Drummer Simon Wright (AC/DC, DIO, UFO) recently spoke to Metal Godz Radio about how he has been dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. He said: “I haven’t lost any friends to [the virus]. I don’t know anybody who’s passed away from it. My daughter just had it last month, but she’s recovered; she’s back at work.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and reading when this thing first broke out. I thought, ‘Is this a freakin’ bad movie or what? [Or] a joke?’
“It’s been really frustrating, as it probably is for a lot of musicians, but there was nothing going on for months,” he continued. “But the past couple of months, I managed to do a couple of albums. There’s a friend of mine, Stuart Smith, who has a band here in L.A. called HEAVEN & EARTH, and he called me up, and we’ve just finished up an album. And then, a couple of weeks after that, another friend of mine, Kevin Goocher, was has a band, OF GODS & MONSTERS, with Ira Black on guitar and Bjorn Englen on bass. He said, ‘Do you wanna do the album?’ [And I said] ‘Yeah, of course. I’ve got nothing else to do.’ Nah, there’s some really great songs on that. So this last couple of months has been a bit busy, which is good, ’cause there was nothing going on for months.
“I think a big part of the problem with all this is the Internet, ’cause of the amount of — excuse my French — bullshit that’s out there,” Simon added. “So you’ve just gotta pick and choose what you wanna think, what you wanna read and believe, and what you don’t. How much of what you are being told is most likely true? What have you experienced that was false?
“There’s stuff out there that you read, and it’s from a so-called reliable source. And it looks like one, but it’s just a load of propaganda. And it’s somebody’s idea — it’s not fact. And then you’ve got Facebook, where they’ve got fact checkers. And then you’ve got Disney being rated R, ‘The Muppet Show’. It’s just insane.”
Wright, currently of DIO DISCIPLES and also known for his work in DIO, RHINO BUCKET and UFO, lasted in AC/DC for six years. Wright, a then-unknown drummer whose first credits included Manchester, England metal outfit A II Z, joined AC/DC in time for the touring cycle for “Flick Of The Switch” and played with the Australian rockers throughout the ’80s before leaving to join DIO in 1989.
