Ronnie James Dio News: September 1999

There are rumors about possible The Best Of Elf album to be released in the fall of 2000. The record company behind the project is Mayhem/St. Clair.

Ronnie's been thinking about making another Elf album also in the future as the time permits. Ronnie's cousin, Dave "Rock" Feinstein (guitars) is going to take part of the project too, as well as the keyboardist Mickey Lee Soule. Bassist and drummer haven't been decided yet.

Aerosmith's tribute album was released on September 7th in the USA and supposedly on September 13th in the Europe. The tribute is titled "Tribute To Aerosmith - Not The Same Old Song And Dance" and it was released by Deadline Records. For more information about it, please click here.

Dio's next album, a concept piece called Magica, was scheduled to be released on October 5th. However, the release date had to be postponed to January 2000. During the Magica recordings, Ronnie's mother became seriously ill and had to have a major operation. She's recovering well and the band returned back to studio to record the rest of the album.

The line-up for Magica will be Ronnie on vocals, Craig Goldie on guitars, Simon Wright on drums, Jimmy Bain on bass and Scott Warren on keyboards. Jimmy probably won't be able to make it to the Monsters Of The Millenium tour in Scandinavia in November, though. It's not known who'll play the bass on the tour yet.

Dio, Manowar, Motorhead and Swedish band called Lion's Share will do a massive tour in the Northern Europe called Monsters Of The Millenium! Tickets are already available for the gigs in Sweden at "Biljett Direkt" in Sweden. The shows will be started with Lion's Share, next comes Dio and after Dio, Motorhead and Manowar will take the stage.

The tour will kick off in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 9th and end in Tallinn, Estonia on November 30th. The tour also goes to Sweden, Norway and Finland. Some of the actual dates, venues and cities are still a subject to confirmation. The tour date pages at http://www.dio.net/tour/scandinavia.html have a list of the dates, but once more, they're a subject to confirmation.

The two Deep Purple Concerto shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London are now confirmed. Deep Purple will play their own songs as well as their members' solo projects. Roger Glover, who released his first solo album "The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast" in 1974, asked Ronnie to sing two songs off the album at the show. Ronnie participated The Butterfly Ball album by writing two and singing three songs on it.

The shows will take place on September 25th and 26th. See you there!