NIKKI SIXX Says There Was No 'Camaraderie Backstage' During MÖTLEY CRÜE's Final Tour

Nikki Sixx says that he "didn't feel" a "camaraderie" backstage during MÖTLEY CRÜE's farewell tour.

In 2015, MÖTLEY CRÜE completed "The Final Tour", closing the book on the band's iconic career after performing a total of 164 shows in 72 markets, grossing over $100 million.

To cement the sense of finality, the four members of MÖTLEY CRÜE in 2014 publicly signed a "cessation of touring" contract that prevents any of them from performing under the CRÜE name in the future.

In a brand new interview with Billboard, Sixx reflected on CRÜE's last trek, saying: "I didn't have any physical challenges. I think I was just detached in a lot of ways. I wasn't detached onstage, but it just didn't feel like a camaraderie backstage. We would do our meet-and-greets and we all would be cordial, but it just didn't feel the same. Since the [release of 'The Dirt'] movie, it has felt like it used to in the old days."

Neither drummer Tommy Lee nor guitarist Mick Mars ruled out new music from MÖTLEY CRÜE, while Sixx said that he doesn't "know what the future holds musically, but it's the best feeling to at least know that we’re brothers and friends through all this. Rock 'n' roll tears your fucking heart out sometimes. It's hard."

The film adaptation of MÖTLEY CRÜE's biography, "The Dirt", was released on March 22. The movie, which was helmed by "Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa" director Jeff Tremaine, was picked up by Netflix after being previously developed at Focus Features and before that at Paramount.

Last year, MÖTLEY CRÜE recorded four new songs for "The Dirt" movie, including the single "The Dirt (Est. 1981) (Feat. Machine Gun Kelly)", "Ride With The Devil", "Crash And Burn" and the band's own spin on Madonna's "Like A Virgin".

MÖTLEY CRÜE's last studio album was 2008's "Saints Of Los Angeles", which was followed by a 2009 "Greatest Hits" compilation.

During a 2017 appearance on "Let There Be Talk", Nikki said that one of the main reasons CRÜE called it quits was the dysfunction that led them to be one of the defining acts of the 1980s and early 1990s.

"When these four guys got together, we agreed on a common idea, and everybody put their skin in the game," Sixx explained. "I don't think Mick Mars was a punk rock fan. I'm a punk rocker at heart — always have been. My attitude is, I love heavy metal, but I was never a super-musician, muso fan. I'd be, like, 'I love what Eddie Van Halen's doing right there,' but I didn't think about it technically. There's other guys in the band that are technical. So they put their skin in the game, I put my anarchy in the game. I'm a huge lyricist fan; that's, like, my driver for everything. And nobody in the band wrote lyrics; I wrote all the lyrics for the band. That was all the messaging. And Vince had this voice; no one else sounded like that. He had a spitfire, Gatling-gun lead-vocal style. He put his skin in the game. No one played like Tommy. Tommy was seventeen, eighteen years old when I met him. He was a monster, and he was hyper — he's a hyper human being. He played hyper and I played simple, and that worked. If I played super busy and he played super busy, it wouldn't have sounded right. So I feel like Tommy's energy was a big driver of the band.

"As the years went, Tommy wanted to be a different guy," Nikki continued. "He fell in love with hip-hop. I have no problem with it, but it was weird for us. We were, like, 'Whoa! Where's Tommy?' And then he went through kind of a… I don't know what that other phase was… [He became] an EDM guy. Anyway, he [was] young and he [was] exploring. But Tommy's thing was, 'Well, wouldn't it be great if MÖTLEY CRÜE did this?' And my thing was, 'I want MÖTLEY CRÜE to be MÖTLEY CRÜE.' So if I'm Angus Young and I'm, like, 'Here's a song called 'Highway To Hell',' and then Tommy is Malcolm Young and comes in and goes, 'Hey, man, wouldn't it be cool if we sound like these other bands?' Angus is gonna say, 'What are you, crazy?' And then there became resentment. And he felt like, 'Oh, Nikki's holding the band back.' I wanted the band to be MÖTLEY CRÜE. And Mick is passive. We did some albums with this producer named Scott Humphrey who made Mick feel horrible about his guitar playing; it was about all sampling and all this and all that. So Mick started to kind of pull out, Vince is in and out of the band. At times, it would be really wonderful with us."

In the end, however, Sixx told "Let There Be Talk" that internal conflicts were just too much to bear, with every CRÜE member having his own vision of where the band should go. "It became four men with different ideas," he said. "Sometimes you have a band and you go, 'There's four guys with the same idea: METALLICA.' They were, like, 'This is what we are. We are metal. It's even in our name.' Even though they had some crazy albums here and there, they figured it out. And towards the end, I think our version of figuring it out was, 'Let's just leave our legacy for what it was.'"