YNGWIE MALMSTEEN

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. 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.”