“Ronnie gave me great advice about building a guitar solo… left to my own devices, it would have been a case of how many notes I could fit in!”: Vivian Campbell looks back on the 1984 Dio classic The Last In Line

Recorded in the spring of 1984 at Caribou Ranch studios, way up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, expectations around Dio’s second album – aka the follow-up to 1983’s Holy Diver, a worldwide smash hit – ran about as high as the Rocky Mountains themselves. 

In the end, The Last in Line, released in early July of 1984, turned out to be the band’s highest charting album, with the single of the same name even breaking into Billboard’s Top 10.

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