Holy Diver

Ronnie James Dio left Black Sabbath in 1982 and, late that year, formed Dio with drummer Vinny Appice, who had left Sabbath with him; it was meant from the start as a band rather than a solo project. Jimmy Bain, Dio's bandmate in Rainbow, took the bass and recommended Vivian Campbell, a young guitarist from the Belfast band Sweet Savage. The album was recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles in an old-school way, guitar, bass and drums cut together before Campbell added a second rhythm guitar. Dio produced it himself, with Angelo Arcuri engineering, and he and Bain played the keyboards. Every lyric and melody is credited to Ronnie James Dio, and he had written "Holy Diver" and "Don't Talk to Strangers" before he assembled the band. The record opens with its fastest song, "Stand Up and Shout", and the twelve-string acoustic at the start of "Don't Talk to Strangers" was the singer's own. In his notes for the 2022 reissue, Mick Wall calls "Rainbow in the Dark" the band's first real collaboration, its riff growing out of something Vivian Campbell had written at 16, and says the song was finished in about ten minutes. The sleeve, from an original concept by Wendy Dio, was painted by Randy Berrett; of its demon drowning a priest, the singer said the idea was to make people ask how they knew it was not a priest drowning a monster. Warner Bros. released Holy Diver in the US on 25 May 1983, and Vertigo issued it in Britain and Europe. It reached number 56 on the Billboard 200, where it spent 39 weeks, and number 13 in the UK, while the singles "Holy Diver" and "Rainbow in the Dark" reached numbers 72 and 46 in Britain. The RIAA certified the album gold on 12 September 1984, platinum on 21 March 1989 and double platinum on 6 May 2022. Rolling Stone placed it 16th in its 2017 list of the greatest heavy metal albums. After Ronnie James Dio's death in May 2010 it returned to the Billboard 200 at number 149.