Doro Pesch
Dorothee Pesch, known professionally as Doro Pesch or simply Doro, is a German heavy metal singer and the former frontwoman of heavy metal band Warlock. Doro's contributions to music and culture made her a global figure in metal culture for over four decades. The name Doro has also been associated with the touring band accompanying the singer, whose members have continuously changed in more than 20 years of uninterrupted activity, the most stable presences being those of bassist Nick Douglas and drummer Johnny Dee.
Doro started her career in garage bands in native Düsseldorf underground scene and achieved media visibility and some commercial success with Warlock in the 1980s. Warlock were starting to have an opening in the US market, when they went through many line-up changes and Pesch was left the only original member of the band. She started a solo career under the name Doro, in order to avoid legal battles between her record label PolyGram and her former manager. She released two albums in the US with producers Joey Balin and Gene Simmons, but they were not the breakthrough that she had hoped.
During the rise of grunge and alternative rock in the 1990s, her record label relegated her productions only to the European region, where she continued to tour extensively. She remained a successful charting artist in Germany, despite living and producing her albums in the US. When classic heavy metal found again the favour of the public, she returned to tour around the world and her popularity as a veteran singer grew considerably, inspiring many new female metal artists. Doro is also known for her duets performed both live and in studio with other singers and musicians of the metal scene, whom she has befriended in her long-term career, and was the first heavy metal artist to perform a drive-in concert during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, she has released 19 studio albums, the latest being Conqueress – Forever Strong and Proud in October 2023. Doro continues her recording career and is a prolific touring artist all over the world. When not on tour, she resides in New York City.
Biography
Beginnings
Dorothee Pesch was born in Düsseldorf, West Germany on 3 June 1964, as the only child of Walter, a truck driver, and Barbara Pesch. Doro's first memory of rock music is the song "Lucille" by Little Richard, which she sang when she was three years old. She learned to play piano and started singing at the age of ten years, when she was exposed to the glam rock of bands like T. Rex, the Sweet and Slade. When she was sixteen and after a life-threatening form of tuberculosis, she decided to dedicate more of her time and energy to singing, without giving up her study of graphic design. In 1980, she was accepted in her first band called Snakebite, which was playing rock music in a Düsseldorf basement used as rehearsal space by many other underground groups. The first recording with Doro on vocals was a cheap 7-track demo released by Snakebite for promotion. When Snakebite disbanded in 1981, Doro went on to sing for the garage bands Beast and Attack, before forming Warlock with Peter Szigeti, Rudy Graf, Thomas Studier, and Michael Eurich in 1982.The Warlock years (1982–1988)
Warlock signed their first recording contract with Mausoleum Records and released their debut album Burning the Witches in 1984. Doro attracted immediately the attention of fans and press, becoming the spokesperson and the main means of promotion for the band. The mix of traditional heavy metal and power ballads, together with her voice and stage presence led Warlock to success, an exception in the 80s' metal scene dominated by male-fronted metal bands. Warlock signed a new contract with the major label Phonogram and released the albums Hellbound in 1985 and True as Steel in 1986, sharing the stage of European rock festivals with some of the best hard rock and heavy metal bands of the period. On 16 August 1986, Doro was the first woman to front a metal band at the Monsters of Rock festival in Castle Donington, England, the most important European rock meeting of the 1980s. Warlock's lengthy tours in Europe, supporting W.A.S.P. and Judas Priest, pushed Doro to give up her day job as a graphic designer to devote her life to music. In this period she also received vocal coaching.After the completion of the tour in support of True as Steel, Doro took charge of business and went to live in New York City, where Warlock recorded their fourth and final studio album Triumph and Agony. The album was their most successful, going Gold in Germany and reaching No. 80 in the Billboard 200 US album chart. It includes the songs "All We Are" and "Für immer", Warlock's best known tracks, also because of the intense rotation of their videos on MTV. Warlock opened for Dio in Europe and embarked on their only US tour, supporting Megadeth. At the end of the US tour, Doro remained the sole German in the band after all the other original members had quit, replaced by American musicians. In 1989, while writing material for the follow-up to Triumph and Agony, she lost a legal cause with the band's former manager for the rights to the name and merchandise of Warlock. Her record label forced her to accept the publication of new albums under the name Doro, in order to continue her career. Doro persevered in the legal battle for the Warlock name and eventually regained the rights in 2011.
Doro in the US (1989–1990)
What was initially intended as the fifth Warlock album resulted in Force Majeure, the first Doro album, released in February 1989. It was recorded in the US by Joey Balin, and is the natural successor of Triumph and Agony, continuing the band's drift towards radio-friendly glam metal in contrast with the European power metal of Warlock's earlier works. The album sold quite well in Europe, but it had limited success in the US, lurking at the bottom of the Billboard 200 chart.Following the tour to promote Force Majeure, the final Warlock line-up disbanded and Doro concentrated on her solo career. She decided to keep her Swiss manager Alex Grob, but renounced to be part of a band with whom to share songwriting duties and career decisions. She contacted Kiss bassist and childhood idol Gene Simmons, who was taking a second career as talent scout and record producer. Simmons was willing to start a collaboration and produced the album Doro, with the help of Black 'n Blue guitarist Tommy Thayer and Pat Regan. Doro was recorded in California with large use of writers and session musicians from the Kiss entourage. Doro recently declared that Simmons "was the best producer we ever had!"
A band formed by the American musicians Thomas Jude on guitars, Paul Morris on keyboards, Nick Douglas on bass and Tom Coombs on drums was assembled for the supporting tour. Doro was a more commercial offering than the previous album, but resulted in a flop in the US. On the contrary, it sold well in Europe, accelerating PolyGram's decision to interrupt the publication of Doro's albums in America, where the commercial appeal of glam metal and classic rock acts was rapidly declining in favor of grunge and alternative rock. Doro concluded 1990 playing some dates in Germany, opening for Scorpions.
Doro in Europe (1991–1999)
The German singer experimented a new direction for her music in 1991, when she recorded the album True at Heart in country music haven Nashville, Tennessee, with local musicians and mainstream producer Barry Beckett. Dann Huff of the melodic hard rock band Giant contributed his lead guitar work to the album. New band members Michael Tyrrell on guitar, Jeff Bruno on guitar and keyboards, and Tony Mac on drums were recruited for the following European tour.Despite living in the US and losing visibility in the English-spoken media, Doro remained very popular in Germany, where her albums always charted and where in 1991 she sang on a charity song by the "German Rock Project" called "Let Love Conquer the World".
Returning in the US after the European tour, Doro was put in contact with Jack Ponti, a mainstream songwriter and producer from New Jersey, to work on her next two albums. Ponti at the time was the producer of some minor glam metal acts and the A&R manager of Skid Row and Nelson. The album Angels Never Die, released in 1993, was produced and largely written and performed by Ponti himself and Vic Pepe with the help of various session musicians. It contains a mix of melodic hard rock songs and power ballads, typical of the commercial pop metal albums of the period. The album had limited success in Europe, but the video for the song "Bad Blood" was voted Best Anti-Racism Video during the first MTV Europe Music Awards ceremony in 1994. The tour in support of Angels Never Die introduced in the line-up of Doro's band the American musicians Joe Taylor on lead guitar, Jimmy DiLella on guitar and keyboards, and Chris Branco on drums; Branco was soon replaced by Johnny Dee and this line-up recorded in 1993 the live album Doro Live, released also in VHS. Doro headlined her first Wacken Open Air festival on 20 August 1993.
Machine II Machine, the second album produced by Jack Ponti, was created through the collaborative efforts of musicians with very different musical backgrounds. The result is an album that explores new grounds for Doro, bringing her sound closer to mainstream rock music. Machine II Machine was mixed by Kevin Shirley and released in 1995. It was her last studio album published by PolyGram/Vertigo, finally fulfilling the ten-year contract with the label that Warlock had signed in 1985. PolyGram did not renovate her contract and Doro entered in negotiations with other record labels. Russ Irwin and Frank Ferrer replaced respectively DiLella and Dee for the following tour. In a pause of her touring schedule in October 1995, Doro made her acting debut as a guest star on the German television soap opera Verbotene Liebe. In various interviews Doro remembered how "it was pretty difficult to carry on" as a heavy metal musician in those years and how she was sometimes reduced to odd jobs like singing at weddings and private parties.
Doro signed a worldwide contract with the major record label WEA at the end of 1995 and started writing new material with Jürgen Engler and Chris Lietz of the German industrial metal and EBM band Die Krupps, who she had met while working on remixes of songs from Machine II Machine. Doro also worked on other songs with Jimmy Harry and Fred Maher in the US. The resulting album, titled Love Me in Black, took three years to be completed and features a massive use of electronics and drum machines, along with a heavier sound than its predecessors. WEA judged the album unsuitable for the US market and published it only in Germany. American guitarist Mario Parrillo joined Taylor, Douglas and the returning Johnny Dee in Doro's band for the following tour, which included another participation at the Wacken Open Air festival.
After the Love Me in Black tour in 1998, Doro parted ways with WEA, unsatisfied of the scarce promotion that the album had received, and signed with the German label SPV/Steamhammer. Through the decisive action of her American fan club, she also received and accepted a proposal from Koch Records for a US deal.