Given the strained conditions in which the album was recorded, what’s perhaps most remarkable is just how much Joe remembers: his memory is as precise as his pentatonic runs, and the sheer amount of detail he’s able to divulge is more than most artists are able to share about an album recorded last month, let alone 30 years ago. So it was such a wonderful surprise when it was embraced, because it wasn’t a calculated record and much was sacrificed to get it done.” “It was under such a climate that it didn’t seem that anyone was going to accept such an album. “It was made with a complete unselfconscious love of the things that I wanted to celebrate on guitar, and it was also made under enormous duress and the feeling that no-one would ever really listen to it and I would be run out of town as soon as I delivered the album,” Joe muses. Satriani’s second release on Relativity Records, Surfing was recorded on a miniscule-for-1987 budget of $13,000 at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios, which placed supreme pressures on Joe and producer John Cuniberti, but only served to stretch their creativity to the limit as they sought to make the record in Joe’s head using the limited resources available to them. And he looked at me funny because it was such an untrendy thing to do, but he said, ‘Well, okay.’ He’d heard me play Satch Boogie at a club in New York City one night and so he said, ‘Okay, is the album going to be like that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, pretty much, with a couple of left turns here and there.’” “I pitched the album to Relativity Records’ president, Barry Kobrin, in the exact same way. And I wanted to make an album that was about that. I’m just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles, and The Stones, and Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there.

“And, so, for me, it went from Chuck Berry to Hendrix, from Wes Montgomery to Allan Holdsworth, I wanted to celebrate all of it.

“Globally, the idea for the album was to celebrate everything that I really liked about electric guitar, my roots, and the players that I still really like,” Joe explains.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Surfing stands as a landmark release in instrumental guitar music, fusing Joe’s love of guitar players right across the spectrum with a sense of fun, technique and, crucially, melody – the resultant album spanned high-octane blues fusion (Satch Boogie), lyrical ballads (Always With Me, Always With You) and bombastic rock (Ice 9), with consistently thrilling results. But most of all, it’s 10 tracks and four words that both defined Satriani and shred guitar as a whole: Surfing With The Alien. Joe Satriani is known for many things: his inimitable legato technique, formidable guitar tutelage legacy, uncompromising approach to composition, those shades.

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