Back in the good old days of 1983 I was playing in my very first heavy metal band called “Razor”, and we were all set and ready to conquer the world with our own music. The basic riff of "Gotta shoot your devils down" was written by our singer/guitarist Andrew Elt for a song called “Gunrunner”. This Gunrunner song never made it to our only demo ever, called “Ad Infinitum”, recorded in 1984. Nevertheless the riff always remained in the back in my mind, and I often played it while practicing my guitar skills over the past years. For RISE I restructured the song and asked Keith St John to work on the lyrics and melody and he did a fantastic job.
 

The song is about a person who gets his “buttons” pushed by someone or something making him want to react, but the consequences are not worth it. So it’s much better to “shoot your devils down”.
Since the basics of the song go back to the eighties, I wanted to have a guitar solo that reflects this period in which I was growing up, and the period that had a huge influence on my musical influences. Steve Lamb was guitarist in Tygers of Pan Tang of the post-John Sykes period, when the band was changing their identity and style and guitarists were continuously compared to John Sykes. For me Steve coped that really well and did an amazing job in the band, as I witnessed at a gig in Holland in 1987.

I got in touch with Steve after I sent him some pictures of that gig. The puzzle came together and I realized Steve was the perfect guy to bring in the 80’s feel with his typical explosive guitar solo.

The nice thing is that the Andrew, the original father of the riff, cannot remember the song he wrote and now finally made it to an album, 36 years later…...