or something. I wasn’t into that anymore, so I made my mind up pretty quickly. As soon as I went there I knew this is not going to work out. I was like I’ll just return my scholarship and then get a refund for the rest of the money. And then I’ll spend the money on a recording. I stayed the whole semester anyways because I had rented out the apartment. That’s basically the beginning of the project Firewind. It wasn’t really a band, it was just me and some friends. Right after that I went down to Florida to Fort Lauderdale because my Mom’s brother, my uncle lived there. I moved in with his family and stayed there for a few months. And I worked at his restaurant and just checked things out to see what’s happening there. But it was the late 90s and it was just a really bad period for classic heavy metal and that kind of thing. I was disappointed. I’m like, wow, I’m here in America and like, nobody’s listening to what I’m listening to. Like, so what’s going on here? It wasn’t even cool to play solos then. I’m going back to Greece. And then I was figuring out what to do.

Tarquin: Yeah, that was a dark time for American rock guitar. I remember everybody was anti guitar solo at the time. Now he goes on to tell me how the new Scandinavian metal scene kind of inspired him.

Gus G: I had some friends back home that were recording in a studio in Sweden. I saw that there was a big Scandinavian metal scene coming out in the underground and those friends of mine were recording at Studio Fredman with this guy Frederick Nordstrom. He was producing all those bands and I just ended up staying there for a few months. And I started a band called Dream Evil. Crazy time, you know, I just basically moved in with the guitar player. I hung out there as long as I could. I didn’t speak the language and I had no money, but I was just trying to get something happening. It took about three years. You know that this was late ‘99. The first record that I did with Dream Evil didn’t come out until 2002. We were working on it for about 2 1/2 years. It was actually successful right away in Japan and central Europe. And we went on tours and played all the big festivals. So, like everything kind of changed overnight and I was involved in other projects like trying to get Firewind off the ground too. Everything happened all at once for me. In 2002 & 2003 all of the projects I was working on were signed to labels. I did 3 records with Dream Evil and 3 records with a band in Germany called Mystic Prophecy.

I would play with anybody who would have me play guitar. Basically, I would just join these bands and it was all about the experience and not only the live experience, but in the studio. I wanted to learn how to write more songs and better songs and write with other people and see how people worked in the studio. So, I was just like a sponge, just absorbing everything, all of the information. In 2005 I got a call from Arch Enemy to fill in as a second guitar player because Michael Amos’s brother, Chris quit the band. And they had a big tour in America. They were gonna do Ozzfest. Around that time, I was a up and coming guitar player and I already had a name in Japan, being considered one of the young guys in the scene. In early 2000 all of a sudden there was a movement from Scandinavia that made guitar solos cool again. I was kind of like right in the middle of all that. All those things that were happening, you know, bands like Arch Enemy or Children Of Bodom or In Flames or guys like myself, were guys that were doing that thing, but with a more fresh approach. In 2005 I went out and toured with Arch Enemy in the states and then I decide I’m going to quit all the projects and focus on Firewind. I wanted to build up my own band finally and we kept making albums, and in 2006 we did our first world tour.

Tarquin: I remember the early 2000s introduced a revitalization of new metal and younger cats bringing in their influences, so I had to ask him, of course, how he got the gig with Ozzy and how it obviously changed his life.

Gus G: Ozzy came around 2009. Don’t really know how he found me. I think he has people in the office obviously that’s making a list of players. I was kind of one of the up-and-coming guys in the scene and I guess I must have been on that list somehow. Some of the guys at the office were keeping their ear on the ground because they knew the up-and-coming bands. Maybe they saw me with Arch Enemy at Ozzfest, or maybe they knew me from Firewind. I heard at least that when Ozzy heard me, he said, OK, that’s the guy. And I would like to check this guy out and they got in touch with me, and they said would you like to audition? It was a wild moment, obviously. And yeah, I learned a bunch of songs and they flew me out to LA and I think I was just finishing up some tour in England with Firewind. I went to the States just for 24 hours to audition and got the gig right there on the spot. It went well, really well, you know, he liked what he heard, and they asked me to come back and do a gig with him and try things out. I initially learned 9 songs just to be prepared, and actually it was good that I learned more songs because he requested a couple more and I happened to know them. That’s the school of heavy metal that I was from. I grew up on all of the 80s stuff and a little bit of 70s too because I’m a big Michael Schenker fan, UFO and of course Black Sabbath is my favorite band. So, you know I knew all the Sabbath stuff and I love Randy Rhodes, the Zakk Wylde stuff and Jake E Lee also. Of course, mind you, in ‘98 or ‘99, when I was in America, living in Florida for a while, I got to see Ozzy live because Ozzy had never been to Greece, at least to play up until then. But I went to see Ozzy in West Palm Beach with my uncle, and I saw him with Joe Holmes playing guitar. It’s crazy. Like 10 years later. I would play with Ozzy; it was pretty wild.

So, in 2009 I played couple of festivals with Ozzy and then the next day he asked me to come down to the studio to listen to this stuff. They had me record some solos over the stuff he was working on with Kevin Churko, the producer. Sessions started at 10 in the morning, to get a full day of work done. Ozzy just came down once or twice during the day to see how we were progressing and if we had something to play for him and he’d give some comments. He just let me do my thing. He tried to make me feel as relaxed as possible. Yeah, so he was really cool about it. Both him and Sharon were just like, do your thing, take as long as you need to make this album. Do what you got to do and whenever you feel ready, just give us a call and we’ll come downstairs. He never really gave any specific instructions. I think he liked my approach. He encouraged me to do more of my style and be myself. Maybe because originally, I thought I had to copy too much of what Zakk did or what Randy did I think to a certain extent I kind of did that on the first tour.

I stayed in LA for about 10 days, and I flew back to Greece and then I didn’t hear anything from them for about a month. And I was like ohh, I don’t know. Are they gonna use this stuff? And then I got an e-mail like a month later from Sharon. And she said, you know we love what you did but we’d like you to come back and have you properly work on this album to do all the guitars from scratch. It was just demo guitars that Kevin Churko recorded and played originally. I spent a month and 1/2 in the studio doing guitars and recording everything. Creating solo parts because they had no solo parts. They had nobody to do that at the time. Even though it was more modernized and a bit different, the album had to sound like an Ozzy album. It was already written so the only thing I added on the record was on a song called “Digging Me Down”. There’s a 1 1/2-minute acoustic intro that I came up. Everything happened pretty fast after we finished the album.

Actually, I came back home and then they had me fly back to LA just to do one last solo. Sharon insisted on that. And she was right because that song was going to be the first single which was “Let Me Hear You Scream”. And she said this is going to be the first-time fans are going to hear you and they have to be blown away. And she said, I think you can do a better solo. Before that everybody was always very happy and very pleased. And it was kind of the first time where somebody said, you know what, you can do better. But I started thinking about what she said. Indeed, try to imagine being a fan and listening to a new Ozzy record. And then there’s this guitar player that you don’t know. You never heard of. What are you going to think? So, it was a lot of pressure. I really thought about it. What should this solo be? I put more work more thought into it. So, I went back and redid that solo. Before I knew it, we were doing promo photo shoots, video shoots, TV shows, late night shows in America and then like off we go on tour for 2 years. It’s crazy!

Ozzy didn’t do another record until 10 years later. What happened was during that tour, it was decided that there was going to be the Black Sabbath farewell reunion. That slowed him down on his solo career because while on the road he was already talking about going back and doing the follow up album. I was already writing ideas and we even co-wrote a couple of things on the road and the band would record them. We would record basically ideas during sound checks. I would give him the tapes, and then he was writing some stuff over it, like vocal ideas. And he showed them to me. We went back and forth. It was really cool in the beginning and then the whole Sabbath thing happened. You didn’t know if there was going to be anything more after that and then Tony Iommi got sick with cancer and there was supposed to be the first Sabbath tour in the summer of 2012 in Europe. They didn’t want to cancel that, so they turned it into Ozzy and Friends. That’s when the whole Ozzy and Friends project happened, I was part of that. We went out and did another tour. The cool thing was that it was Ozzy with the band, which was us and the special guests were Geezer Butler, Slash and Zakk Wylde. So, there was this massive jam every night, and it was incredible. I mean, right, when I thought everything was done and over.

After that Ozzy went back to Black Sabbath and recorded the album 13. They did the world tour which lasted two or three years and that was basically the end of the stuff that I did with Ozzy. We did some other stuff sporadically here and there like another South America tour, Japan and a couple of festivals in the US. I was with Ozzy from 2009 until end of 2015. So about six years, it was great learning experience because I had experience with doing my own thing, but I was not really used to being this gun for hire and certainly not at that big level. I had never been a part of a one of the biggest artists in the world like that. It was just very eye opening and nice to see how a big operation like that works.

Tarquin: Yeah, I bet it was cool. Gus probably learned so much on the road and just hanging out with Ozzy and all the great experiences that came with it. Now he tells me after the Ozzy years he went on a solo career and continued with the band Firewind.

Gus G: When Ozzy went back to Sabbath, I went back and did another Firewind record and tour and that’s when the singer left, and I decided to put the band on a hiatus for a while. I basically launched my solo career. I did my first solo record. I did a couple of records with guests on it. In 2014, I put out a record called I Am The Fire. 2015 was the second record called Brand New Revolution. So, I had a lot of people on it. People like Dave Ellefson, Billy Sheehan and I had Michael Starr from Steel Panther. All kinds of guests all over it and I started doing some solo tours, kind of like doing what Slash did on his first solo album with all those collaborations. I kind of went for that type of vibe; that was strange because I think a lot of the fans expected me to put out a full-on shred record. I did that for a few years and then in 2017 I brought back Firewind. We regrouped and we started doing some shows and then put out albums again. Yeah, we had a couple of rough years like everybody with the pandemic. And we put out a record right when the pandemic broke out so we couldn’t tour it.

All of a sudden in 2022, things opened up and we’ve been touring pretty much nonstop and came back to America to tour. We were there last year with Driving Force, in 2023. Then we toured Europe a lot and we went back in the studio and finish this new record called Stand United and it came out on March 1st. We are on our next world tour and I’m very excited, man. Very excited! There’s a lot of good stuff on it. It’s our 10th album and sometimes it’s hard to be excited after 10 records. But I am because there’s a revamped energy in the band the last few years. And I think the tours we did really helped us kind of get our shit back together and sort of reintroduce the band to younger audiences and new audiences. And that inspired me to write. Our singer is also in a in a pretty big band here in Europe called Avantasia which is a rock opera kind of thing. He’s a part of the main band and they have a lot of guest singers like Eric Martin and Geoff Tate. Basically, we start the tour this year in Frankfurt and Europe for months, then we come to America. We play twenty shows in America and then fly right after that to Japan.