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"Don't call me a 'shredder,'" says guitar monster George Lynch, whose fret-burning chops in the band Dokken made him a reluctant '80s hair metal star. "I was into playing cool guitar, for sure. But everything else was window dressing. There's so much I wish I could redo about that period."

Like working with singer Don Dokken, for one. In the following interview with MusicRadar, Lynch, who recently agreed to what he thought would be another in a series of long-promised Dokken reunions, only to find out that it was nothing of the sort, doesn't hold back when it comes to the vocalist he refers to as "a pathological liar."

Currently leading his own bands, Lynch Mob and Souls Of We, the guitarist has just released a new album, Kill All Control, which sees him working with a variety of lead singers - not his choice, as he explains - and dishing out the furious instrumental Son Of Scary, a follow-up to his signature piece, Mr Scary, from 1987. "I was a little nervous doing a sequel to something I'm so identified with," he says. "But one day I realized, it's now or never, and I'm not getting any younger. I might as well do it and call it what it is."

Kill All Control is a most solid record. You must be pretty psyched.

"I'm getting good feedback on it, yeah. I've done so many albums that it's hard to tell sometimes how that's going to translate. Back in the day, records sold because they sold. If you had something of a name, you were guaranteed X number of sales. It's a different day now. The record business is gone. You can have an amazing album, and it might do nothing.

"One thing the downsizing of sales and the music business has done is, it's shifted my focus to making music purely for making music. Now I'm no longer a product. I have nothing to lose. I'm not going to sell a million records out of the box or have a hit single, so I might as well make the kind of record I can really be proud of.

"What's a drag is, I spent very little time writing this new album. Originally, it was supposed to be the second record with my group Souls Of We [which also includes Adrian Ost on drums and Nick Speck on bass]. We wrote everything in ten days, recorded the tracks and then we ran into singer problems. My regular vocalist, London LeGrand [from Brides Of Destruction] had some trouble, and he had to bow out for a while. And then I became unhappy with the writing. This whole record was supposed to be fast, and it wound up taking two years.

"In the end, I used a few singers. I have Will Marten [Earshot], Marq Torien [Bulletboys] and Keith St. John [Montrose]. It was a pain shuffling around all these different tracks, rewriting things, getting in multiple singers. But the record's still great, so that's all that matters. And London came back, which is great. I would've liked a little band cohesion, though. My whole life seems to be ruled by lead singer problems."

We'll get to more of that in a minute. First, let's talk about the whole shred guitar scene, which you mentioned earlier. So, were you ever comfortable being called a 'shredder'?

"No. Not at all. I grew up playing blues music, jazz and classical. Then I was raised on 'The Four Horsemen' - Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Page. In the '80s, I got caught up in the shred world, yes. It became a race of technique, and I had to play along to get noticed. There were a couple of cool players around at the time, but I didn't have their level of enthusiasm for the genre and the sport of speed guitar.

"As far as being a shred guitarist, I was never one of the pack. The shred thing was pretty silly. I was faking it. I wore the clothes and did the hair and all that, but my heart wasn't into it. I remember being in the studio with Dokken, and there was a guitar part that needed some heat. I had nothing. So I looked at a guitar magazine and there was this lesson by Yngwie Malmsteen. I studied that for five minutes and then said, 'OK, I'm ready!'" [laughs]

"I sure hope that people today don't consider me a shred guitarist. You know, the other day I jammed with Marco Mendoza and Allan Holdsworth's drummer. I mean, these guys are amazing! We did all of these prog-rock and jazz-type stuff. They couldn't believe I could hold my own playing music that wasn't considered heavy metal."

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