YNGWIE MALMSTEEN

He’s the Swedish wizard whose neo-classical flash turned the 80s shred scene on its head. Now, as Yngwie Malmsteen releases new album, Parabellum, he looks back on first Strats, scalloped fretboards, crashed sports cars, and his notorious ‘air rage’ spat

- Henry Yates

I’m A Boy

“As a kid, I’d already played the piano, the trumpet, all that. I didn’t like any of it, it was horrible. But guitar felt like a natural thing to me. I was only seven, and already had a guitar, when I saw Jimi Hendrix smashing up his Strat on TV – but that was only a visual influence, not a musical one. Next, I found a blues album in my mother’s collection by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and that was amazing. When I was eight, I got Deep Purple’s Fireball, and by the time I was nine, I could play all that inside out, on my head. Then I started listening to old Genesis albums like Selling England By The Pound, and understood that the chord progressions and melodies were much more advanced than the five-note pentatonic scale.”

Classical Gas

“I became an aficionado of Bach and Beethoven, but when I heard Paganini, that was the biggest moment. Nobody was playing those crazy arpeggios. Everybody was just playing the box. But I wanted to play that shit on guitar. Sweden, at the time, was a quasi-socialist country, very anti-everything. But one day, when I was 12, there was a solo violinist on TV, just one Russian guy playing Paganini’s 24 Caprices. Back then there were no VCRs, so I took a boom-box with a built-in microphone and put that in front of the TV to record it. You’ve got to understand, there was no internet, there was nothing. You had to learn everything by yourself.”

The F Word