Here are all the news from the year 2008 - some of these may be outdated already, so please check out the newest news for updates!
Happy new year 2009 to everyone reading this!
This year has been very quiet year on this site. I guess everyone now has realized that this is not a very good site for tracking the news for the band, but I hope to change that a bit during 2009. No promises, but I'll try to increase the amount of updates a bit.
Quick recap of the current news: Heaven And Hell is working on a new album - it should be fairly complete already. The latest estimate I've heard for release date is March 2009. They'll start a world tour after the release - European dates have already started to appear. Click here for the tour dates.
After the Heaven And Hell album and tour is over, Dio will continue working on Magica II & III, according to Ronnie.
There has been a couple of small "side projects" releases (these are not yet listed on the discographies on my site, sorry) too: Christmas album featuring many Dio members, including Ronnie, as well as Sabbath's Tony Iommi, Motörhead's Lemmy and so forth. This is titled "We Wish You A Metal XMAS And A Headbanging New Year" and has metal versions of traditional christmas songs. Ronnie sings God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. There is also a new Girlschool album with Ronnie on one track. More of those albums hopefully in later postings here.
New year wishes come late this year. Hey, only 4 months have passed since the last update!
Dio the band will do a short European tour this year, starting in May in the UK with two shows, then a few shows in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland before the last show of the tour in Spain.
The line-up for the tour will be the familiar one from Master Of The Moon tour - Ronnie will obviously sing the songs like a singer, Simon will be drumming, Craig playing the guitar, Rudy on bass and Scott plays the keyboards.
Surprise tour comes in August! Heaven And Hell will do another tour together before their new album comes out - it will come out probably in late 2008 or early 2009, no release date has been set yet. This Heaven And Hell tour will take place in the USA, where the band teams up with Judas Priest, Motörhead and Testament for a tour titled as "The Metal Masters Tour". Judas Priest is stated to be the headliner, but it remains still unknown whether it is actually a double headlining tour with H&H.
This probably also puts an end to the rumors about possible Ozzy fronted Black Sabbath tour this summer. Way before the previous Heaven And Hell tour last year, many were saying that the original Black Sabbath will do a special 40th anniversary tour this summer but it is not happening. Instead, Tony, Geez, Vinny, Ronnie and Scott are taking Heaven And Hell on the road again.
The Rules Of Hell is going to be the name of the five-CD box set of remastered Dio-era Black Sabbath albums (Heaven And Hell, Mob Rules, Live Evil 2CD and Dehumanizer). It comes out on Rhino on July 22nd, 2008.
The box set will be newly remastered; it will not use any of the previous remasterings of the albums or the songs. Not even the ones used for the Dio Years CD. It will have new liner notes, but no extra songs --- not even the alternative takes available on some of the single B sides etc.
There are lots of other things that should be reported here. Unfortunately I have to stop writing here - I simply don't have enough time to collect the news here in a timely fashion. The reasons are the usual excuses I've stated here -- kids and the work take all my waking hours these days. I still try to keep the discography and tour date sections in shape, and hopefully some day the kids will let the dad to update this site a bit more too ;)
This page is maintained by Tapio Keihänen,
E-mail: dio@iki.fi.
URL: http://www.dio.net/news/,
the front page http://www.dio.net/.