Tony Franklin, “John Sykes and I Jammed Together This Weekend”

Posted by On August 27, 2019 0 Comment

Tony Franklin: Oh did I mention that John Sykes and I jammed together this weekend?? ??

During our recent interview with Tony, the bassist talked about his upcoming collaboration with Sykes:

Tony Franklin: There’s been a lot of rumblings about John Sykes and I getting back together, which we have been jamming with the intention of doing some tour dates, not as Blue Murder. We would play a broader spectrum of his music from Thin Lizzy to Whitesnake to Blue Murder and new stuff as well. I think realistically that would probably be towards the end of this year or early next year.

full in bloom: Does John not want to do a Blue Murder reunion? I’m assuming Carmine (Appice) is available, or is he too busy?

Tony: John doesn’t want to do it because he wants to play a broader spectrum of music. Carmine, if we were to do it, wants to just play Blue Murder, and that’s ok, that’s fine. But who knows, at some point we may do it in the future. I don’t know. But at this point, John wants to be a bit more broad because he’s involved in so much great music. You know the Whitesnake stuff, my God, nobody plays it like he does. We’ve been jamming with a new drummer, a guy called Fred Boswell Jr, who is phenomenal. I don’t know about Blue Murder, it may or may not happen in the future, but this will be the first thing.

full in bloom: I was thinking some one-off gigs would be cool. I was thinking that about The Firm after you had said something (about The Firm) on Twitter the other day. I think people would just go apeshit over a reunion of The Firm. Even if it was just a handful of gigs in major markets. Even Blue Murder, if he’s (John Sykes) around, wouldn’t some occasional one-off gigs work just fine, instead of a tour?

Tony: Well yeah….here’s the thing. I agree to a certain extent, but if you are going to do something like that….we were always very tight and very well rehearsed and it’s not just something that you can just not do for a couple of months and do a one-off gig. You really have to put a lot of…it’s very physical, that music. Just realizing that by playing the stuff and everything, you’re emotionally spent from it all. John won’t do anything unless it’s top notch. So, you’ve got to really put in time for that and so, just to do it for a couple of one-off gigs is like, to me, it’s not really going to serve Blue Murder very well. The Firm, that’s a different matter, because I don’t think we’re close to that happening, but you just never know in our world. It was actually close to happening, it was before the Led Zeppelin O2 Arena thing happened, which kind of changed the course of everything. There was talk of it, although I heard about it after the fact. I wasn’t involved in any discussions per se about whether I’d want to do this because my answer is always going to be yes (laughs). The Firm, to me, would be a cool thing. With The Firm, it was the first band that Jimmy (Page) and Paul (Rodgers) had been in since Led Zeppelin and Bad Company, and neither of them would touch their old band’s material, because they wanted to establish The Firm as an entity in its own right. They wanted the music to stand on its own, and I respect them for that. Some people say, ‘well, it wasn’t like Zeppelin, it wasn’t like his heights,’ I’d say, well, he as creating music that was true to that moment and I think it stands alone in itself. I give them great credit for not leaning on their old material, because that would have been easy to do. But now that time has passed, I think you could do The Firm material and you could do some Zeppelin, same with Bad Co and Free; Jimmy could play that stuff killer. It could be a lot broader show and I think it would be really cool to do a few shows in major markets. It would be meaningful, but I don’t know. Paul’s in a very happy place in his career. He’s doing the solo stuff, he’s did the “Free Spirit” thing and he’s doing Bad Co. I don’t know if he wants to do that, but you just never know.

You can listen to the entire full in bloom interview with Tony Franklin at this location.