GUS G. Trivia — 23 Entries
23 sourced facts about GUS G..
Trivia
In the early 2000s, alongside Germany's Mystic Prophecy, with whom he made his album debut in 2001, he was also a member of Nightrage and Dream Evil. King Records, his Japanese label, says in its biography of him that this earned him a reputation at the time as the busiest guitarist in the world. His first trip to Japan belongs to the same period; by his own account he came with Dream Evil in 2002 and again in 2003, then returned with Firewind in 2004.
In 2026 Gus and the Japanese guitarist SAKI each played on the other's record. On PLUVIA, SAKI's major-label debut released on 24 June, Gus plays the guitar solo on track 8, "Flores a Flores". SAKI in turn takes a solo on Gus's cover of Iron Maiden's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" on Steel Burning Live, an EP planned for Japan only, due on 7 October to coincide with his autumn visit. The EP is also set to carry a cover of Black Sabbath's "The Mob Rules" sung by Ronnie Romero and live recordings from the 2026 Rock Hard Festival.
His first shows in Japan under his own name were at Club Quattro in Shibuya on 22 March 2017 and at Club Quattro in Umeda the next night, with Amaranthe's Elize Ryd along as special guest. Henning Basse, then Firewind's singer, handled lead vocals, and the set mixed his solo songs with Firewind and Dream Evil material. Elize was booked for three songs, but in Tokyo she also joined the closing Ozzy Osbourne cover, "Crazy Train".
"What Lies Below", from Brand New Revolution, was co-written with Mat Dauzat, a Los Angeles producer and songwriter, and the demo was sung by his wife, Heather St. Marie. From the start, though, Gus had Amaranthe's Elize Ryd in mind for it, and it is Elize who sings it on the album. The two takes came out so different that he wanted to keep both, so Heather's became the bonus track on the Japanese edition. He did not know Elize personally; the link was director Patric Ullaeus, who had made videos for both Amaranthe and him.
At eighteen he went to Boston on a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, lost patience with the academic side and left within weeks. While in Boston he was studying with Joe Stump, and in 1998 he cut ten songs with singer Brandon Pender and drummer Matt Scurfield, calling the project Firewind and the recording Nocturnal Symphony. Looking back in 2002, he said shopping it to labels had led nowhere and that the music on it pulled in too many directions at once.
The name Firewind comes from the title of an Uli Roth album. In a 2002 interview he said it was a word he had always liked and that he thought it made a strong band name. Asked in the same interview why he went by Gus G. rather than his full name, he would say only that it was a secret.
Fearless, his third solo album, was made as a trio: Dennis Ward on vocals and bass, and Will Hunt of Evanescence on drums. When he signed a worldwide solo deal with AFM Records in November 2017, he announced that he would unveil a brand-new power trio, with Ward and drummer Richie Monica, on a North American tour with Vinnie Moore starting at the end of that month. The album came out on 20 April 2018, his first release since leaving Ozzy's band.
Quantum Leap, his fourth solo album, was the first of them made up entirely of guitar instrumentals. In 2014 he had said an all-instrumental record of his own would probably be boring, and in 2015 that one would take him about ten years; the 2020 lockdown, with no one to meet or play with, is what finally set it in motion. The title, he explained, stood for the big step of letting the guitar be the voice. The Japanese edition came out first, on 6 October 2021, two days before the international release, as a two-disc set whose second disc was recorded live in Budapest in 2018.
The title track of his fifth solo album, Steel Burner, began as a commission from a company that builds industrial machines for shaping metal. He took his cue from a machine that was, fittingly, called Steel Burner, and the energy of the piece went on to set the concept of the whole album and, in the end, its name. On the track he is credited with every guitar, bass, keyboard and drum part himself, with Dennis Ward mixing and mastering.
At the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest he appeared as Greece's spokesperson. Posting the clip on his own YouTube channel during Eurovision week in 2021, he noted that he had ended up shredding more than talking.
What set him off was a record from his father's collection: Frampton Comes Alive! by Peter Frampton. He has recalled hearing the talk-box parts at the age of nine, taking the voice for a robot's, and deciding to learn the instrument once his father explained it was a guitar. His father, a teacher who sang Greek music at weddings at weekends, started him on a classical guitar; the electric he had been hoping for only arrived when he was fourteen.
In the summer of 2005 he was on the Ozzfest tour as Arch Enemy's stand-in for Christopher Amott. When word got out that Ozzy Osbourne was looking for a new guitarist, he has said, he left a Firewind CD with Ozzy's people at the festival. Zakk Wylde was back in the band within days and nothing came of it, but four years later, in 2009, Ozzy's office emailed him an invitation to audition.
The approach came by email from Ozzy's management in the summer of 2009. He recalls that when he checked into his hotel in Los Angeles, Ozzy himself rang to say he had a good feeling about him and that mistakes did not matter. He was told later that it had all started with someone showing Ozzy a YouTube video of him. His first show with the band was the closing ceremony of BlizzCon '09 at the Anaheim Convention Center on 22 August 2009, which was also drummer Tommy Clufetos's first.
His unveiling as Ozzy's new guitarist was a Guitar World cover shoot in London with Ross Halfin, and the person in front of the camera just before him was Jimmy Page, who asked whether he was the new guy and wished him luck. Ozzy then called him over to join a picture with the two of them. Gus never got a copy, and in 2026 he used the magazine to ask Halfin to send it. Knowing Ozzy was not keen on his Star-shaped signature guitars, he left them at home that day and brought an ESP Eclipse single-cut instead.
Ozzy Osbourne's Scream (2010) was made in Ozzy's home studio. Gus remembers producer Kevin Churko picking him up at his hotel each morning; they would have breakfast at the house and then go downstairs to work. The album had already been recorded, so his job was to lay guitars over it, leaving the odd nod to Ozzy's earlier guitarists and saving his own voice for the solos. The amp was a Blackstar Series One 200, which he had just started using and which he kept for the world tour that followed.
At Metal Hammer's ninth Golden Gods awards on 13 June 2011 he took the Dimebag Darrell Shredder award. On 15 September 2017 the German edition of Metal Hammer held its awards at the Kesselhaus in Berlin and named him Riffgott, or God of Riffs, and he was there to collect it in person. Zakk Wylde, Michael Weikath, Wolf Hoffmann and Rudolf Schenker were among the other nominees in that category.
In April 2017 it was announced that Zakk Wylde was returning to Ozzy Osbourne's band, which ended Gus's eight years there. He has said Sharon Osbourne phoned him at home in Greece, in the middle of the night because of the time difference, so that he would hear it from her rather than online. He had half expected it, took it well and thanked her for everything. In 2018 he admitted it had also been something of a relief, after years of waiting on tours and recordings that were never scheduled far ahead.
The main riff of "Mr. Manson", on Fearless, was written with Ozzy Osbourne in mind. Gus has described it as very much in the vein of Black Sabbath's "N.I.B."; when nothing came of the Ozzy idea it sat on his hard drive for years along with a few other riffs. He sent it to Dennis Ward with the backstory, and Ward took that as his cue for the lyrics. In 2017 he said the same had happened with "Back On The Throne" on Firewind's Immortals, another riff first made for Ozzy.
Many of the guests on his first solo album, I Am the Fire, among them Megadeth's David Ellefson and Mr. Big's Billy Sheehan, came through Jay Ruston, who mixed it. Ruston had mixed The Winery Dogs and suggested Sheehan, and Gus, a fan, said yes at once. Ellefson's part was a swap of sorts: Ruston had first brought Gus an invitation to play a solo for Altitudes & Attitude, Ellefson's project with Frank Bello, and Ellefson's appearance on "Vengeance" followed in return.
His partnership with Ronnie Romero grew out of some acoustic shows in Romania, where Romero lives, which Romero suggested in 2024. They had known each other for ten years and had once played covers together in Sweden; after the short Romanian run Gus brought Romero to Greece for full-band shows, and festival bookings and the Convergence European tour of autumn 2025 followed. They wrote "My Premonition" so they would have a song of their own to play on the road, and it came out as a single in June 2025. On Steel Burner (2026) Romero sings that song and a second one written for the album, "Frenemy".
On 24 July 2026 King Diamond announced two things at once: the end of Andy La Rocque's 40 years with the band, and Gus G. as the new guitarist, joining to write, record and tour. King Diamond made a point of saying Gus would carry on with Firewind and his solo work with no restrictions. In a video two days later Gus said he was a fan like everyone else, called La Rocque a legend and a friend, and revealed that La Rocque himself had sent him a message wishing him well.
In June 2016 he left ESP after twelve years and signed with Jackson. ESP had given him his first signature guitars, but at Jackson his custom-shop instruments would be built by Mike Shannon, the man who built Randy Rhoads's first Jackson. The announcement also noted that he was born in 1980, the year Jackson itself began, and placed him in a line of Jackson-playing Ozzy guitarists going back to Rhoads.
In January 2021 he launched his own pickup company, Blackfire Pickups. Its first two sets, Proteus and Immortal, had until then come only in his latest Jackson signature guitars, and now could be bought on their own. Proteus was the first set he and his team designed, and its built-in preamp lets it be wired either passive or active. On the brand's site he explains that after years of signature products with big manufacturers he wanted a company where he had full control over what got made.