MOTÖRHEAD Drummer Looks Back On His Split With KING DIAMOND

Rockpages.gr recently conducted an interview with MOTÖRHEAD/ex-KING DIAMOND drummer Mikkey Dee. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rockpages.gr: Before MOTÖRHEAD you have played with KING DIAMOND, Don Dokken... Is there anything special you can share with us from these days?

Mikkey Dee: You're digging into history... There's so much special moments. It's like asking you, you've been alive for so long, do you remember the best food you ever had. And yeah, I know great restaurants. I have 35 years... 40 years of going to restaurants. You can't really say one moment. You have to see the picture in a whole. And the only thing I can say is that KING DIAMOND, DOKKEN, MOTÖRHEAD, they came in the right order. It felt really right moving through these bands. And I'm very proud of the stuff I did with KING and DOKKEN was great too. Each band had its vibe and its feeling and it's like getting divorced and starting a new family. New kids, new wife, and then you move on. Another wife and two more kids (laughs). You love all your kids, and maybe your ex-wife too, but you have a different family now.

Rockpages.gr: How did it feel to move on from the more technical drumming of KING DIAMOND to the...

Mikkey Dee: (Interrupts) Perfect. That's what I needed at that moment. I remember I was so tired of all the technical shit that we did, I felt really bad as a drummer. I could only play the technical shit and I felt very very narrow, as a drummer, and I wanted to play simple, straight rock, you know, and DOKKEN was perfect. The best school I went through. Don is a very very good musician. He's a great drummer, great bass player, great guitar player, good songwriter, good singer. It was a good move, actually. And after a few years with Don, I realized that I actually do belong more... I love heavy, heavy is my heart. So, when MOTÖRHEAD came along, it was a perfect move as well.

Rockpages.gr: There is a rumor saying that you left King Diamond because he was taking all the credit...

Mikkey Dee: No, no. That is completely wrong. Someone must have misunderstood. I have no problem with King taking all the lights. The problem I had was that we were fighting to get from the underground scene which they were with MERCYFUL FATE and we were with "Fatal Portrait". When we got to "Abigail", we exploded in America. Instead of only the dark that loved the MERCYFUL FATE, we had musicians, girls, normal people came to the show. So, we tripled... we tripled the attendance from playing one year 1,100 people and with "Fatal Portrait" in a city we did two nights, 6000 people every night, Friday-Saturday or Thursday-Friday. And then it was very good too, but then King (claps his hands)... I don't know, took it back down where the rest of the band didn't agree of going. We are crazy, we tried to strangle ourselves. So, when it's not funny anymore, then you wanna move. It's not that King took all the glory. I don't want the glory myself. He can have all the glory. But, with the way we stirred the band, I disagreed on, big time.

Read the entire interview at Rockpages.gr.