Band Line Up 2022

Mercyful Fate’s Highway to Hell: The Touring History of Denmark’s Pioneering Band

Mercyful Fate was formed in early 1981 in Copenhagen, Denmark, by vocalist King Diamond and  guitar player Hank Shermann. Guitarist Michael Denner, Bassist Timi Hansen and drummer Kim  Ruzz soon joined to complete the band line-up.

The band recorded two demos in 1981, and later signed with Rave On Records in Holland, for  recording of their successful EP “Mercyful Fate”, released on November 8th 1982. The EP was soon  in heavy rotation around the core metal radio stations, starting a new breed in Heavy Metal with their

unique sound.

Mercyful Fate signed a new deal with Roadrunner Records in 1983 to make their first full length  album “Melissa”, recorded and released that same year. In 1984 the band went back into the studio to  record their legendary album “Don’t Break The Oath”, released on September 7th 1984.

Soon after Mercyful Fate started a two month US Tour, which took them across the States several  times, including sharing the stage with Motorhead and Exciter for the last part of the tour. The shows  had created a brush fire within the metal community, and Mercyful Fate was now getting a lot of  recognition. The year of 1984 ended with a 5 days tour in Germany, together with Motorhead,  Girlschool, Helix and Talon.

First concert of 1985 was in their hometown of Copenhagen, an old movie theater with higher  capacity. The show was sold out, and the band displayed new levels of their stage show. It was a huge success, and was a new highlight for Mercyful Fate.

In April 1985 though, the band decided to part ways, for each to pursue new challenges. The King  Diamond band was born and had huge success the following years with five studio album releases on  Roadrunner Records. King Diamond has since signed with Metal Blade Records, and is going  stronger than ever.

Summer of 1992 Mercyful Fate decided to get back together and penned a new deal with Brian  Slagel and his label Metal Blade Records. “In The Shadows” was released in 1993, and was and  instant success followed by a sold out US tour.

The following years Mercyful Fate released another five studio albums and toured Europe, US and  South America many times. The highlight of the year 1999 was their critically acclaimed “9” album,  released on May 25th 1999. It was followed by a European tour with Metallica, where King and  Hank several times joined them on stage performing the medley “Mercyful Fate” which Metallica  had recorded on their “Garage Inc.” double tribute album, in 1998. A USA tour and touring in South 

America followed.

There’s a reason Slayer’s Kerry King is a huge Mercyful Fate fan and Metallica chose five Fate songs to  cover in a medley for their 1998 album Garage Inc. Like many ‘80s bands that wanted to push the limits of speed and aggression in the eighties, Metallica was captivated by Mercyful Fate’s heavy, melodic, and occult-saturated music, and blown away by frontman King Diamond’s foreboding stage presence. From  the time the band formed in 1981 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the vocalist painted black bat wings around  his eyes, a white trident-shape on his forehead across his nose and down his cheeks, and what looked like 

black stalactites across his lower lip and chin. For the coup de grace he drew an inverted cross on his  forehead. The evil image made Gene Simmons look like Bozo the Clown.

“I always liked to be scared, so I wanted the band to scare people,” King Diamond told Revolver. “With  the performance, I’ve always liked to make sure everyone was getting a show and there was going to be  something they could bring home from the venue. So, the next time they played the album at home, they  would get those pictures in their head that they saw onstage.”

Equally influenced by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and The Satanic Bible, Mercyful Fate were a sinister  spectacle of sight and sound. Diamond opened concerts with invocations to Lucifer, lit a hanging cross on  fire, brandished an actual skull onstage (he named her Melissa), and adorned the stage with occult iconography. During Mercyful Fate’s second-ever show, Diamond theatrically summoned Satan to join  the celebration. When headliners, Girlschool, took the stage, their guitarist and vocalist Kim McAuliffe  was electrocuted by the mic. Diamond credits the demons he invited into the room for the shocking 

episode.

“I felt something weird happening,” he told Kerrang! “I knew I had invoked a spirit and that it was  negative, Satan really did come into the house and the girl almost died because of this.”

Before Mercyful Fate formed in 1981, Black Sabbath, Coven, Judas Priest and others had referenced the  devil in their music, but Mercyful Fate put the unholy one on the front burner and – along with Newcastle, England band Venom and Sweden’s Bathory – were later credited as the founders of the first  wave of black metal. And Diamond’s look was a primary influence for the “corpse paint” face makeup of  the second wave of black metal, which surfaced in Norway at the end of the decade. Many have assumed Diamond based his look on Kiss, but it was another theatrical rocker that first captivated the King.

“Seeing Alice Cooper doing the Welcome to My Nightmare tour in Copenhagen in 1975 was such an  important experience for me,” Diamond told Revolver. “He didn’t have much makeup, but it was just enough and it totally changed the way he looked and the way the band came across. It felt like he was not  of this world. If I had reached up over the stage and touched a boot, he’d probably just vanish in thin air. 

That was the feeling it gave me, and right there in my mind I went, ‘If I’m ever going to be in a band I’m going to use makeup’ because of what a strong feeling it puts across.’”

Of course, there was far more to Mercyful Fate’s live show than their frontman’s stage outfit. From their earliest days, the band wrote tight, catchy songs including “Evil,” “Black Funeral,” and “Curse of the Pharaohs” that were melodic but featured more structurally complex than songs by their peers. The key members of Mercyful Fate were already accomplished musicians by the time played their first show together in a tiny Danish club on September 6, 1981. Not only had they recorded four demos since they 

formed in early 1981, the musicians had already performed together in various formations in other bands.

In 1976, the year after he saw Alice Cooper for the first time, King Diamond started playing guitar and writing music in Brainstorm. Around the same time, guitarist Hank Shermann was in the punk band Brats. Second guitarist Michael Denner joined Brats in 1979 and played on the band’s self-titled debut, however. Seeking a more rock-based band, Denner left to form the Danger Zone with bassist Tim “Grabber” Hansen. So, in 1980, Diamond started a new band Black Rose – the first group in which he wore makeup – but it lacked chemistry so he joined Brats in the beginning of 1981 and the band started playing more metallic music. Their label, CBS, didn’t like the directional shift so Brats broke up and Diamond and Shermann formed Mercyful Fate with two other members. The band recorded its first 

demo, “Demo 1981.” The next month, Hansen took over on bass, and in May 1981, “Demo #2” cemented 

the band’s macabre metal sound with early versions of “Return of the Vampire,” A Corpse Without a 

Soul” and “Curse of the Pharaoh.”

“We rehearsed a lot,” Diamond said on the commentary for the bonus DVD of the expanded edition of Melissa. “I think it was four times a week in the early days and we would rearrange songs over and over and over. So, there’s a lot of stuff that was cut to pieces and developed into other songs. And that’s why if 

you listen to the demo versions of some of these songs they’re sometimes very different from what you 

hear on the album.”

Mercyful Fate had yet to play a live show, but Ebony Records loved the demos and was impressed by the underground buzz they were generating. So the label invited Mercyful Fate to travel to Hull, England to record “Black Funeral” for the compilation album Metallic Storm. As monumental as that was, the 

defining moment came when Michael Denner rejoined his Brats bandmates.

The band’s twin-guitar attack was an unstoppable force comparable to Judas Priest’s Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing or Iron Maiden’s Dave Murray and Adrian Smith. They played searing guitar harmonies, dueling leads, and point-counterpoint rhythm which provided much of the musical thrust. Diamond may 

have been the band’s vampiric frontman, often clad in a black cape, leather pants, biker gloves and bullet belt, but his band mates – dressed in more traditional metal garb – complimented the King’s haunting atmospherics.

“They were doing this wild [Deep] Purple meets Judas Priest thing with a more progressive element. Really insane stuff,” said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in the liner notes of Damage Inc.Mercyful Fate played about a dozen shows in Denmark in 1981 and early 1982, and with every gig the band’s following grew exponentially largely due to their reputation for being outrageous and controversial. King Diamond skulked around the stage carrying a real human skull he borrowed indefinitely from a medical hospital. Melissa, as he affectionately referred to her, was a staple of the show until she was stolen one night backstage in the Netherlands. Even more impressive was his custom-made mic holder, which he fashioned from a human femur and tibia and formed an upside-down cross.“My younger brother’s schoolmate’s dad was a surgeon. He taught students how to operate on donated bodies, and when they were done, they would strip the skin off the bodies and put the bones in barrels,” 

Diamond told Rolling Stone. “He took a couple bones home to his son, and my brother convinced him to give it to him. I feel like the person they belonged to is now getting to see the world in a different way. I don’t mean that in a sick way at all.”

Mercyful Fate’s self-titled 1982 EP featured the instantly acclaimed “A Corpse Without a Soul,” “Nuns Have No Fun,” “Doomed By the Living Dead” and “Devil Eyes” and the original printing of quickly sold out. The songs, which were recorded in two days, became crowd favorites, but what left consumers slackjawed was the cover art, a drawing of a topless woman in a bikini bottom crucified on a burning cross, and surrounded by a cabal of mysterious, hooded figures.

“A lot of people lost their minds about that cover,” Diamond told Revolver. “I can’t say I didn’t want that to happen, but what I really wanted was for people to think and try to make up their mind about things that bother you and probably bother them as well. Take a song like ‘Nuns Have No Fun,’ for instance, which is about this cult raping a nun and crucifying her. You may ask, ‘Where is the good in that?’ Well, I’m not saying there’s any good in it, but I’m just saying that isn’t it funny that there’s a drawing on a cover of an album with music on it, and a lot of people freaked out over it? It’s a drawing. It’s not real. 
 

All the violence and criminal activity that Christians have done is real. The Inquisition was real.”Motivated by the quality of the band’s songs, the success of their EP, and the intensity of concerts opening for Uriah Heep, Gillan, and Crossfire among others, Roadrunner Records offered the band a deal. 

Mercyful Fate recorded their first full-length, Melissa in East Sound Studios in Copenhagen over 12 days in July 1983, and the album came out that October. The band supported the record in Europe from late 1983 until Spring 1984. During these shows they learned which songs fans reacted most favorably to, what theatrics worked best onstage, and what jeopardized the quality of their performance.

“When you’re standing onstage, for some reason, you might not think exactly of where you are at a particular time, but I discovered it’s very important,” Diamond said in the commentary track on the bonus DVD for Melissa. “If I stand on the side where the guitarist is playing a solo, I must move over to 

the other side towards the very end of the solo otherwise sometimes all you get from that side is a long, hanging, distorted feedback note, which doesn’t give you a riff to sing from or a key to sing to. That’s why it’s very important to be on that side where the guitar is starting to play that verse.”

Sometimes it wasn’t hard for The King to calculate what he needed to do to make his performance as powerful as possible. Other situations were beyond his control, especially when the band played hot, humid clubs with shoddy sound systems. 

“When we played ‘Satan’s Fall’ which is a long song, I was always being reminded by the other guys, ‘Please take your time. We need time to tune our guitars,’” Diamond said. “By the end of those 12 minutes, their guitars slowly drifted out of tune and there was nothing we could do about it. And it happened every time we played that song. I always hated getting to the end of ‘Satan’s Fall’ because I always had to try to figure out who was in tune with who. And if they were a little off I had to figure out 

what guitarist to sing to. And if they were both a little off, it didn’t matter which I chose to sing because I would sound off-key.”

Between the chaos and excitement of songs like “Doomed by the Living Dead,” “Evil,” “Into the Coven” and “At the Sound of the Demon Bell” there was enough energy and volume that no one in the crowd noticed or cared about the sour notes. And the wilder the band was, the crazier the European audiences. 

As excited as they were to see how American crowds would react to their harrowing, haunting music, Mercyful Fate had to wait until after they recorded their second album, Don’t Break the Oath, to head to North America. They wouldn’t have to wait long. Many songs for the record were already written by May 1984 when Mercyful Fate entered Easy Sound Recording in Copenhagen. Less than a month later, the band resurfaced with an album that equaled the intensity of Melissa, yet was more musically complex at 

times and featured more multifaceted guitar solos – the perfect vehicle for the band to build the alreadymajestic live show.

With two full albums and an EP of material to work from, Mercyful Fate made their U.S. debut on October 20 with Slayer at Starry Night in Portland, Oregon. “When I met King and Mercyful Fate I was already a giant fan,” Kerry King told Noisey. “Even though we were both early in our careers, they were a 

couple years ahead of me.”

Exodus and Exciter also supported Mercyful Fate during their first run of American shows. Then, on November 20 at the Warfield in San Francisco, Mercyful Fate began a tour with Motörhead and Exciter, which proved to be a giant learning curve in endurance.

We were in a mobile home that broke down constantly,” Diamond told The Electric Theater. “When we finally got into a bus it was also so old that nothing worked - no heat in the winter… So it was Exciter, Mercyful Fate, and then Motörhead. There were good times because Motörhead 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.”

After they finished touring for Don’t Break the Oath, most of Mercyful Fate was gunning to return to the studio but Shermann had become tired of playing extreme music and quit to form the far more commercial group Fate. Instead of continuing with another guitarist, Mercyful Fate broke up and Diamond launched his solo band. Five years later, Diamond asked Shermann, Denner, and Hansen if they were interested in reforming Mercyful Fate and working on new material. So the band entered the writing 

room to write new songs in the vein of their first two albums, but with fewer Satanic themes. The band entered Dallas Sound Lab studio in February 1993, then they took a short break and returned to the studio in April to finish the album. Following a couple of shows in May, including a memorable performance at 

the Dynamo Open Air Festival in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Mercyful Fate released In The Shadows on June 6, 1993. On September 8 they launched their second full tour of North America at Saratoga Winters in Cohoes, New York, but Hansen didn’t want to leave home so he was replaced by Sharlee D'Angelo 

(Witchery, Arch Enemy).

Instead of scheduling a European run for In the Shadows, the same lineup that toured the States entered the writing room to put together Fate’s fourth album, Time. This time, Mercyful Fate took a more relaxed approach in the studio than they had for previous records, tracking at Dallas Sound Lab in multiple sessions between May and August 1994.

Over the rest of the year, the group limited its touring to Europe – especially big festivals – since Diamond wanted to keep his solo project and Mercyful Fate active at the same time. Mercyful Fate released Into the Unknown on August 20, 1996, and the record was the band’s highest-charting album to date. As pleased as they all were with their album sales, Denner, who didn’t want to tour anymore, quit the band. He was soon replaced by Mike Wead and Mercyful Fate embarked on a tour of North and South 

America to support Into the Unknown. After another King Diamond project, Mercyful Fate returned to the road in early 1997, playing a gig in Estonia and a full tour of Europe.

But the instability and vertigo caused by whirlwind tours and writing sessions with Mercyful Fate –followed by a waiting period while King Diamond recorded and toured with his other band – started to take its toll on Shermann. He returned to Texas with Mercyful Fate at the end of 1997 to write and record Dead Again at Nomad Recording Studio, but the album didn’t come out until June 1998. Exhausted and somewhat disillusioned, Mercyful Fate recorded their most recent album, 9, in February and March 1999. 

The album came out two months later and Mercyful Fate played a five-month tour of North America and Europe. Then they broke up. Wead continued with Diamond in his solo band and Shermann joined Denner in Force of Evil, which recorded two albums between 2003 and 2005.

That could have been the end of the saga, but as the saying goes, evil never dies. In August 2008, Lars Ulrich asked Diamond if he could use the original masters of “Evil” and “Curse of the “Pharaohs” for Activision’s “Guitar Hero: Metallica.” Since he couldn’t find the tapes, Diamond asked Ulrich if he could use re-recorded versions of the songs featuring the original band. Soon after, King entered the studio with Shermann, Denner, Hansen, and drummer Bjarne T. Holm, banged out the classic tunes, and everyone exited smiling and in good spirits. Remembering how much fun they had playing their classic tunes together, they immediately accepted Metallica’s offer to join them onstage at Metallica’s 30th Anniversary concert in San Francisco to perform the “Mercyful Fate” medley on Metallica’s Garage Inc.

That unlocked the creaky cobwebbed doors of the haunted castle that is Mercyful Fate, and though it took almost another decade for the spirits in the castle to be joined by the living, in August 2019 Mercyful Fate revealed that they would play a series of shows in the summer of 2020 with Shermann, Wead, drummer Bjarne T. Holm and ArmoredSaint and Fates Warning bassist Joey Vera. Sadly, Grabber died from cancer in 2019. Like every band that planned to tour in 2019, Mercyful Fate canceled their plans due to COVID-19. But now, the time has come.

Shermann has said he has six or seven new songs which will he will likely use for the next Mercyful Fate album and ten European dates are back on the schedule.

“We have some hope that we can continue this new beginning for at least another five years or more,” Shermann told Subculture Media. “Back then, we were living in the right now. We were living in the present, not in the past or the future. We were never thinking too far ahead.”

-- Jon Wiedehorn

Mercyful Fate will be playing 19 shows in the Summer of 2022.