KING DIAMOND And MERCYFUL FATE 'Retro' DVDs On The Way

KING DIAMOND frontman/namesake recently gave a lengthy interview to Metal Sludge as part of the web site's weekly "20 Questions With..." feature. A couple of excerpts from the interview follow:

Metal Sludge: What are you currently up to? Briefly plug whatever it is you have to plug so we can get going.

King Diamond: "Working on starting to write material for the next studio album. We'll be working on two DVD projects, which are retro DVDs, one for MERCYFUL FATE and one for KING DIAMOND. What we're going to do there is we're going to look through a lot of old masters that we have, what you'd call 'bootlegs,' but they are very good quality, and they are masters that we have and no one else has ever seen. They have never been on the bootleg market. So, never before seen footage from the early days. And then, at the moment also, there is being worked on a possible tour for next spring in the U.S., that being like a second leg of the 'Puppet Master' tour. We might change the set list, of course, for that tour, since we were already in some of the cities we're going to do. But we're also going to do a lot of cities that were not on the last tour. So, those are the things right now. After that, then will be the European tour for 'The Puppet Master', which we still definitely have to do. And by that time, I think we will be ready to release the next studio album as well. So that should take us all the way to next Christmas, I think."

Metal Sludge: We heard a rumor that at one of your performances in Cleveland, you were locked in a casket that was set on fire, and the prop went wrong and you couldn't get out and almost got seriously hurt. Care to quickly tell us what happened?

King Diamond: "Yes, um, what happened was, in this trick — it was like one of those magical tricks that had built by a magician, you know. And I guess the reason was that the guy that normally took care of putting all this flaming liquid into the coffin in the right places couldn't do it one night because there was something else he had to take care of because of circumstances, and he left that job to an inexperienced person. And this inexperienced person put that liquid into the coffin, I think 45 minutes before the trick, when it had to be put on like two minutes before they wheel that coffin in. Otherwise, it can be very dangerous. When we performed this trick on stage, they slide me into this coffin, and they just open it there at the end of it, they slide me in, then they're supposed to close it up completely in there. They're supposed to then take the lid off, and stand with a lit torch in their hand to stick into the coffin and then it catches fire. You'll see flames shoot up around the sides of it. They'll eventually let down all sides of the coffin and you can still look under it — I'm gone, and all that's left in there is a burnt skeleton that is still burning. What happened when they slid me in there was I couldn't breathe. I was breathing these fumes from the flammable liquids. I was almost choking! They tried to close the end of the coffin… the end of it so I would be all closed in. And I was kicking for my life there so that they could not close it. And they couldn't understand why they couldn't close it, and they tried and tried but I kicked for my life so they couldn't close me in there. Had they closed me in there, I would probably have choked to death, or I would've jumped up and destroyed the whole scenario. Or if I had not caught on to what was going on early enough, and if they had lifted the lid with a lit torch in their hand, the coffin would have exploded. So, that was a close one, yes. Because I kicked for my life, they couldn't close the coffin, and then they abandoned the trick and wheeled out the coffin, and I came out soft of half choking to death, asking, or rather screaming, if someone was trying to kill me. That was one way that the person who was in charge learned to never give their job to someone who had not been part of the trick before. It's not fun, you know. It could be dangerous."

Read King Diamond's entire interview with Metal Sludge at this location.