Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham recently shared that he was the one who encouraged Adrian Smith to rejoin Iron Maiden back in 1997. He even suggested that Smith could potentially replace Blaze Bayley as the band’s frontman.
When asked about working with Smith in an interview with Eonmusic, Gorham recalled the incident and said:
“I’m a big Adrian Smith fan. He showed me the demos of that album he was going to record and I listened to his voice. I said; ‘Adrian, why aren’t you singing in Iron Maiden? Be the singer!’ He’s got a great voice, you know? Forget about being a great guitar player – which he is – this guy can sing! And he said to me, he said; ‘No, that’s way too much pressure, way too much being the frontman, having to talk everybody every single night. No, no no, I’m good with just playing guitar.’”
However, Gorhom didn’t force him because he understood why he refused to be the singer of such a big band. He continued by praising the Iron Maiden guitarist:
“And I kind of got that because watching Phil every night, the way he could shrink the audience, no matter how big the arena was, he could shrink it down and include everybody into it, and that’s a real art form to be able to do something like that. It takes a long time for most frontmen to learn how to do that, so I got what Adrian was saying, but I still think Adrian Smith ought to get out there and do a little more recording and do more singing.”
Gorham Is Smith’s ‘Hero’
Smith might be the guitarist of a legendary band today, but he still has some rock heroes.
In another interview, Smith was asked if he had ever met one of his heroes or the people who influenced him. He named the Thin Lizzy rocker along with a few other names and said:
“I met Scott Gorham once, he’s a hero of mine, and I literally bumped into Brian Robertson one night in a club and we nearly had a fight. Scott Gorham is a great friend of mine and a really good guy, but Brian Robertson seemed like a typical Glaswegian hard man, but we shook hands and everything was cool. So yeah, I’ve met my heroes.”