King Diamond Talks How Motorhead & Lemmy Treated His Band on Tour, Recalls What He Thought 1st Time He Met Metallica’s Lars Ulrich

“I remember Kirk [Hammett] on stage knocked me over,” the musician said.

During an appearance on The Electric Theater, hosted by Slipknot percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan, King Diamond looked back on the early days, discussing some of his musical heroes and also touching on Motorhead, Metallica, Lars Ulrich, and more.King Diamond is gearing up to release a new album titled “The Institute.” You can check out the band’s music here via Amazon.When the interviewer said, “What was it like when you started? There were no iPhones, you didn’t have the opportunity to take a picture of everyone that you met in a hallway at a hotel, or what was going on stage,” the musician replied (transcribed by UG):

“So different! If I look back, my first concert was in 1971 – Grand Funk Railroad. Some of those albums I would have only gotten access to through a library back then. I didn’t have money to buy all these albums, I used all my allowance when I was a kid to go and buy albums, but I couldn’t buy all of those I wanted.

“So I was totally into music early on, I started recording my own sounds on a tape recorder before I could ever play anything. My first guitar was a piece of wood with two nails, and an elastic band between. And I would record those sounds, I could make with moving my finger on that with a microphone on this reel to reel. Completely primitive and ridiculous to listen to, it didn’t sound anything like a guitar.

“But I was successful with the raw guitar sound of Jimmy Page back then and that was what I wanted to do. And going through all these different stages of trying to record simple stuff that sounded nothing like it, ended up with me saving enough money to go buy an electric guitar, and I came back home with it and had no idea why I could make it sound like this.

“And then there was a neighbor that told me, ‘You need an amplifier if you want to make those sounds. I can help you build one.’ And then he built that and suddenly I had the red button – on and off, and then the black button – those were the only two buttons, and there was just distortion, and it was always on.

“That was the early days, and then I started playing with a couple of school pals. Just getting the info of a band coming to Copenhagen, Denmark and playing, you would read the English music magazines and stuff like that, newspapers, you would see that they would go on tour, you would buy a magazine called ‘Go-Go’ or something stupid, and in there you would look for tour days if any banks were coming by.

“And then it was your local newspaper you would look at to see the actual venues, they would announce if fans were coming by. Suddenly you read Black Sabbath or Deep Purple was coming by, it was like, ‘Oh my god, gotta see that!’ I think in ’72 I saw the same concert, that was Deep Purple and touring the ‘Fireball’ album.

“They had not released ‘Machine Head’ but they had the ‘Fireball.’ But they played new songs from ‘Machine Head’ as well. So many bands came by Copenhagen back then, I saw Brian Johnson of AC/DC playing with a band called Joy that was not very known, I saw them three times live in clubs that held maybe 150 people.

“Suddenly, he was in AC/DC and all these crazy things that happened. But you couldn’t get that instant information. You saw in magazines that they’ve been out touring for a while, and you just didn’t know. You would try and keep up with all these magazines and newspapers, and get it from England if you could.

“So it was definitely different days and lots of posters on your walls, and all this. I’ve been a music fan my entire life, and still am – never lost that spark inside. I so love it today, there’s barely anything better than being on a stage for me.

“Now we are running both bands again and writing new stuff for two new albums that have to beat everything that we’ve done. We have to and I know we can do it…

“On the first US tour, we were in a mobile home that broke down constantly – nightmares, absolute nightmares. When you finally got into a bus, it was also so old that nothing worked – no heat in the winter or whatever. Our first tour within the US was together with a Canadian band called Exciter, and it went so well that Motorhead was going to do a tour, and they were looking for the support package, and they grabbed both of us.

“So it was Exciter, Mercyful Fate, and then the Motorhead, and that was the first tour we did in ’84 over in the US, which was very interesting with the logo and so on. But there were good times too because the Motorhead has always been very good to us.

“I have always had very high views of Lemmy – he has always been very nice to me, and they helped us a lot in the beginning. So that was really good times as well and some funny memories, I can tell you.

“That was also when we met Metallica first time as far as I remember. They came to our show in San Francisco. It was kind of funny because it was someone outside – a DJ from San Francisco then, and he told us that there was a band with a Danish drummer outside that would like to come in and say hi.

“They were called Metallica, and none of us had heard of them, we didn’t know what to think. But of course, they did come in and say hi – the Danish guy, his name is Lars Ulrich, his dad plays tennis, his name is Torben Ulrich. And he knew his dad from Denmark, he was a professional tennis player back then.

“That’s when we started to talk to them and then got to become very close friends and all this stuff down the road. But very good memories, I remember Kirk [Hammett, guitar] on stage knocked me over. They joined us on stage for the last song – some special introductions there.

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