At 20, guitarist Vivian Campbell stepped into the vacancy left by Jake E. Lee and helped build Dio’s debut album. Decades later, he recalls the night it began—and the promise that didn’t last.
When Vivian Campbell auditioned for Dio in 1982, the shadow of the band’s former guitarists loomed. Ronnie James Dio had already made his name alongside Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow and Tony Iommi in Black Sabbath. Campbell, at 20, was fresh from Belfast’s Sweet Savage—a New Wave of British Heavy Metal act whose song “Killing Time” later got the Metallica treatment.
Shortly before Campbell’s tryout, Jake E. Lee had left the nascent Dio lineup to join Ozzy Osbourne, heightening the already bitter rivalry between the two frontmen. Dio and drummer Vinny Appice needed a guitarist. At London’s John Henry’s rehearsal studio, with bassist Jimmy Bain absent, Dio picked up a bass and ran Campbell through a rough draft of “Holy Diver,” the title track of what would become the band’s debut album. “That night at John Henry’s, my audition… that’s what we played—Holy Diver,” Campbell told MusicRadar. “Ronnie didn’t play guitar, but he played bass, and he picked up Jimmy’s bass and showed me the arrangement.”
After the jam, amid a haze of marijuana he didn’t share, Campbell says Dio made a promise: three albums, then equity. “Maybe I was the only one that remembers it, because I was the only sober man in the room,” he said. “But that’s what I remembered from that night, and that’s what got me fired in the end.” Campbell was dismissed after 1985’s Sacred Heart. Yet looking back, he sees the band’s work more clearly. “Dio was a great band,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t even realise it at the time.”
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