Imagine if Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith Wasn’t a Guitar God

Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith has been playing guitar for the group for more than four decades now. But his recent work with Richie Kotzen offers a look at what it could have been like if he hadn’t joined the British heavy metal legends.

The pair are set to release their second album under the Smith/Kotzen banner with the arrival of Black Light/White Noise April 4. During an upcoming interview on the UCR Podcast, the guitarist shed some interesting light on his early days prior to joining Maiden. “I was 15 years old and I hadn’t really picked up a guitar yet,” he remembers now. “I met Dave Murray, who’s the other guitarist [in Iron Maiden]. We became friends when we were kids.”

“Dave had already been playing for a couple of years, so we decided we wanted to form a band, because we were the only kids in our neighborhood who were into Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and all of that,” he details. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll be the singer.’ I didn’t have a guitar, so I sang and he played guitar. [But] he had a spare guitar, so I learned guitar as I went along, but I was mainly singing. I did that from the age of 15 until just before I joined Iron Maiden. I’d kind of paid my dues [as a result] doing the whole club and pub scene.”

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Decades down the line, it’s a situation which left him in a very familiar place when it came to the idea of sharing the lead vocals with Kotzen. “Singing through shitty PAs [back then] and screaming out [the vocals], I’m very comfortable with it,” he shares. “It’s kind of in my DNA, since I learned to do it a long time ago. It’s something I’ve done over the years and something I was very happy to do with Richie.

The Birth of Smith/Kotzen

It turns out that the core of what the pair are currently doing with Smith/Kotzen flies very close to the music that the guitarist himself loved when he was growing up. “Richie’s a world class singer, who is very accomplished,” he says. “But I wanted to do some singing in our project, so it was part of the blueprint of what we were doing — and also, I think it’s interesting. Some of my favorite bands [had] two singers, like the Deep Purple lineup [with Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale], Humble Pie, they all used to sing. No one’s really doing that 1742105107, trading vocal and guitar lines. So it’s a win-win all around, because we write really well together. Richie — with me, anyway — he’s really into the idea of splitting it up. He can see the good in it.”

The infectious “Black Light” is the latest single from the album. Smith and Kotzen enjoyed making an appropriately themed music video to go along with the track’s arrival. “‘Black Light’ started out as a song that we recorded and we weren’t happy with it,” the guitarist shares. “We kept the drums and stripped everything else away. I had a title, ‘Black Light,’ which I thought was a strong title. So we applied it to the track we were reconstructing and built a new song around it. But you know, in its original form, it nearly didn’t make the album.”

“We ran with the black light idea for the video. We used fluorescent paint and stuff like that,” he continues. “The song itself is about [how] when you shine a black light on something, you see things you wouldn’t see in a normal light. So, similarly, it’s like you see a person in their true colors. It’s about deception and things are not as they seem.”

Watch the Smith/Kotzen ‘Black Light’ Video