King Diamond's Tales Of Horror!

King Diamond's Tales Of Horror!

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Don Kaye

I'm sitting in a hotel room with King Diamond, publicly-admitted practitioner of occult services (shall we say), ex-lead singer of Mercyful Fate, and leader of his own successful group named after him. We’re conducting an interview; King is intelligent, friendly, forthright, very keen to talk about his group’s new album, Abigail.

I do not detect any demons lurking about, nor do I get the feeling that King may want to lure me into the depths of the black arts.

And that’s a good thing, because I sense that the man wants to break away from his Satanic image and rid himself of any stigma that may have attached itself to him; rather, he’s got slightly loftier ambitions, like taking whole horror stories and draping them in heavy, complex, yet melodic metal that creates a perfect mood for the tales he’s spinning. See, Abigail is a—oh, no—concept album, all the songs following in correct order to tell the horrifying tale of little Abigail, an illegitimate child who died in her mother’s womb before birth, yet whose evil spirit lives on to possess the mansion she feels cheated out of and to destroy the lives of two poor saps who actually inherit the old dump. Jonathan and Miriam are an innocent young couple who stupidly move in despite enough warnings from Men in Black to scare off Max Von Sydow. Once inside, Miriam becomes preggers, but the baby is none other than little Abby, ready to literally claw her way back into the world in the gruesome finale. It’s a story right out of Stephen King and Clive Barker territory, and I already see Wes Craven in line for the film rights...

“I came up with the idea at two in the morning, at home, just as I was about to go to bed,” recalls the soft-spoken King, “and it was real nasty weather outside. It was the right atmosphere and I just wrote for an hour and a half. Everything just came to me at once: the plot, the names of the characters, the song titles, and the secret of the number nine which recurs throughout the story. I had to get up twice during the night, a half-hour each time, to add more as it came to me."

King goes on to explain that all numbers in the story add up to nine, which is a magical number. "If you take any number that is a multiple of nine and add all the digits up, they either add up to nine or another multiple of nine. No matter how large the number is, it always comes back to nine. The key to the story is when one of the Black Horsemen try to warn this couple away from the mansion by telling them that 18 will become 9, meaning that events are coming around full circle. Just as Abigail’s father killed her mother to prevent her birth, so does Jonathan eventually attempt to kill his wife to prevent Abigail’s rebirth.”

King wrote the plot in story form, only shaping it into songs later on. In some ways, the story is similar to the tale that wove its way through one half of Fatal Portrait, the album that marked the debut of King’s new band after Mercyful Fate’s demise. On Portrait, the spirit of a little girl named Molly came back to haunt the mother who had imprisoned and tortured her. The vengeance motif is in both stories, and King’s challenge is to combine songs from both albums into the live set without losing the records’ original ideas.

‘‘I had to sit down and think very hard about this, because I obviously wanted to play six songs or so off the new record, plus material off the last one, plus some Mercyful Fate stuff. And the trick was to keep the songs from Abigail in some sort of sequence to maintain the concept. One way to do it would be to run songs with similar themes together. For example, 'The Portrait’ from the last record and ‘Family Ghost’ from the new one both deal with a spirit who appears to explain strange occurrences. So, in that sense, I could tell the two stories during the set in parallel fashion.”

Hey, King, have you ever considered giving it a shot as a horror novelist? wouldn’t have the time at this point to write books. I am concerned with music now, plus I have to deal with the business end of it: rehearsal and so on. I couldn’t do it now, but who knows? Maybe later on, when the music career stops at a certain point, it’s likely that I might try writing. What I would love to see is the story I’ve come up with for this album in movie form.”

“We’re doing illusions that reflect the magical and occult side of things. ”

That may be a while off as well, since King Diamond (the band) is a hot property right now. When Mercyful Fate split up in early 1985, just as they were on the brink of possibly breaking out of the metal underground, King immediately set to work on a new project. He retained guitarist Michael Denner and bassist Timi Hansen from Fate, added guitarist Andy LaRocque and drummer Mikkey Dee, and began preparing the album which he called at the time, really the third Mercyful Fate album.” When Portrait was released in July of 1986 it outsold the two previous Fate LPs, making them probably the hottest rock act ever from Denmark and proving what many had suspected: that much of Fate’s success hinged not just on their melodic, Gothic metal, but on King’s diabolic image.

Although (as we said), King is toning down his Satanic past in favor of the straight horror approach, he’s not toning down his plans for the band’s stage show. Not only will it feature effects that relate to songs from last year, but new visuals will accompany the new material. ‘‘We’re gonna have the same stage set, two huge gateways with iron spikes that come down and impale me during ‘Evil,’ and there will be new things around those gates as well. I’m into creating illusions. One thing that we’ve got down already is an effect during the intro where my cape catches on fire, and I’m enveloped in flames. I should say that the only person endangered by this is me, but for everyone else it’s safe.”

By the time this sees print, King Diamond will be on the road in the States, and hopefully a good deal of you will be gasping in astonishment at whatever he’s got up his sleeve. I say hopefully because, for about half of last year’s tour, the set and larger effects stayed in the truck, victims of being booked into small clubs. So while King (and even Fate before) has carted around a full stage show, not many U.S. fans have had the chance to see it. ‘‘Actually, we set up the full stage for about 50 percent of the gigs last year,” claims King, ‘‘This time, we’re playing better and larger places, so we’re using the full show at least 80 percent of the time.”

King has made no secret of his admiration for Alice Cooper, and the man’s influence on him—so with Alice making a comeback this year in full regalia, does King feel the pressure of competition from his sort-of mentor? ‘‘No, not at all, because we’re doing absolutely different things from what he’s doing now. We’re doing illusions that reflect the magical and occult side of things, while he goes more for the shock and gore. But even so,

I know that Alice is glad that bands are taking what he started with and carrying on in their own style.”

Evil spirits, dead babies, and Black Horsemen aside, King’s got plenty of style. And the music to match. Don’t be afraid of him—he doesn’t want your soul; he just wants to take you for a ride in his own private haunted house.