King Diamond’s career spans over three decades now, first as vocalist for influential Danish black metallers Mercyful Fate and then as vocalist for his self-named outfit King Diamond.
A theatrical stage presence, coupled with his interest in Satanism underscores much of King Diamond’s musical tales of the macabre which continues to be evident on King Diamond’s latest epic, Give Me Your Soul…Please. As a blistering metal “horror-opera concept album” it tells the story of two children - bothers and sisters, who are viciously murdered by their father. After their death, the brother and sister become spirits, waiting to get to the other side. The powers that be wrongly accuse the little boy of committing suicide and demand he go to hell. It is up to his older sister to help her little brother to get to heaven with her. She devises a plan that will help him – to steal an innocent soul –her first victim?
Joe Matera recently caught up with King to discuss the new album, playing guitar and his desire for his stories to make it onto the silver screen.
Ultimate-Guitar: You recently have been in extreme pain after suffering a herniated disc how is the healing process coming along?
King Diamond: Yeah man it hasn’t been a pleasant experience. And at the beginning it was very unbearable. The doctor has told me it’s the worst pain a human being can experience. It runs down your leg via the sciatica nerve and sometimes it moves from one place in the leg to another part of the leg. It’s like someone is poking you with a burning iron, it’s very, very painful. I’ve been following doctor’s orders to the point of as much as I can, except for doing all these interviews which I’m not really suppose to be doing. But I’ve only got a few more days of promo to do and then I can really start to heal. The prognosis is that there is a 90% chance that it will heal by itself if you’re really, really careful and have lots of rest.
Give Me Your Soul…Please is the first album that seems to really capture the King Diamond sound in its fullest.
I wish all of our albums sounded like the way this album does. Andy [LaRocque, guitarist] and I made the decision when we were mixing the record that we wouldn’t follow the industry norm. These days, and for many years, there has been far too much use of compression on albums and including ours. It tends to wash out the sound and takes away a lot of the details. It has caused a lot of frustrating problems for me in the past in regards to my vocals. I was putting so many emotions into the recording, that could still be heard during the mixing process but once we got the album back from mastering it always seemed to have been over compressed and over working the limiters really high with the result being that the vocals suffered in missing lots of the detail in the voice.
Do you do a lot of writing on the guitar?
Yes it is mainly on the guitar and on a few occasions I may even start out writing out on a keyboard but it’s mainly been on guitar. I use a drum machine to create the demos and I will put a guitar through an octave pedal to simulate a bass guitar for my bass lines.
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| "I wish all of our albums sounded like the way this album does." |
Considering first and foremost you’re a vocalist, how is your approach to playing the guitar?
There is a specific technique that I have. It’s hard when you write songs with a certain technique and then someone else will be recording the guitars on your songs. They might not play it the right way on a certain part. Like, I might need more “boom-boom” instead of “cling-cling”. Also the hand position is important in order to capture the correct feeling of the song and since I use a lot of downstrokes, the other guitarist has to be aware of this. Andy has done something really amazing. It has been progressing over the last three albums I would say, where he has got better in incorporating my downstroke style into his style. And so because of that my songs on this album were played perfect. I mean it has all the right feeling that it was written with in the first place.
Speaking of Andy how does the song writing process work between you and him?
He writes his parts in Sweden and I do mine here in the U.S. Then we’ll send them off to each other and then once we’ve got it together we’ll send them off to the others to get them to add to the songs. Then we’ll listen to the songs to see whether we like them or not. It’s usually rare that we won’t like something so most of the time we go with the songs. By now we know pretty well know if something is not going to work from the outset. Afterwards we’ll go into the studio and begin the recording process.
Do you know what guitars Andy used for the album?
Andy played a lot of the guitar parts on my B. C. Rich. I have this custom made B. C. Rich which was given to me by B. C. Rich back in 1989. It’s a one of a kind, that looks kind of like a Warlock but because it was made especially for me, it’s smaller than a normal Warlock. The cutaways are smaller and it’s more devilish looking with all these upside down crosses down the neck and my face painted on it. Aside from that it has just an on-off switch and a volume switch and that’s it. And the guitar sounds absolutely mind blowing! Andy has used that guitar on several King Diamonds albums so far.
What was the process like when it came to making Give Me Your Soul…Please?
Making this album was a really strange process as so much was happening in between as the process was broken up several times by touring. After we did The Puppet Master we did one U.S tour and on that U.S tour we recorded a lot of shows and from that came the double live album. After that was finished and released we did another full U.S tour and only then did we start writing this album. In the first part of the writing process went through all my notes to get ideas for stories and once I had a story it was practically ready to go. I then told Andy all my ideas including some of what the characters would be, the names, the locations, so he could get a real feel of what the atmosphere of the album was going to be like. When you start writing the music a lot of that mood is automatically carried over into the writing process and that is really an essential part. After that was done we wrote the music and did the demos. And once the songs for the album were chosen we go into the studio and began recording with the rhythm guitars usually the first thing recorded to a drum machine.
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| "You can't take Ozzy out of Black Sabbath and replace him with someone else and then expect the same thing." |
After two decades of King Diamond do you have any regrets in how your career has unfolded?
I don’t think so. I mean I really don’t look back on things in that way because the way we’ve done things has always been straight from the heart. We’ve been given an opportunity by the record labels so have been very fortunate to have the full freedom to do what we like the whole of the way. It’s always worked this way for many, many years. Metal Blade’s Brian Slagel has had the chance to come by in the studio and hear the demos but he has never sat there and gone, ‘I don’t like the demo’ or ‘I don’t like these three songs so write some other ones’ or ‘lets go with this producer because it sounds like this and it’s really hip right now’. It’s never been anything like that. It’s always just us. He’s never interfered. If someone was ever to start interfering I would stop right away. Who is to come and say, ‘hey Mr. Diamond you need to sound like this?’ I think I know how I should sound! And when you do that it becomes really unique. You create a style of your own and it becomes a little bit timeless because you’re not following any trends.
Are there any musical genres other than metal that appeals to you enough so that King Diamond would be comfortable dabbling with it someday?
I kind of feel like I only have one but King Diamond means anything goes. Anything that will enhance the mood or a certain part of the song, like I’ve used harpsichords and violins and cellos, whatever it takes to create that right feel, we will use. I mean we base our albums on bass, guitar and drums but we’ll use any instrument that enhances it. Even a flute can enhance certain things. The only thing I’ve never used is a saxophone because it doesn’t make the hairs on my back stand up.
Who are some of your musical influences when it comes to your vocal style?
I have quite a few but one of my favourite singers of all time is the late David Byron who sang with Uriah Heep in their early days. I’ve saw Uriah Heep with him five times in Copenhagen. Otherwise the other big influences for me are Ian Gillian, Robert Plant and Robert Halford. Alice Cooper is another one too, definitely because he has always had the ability to makes listeners feel that he is there in that situation that he is singing about. It is a very theatrical way of singing. And Ozzy Osbourne too, as he has a personal voice where it’s, like a lot of those other singers I’ve mentioned, a personal sounding voice. You can’t take Ozzy out of Black Sabbath and replace him with someone else and then expect the same thing.
Have you ever thought about maybe producing a comic book of sorts from stories on any of your albums?
I’ve never really thought of that. But what I would really like to see, and maybe it’s a little over the top but I’d like to see some of the stories make it to the big screen. I think Conspiracy would be an obvious one that would work as a horror movie. Even The Puppet Master or Abigail II: The Revenge could make for good psychological thrillers. If the right person came along and said to me, ‘hey man what would you think if we tried putting this story into a movie as I think it has a lot of potential’ I would go for it. A lot of my stories have a lot of potential to be movies. I’ve noticed there are a lot of remakes coming out in recent times so I’m thinking ‘how about giving me a break and using one of mine, please!’…
2007 © Joe Matera
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best sing of all time. a movie or 10 would be nice.
