Legendary journalist Malcolm Dome was an early champion of Danish occult metal pioneers Mercyful Fate. In 1983, he was invited to Copenhagen to interview the band ahead of the release of their debut album Melissa. In 2006, he recounted a night of occult weirdness, Satanic messages and human skulls.
It was early in 1983 when I flew to Copenhagen to discover who King Diamond really was. The King – real name Kim Bendix Petersen – was fronting one of the hottest young underground metal bands on the scene, Mercyful Fate. Their debut EP, Nuns Have No Fun, had captured the imagination when released on the Dutch label Rave-On in 1982.The cover showed a semi-nude nun, tied to a cross and clearly distressed by the unseemly attentions of the cowled figures gathered around.
Within months, Mercyful Fate had signed to the fledgling Roadrunner label and were preparing to release their debut album, Melissa. And now I was in a coffee shop in Copenhagen awaiting the arrival of the Danish band.
King Diamond turned up, without his make-up, but sporting earrings made from inverted crosses. With him was band bassist Timi Grabber. Their budget in those days didn’t stretch to hotel rooms, so I was to stay with the King.
“Erm, are you a bit freaked out by the spirits?” asked Grabber, while holding on to my arm. “Because, if you are, then I’d better warn you, King’s place isn’t gonna be fun for you!”
Assuming this wasn’t a reference to bottles of vodka, I followed the pair out of the coffee shop, and into the rail system, as we crossed the city, stopping off for a while to see the band in rehearsal – a staggering experience. This lot were sensational. And, to skip over the boring bits, several light ales and a few games of table football later, it was past midnight – and I was in King Diamond’s flat. Now, here’s where it gets odd.
The first thing I noticed was that there no light bulbs in the place. None at all. We were feeling our way by candlelight, little else.
“Is there a problem with your electricity?” I naively asked.
“No,” replied King Diamond. “I don’t like electric lighting. It drives away the spirits, and I love to have them near me!”
OK, I thought, this is all a trick. He’s trying to freak me out. So, stay calm.
We sat in the half-light nattering for ages, as the King openly talked of his devotion to the Church Of Satan, led by Anton Lavey, and how he regularly read from the ‘Satanic Bible’, which he kept on an altar in his living room – I could just about make this out in the gloom.
Suddenly, he got up and leapt into his bedroom, emerging with two cassettes.
“These are interesting,” he enthuses. “Have you ever heard Stairway To Heaven played backwards?” he ventured.
I shook my head. There are those who insist that if you play this Led Zeppelin classic backwards at a certain speed, then you can clearly hear vocalist Robert Plant intone the line: ‘My sweet Satan’. King Diamond was one such believer.
“Listen to this,” he hissed – well, it now seems like a hiss – “you can hear him say the line!”
With that, the King played a taped backwards version of the part, and when it got to allegedly Satanic part, all I could hear was utter gibberish. I looked over at my host, who was clearly shocked that I couldn’t decipher the fabled words among the ruins of those legendary lyrics, now mangled beyond salvation. He played the tape again. And again. And again. Still nothing, Whatever King Diamond was hearing didn’t translate to me.
Undeterred, he held up the second cassette.
“Do you remember hearing about how one of Girlschool was nearly electrocuted onstage in Copenhagen a couple of years ago? Well, it was my fault!”
Now, there had been a story about how Kim McAuliffe, guitarist/vocalist with the all-female British band, had come close to dying onstage after grabbing an unearthed microphone. But what had King Diamond got to do with this?
“Well, Mercyful Fate were the support band that night. At the end of the set, I said, ‘Let’s bring Satan into the house tonight’. And I felt something weird happening. I knew I’d invoked a spirit, and it was malevolent. Satan really did come into the house, Anyway, I taped the start of Girlschool’s set, and you can hear what happened…”
He put the cassette on, and just a few minutes into the recording, there was a loud shriek of agony – seemingly the point where Kim McAuliffe was electrocuted. To say it was unnerving was an understatement. It was the sound of a person in pain. Not that this actually proved King’s version of events, but clearly he was convinced this was of supernatural origin.
He went on to explain that being a Satanist does not mean that he goes around killing babies or animals. “Satanism simply means that I understand the powers of the Unknown,” he said proudly.
Sleeping overnight in a hastily arranged bed on the living room floor right by King’s Satanic altar was a weird experience. More than once I thought I heard uncanny, unnatural sounds. But I put this down to paranoia.
The next day, in the sunlight, I could clearly see the altar. On it were an inverted cross (“I stole it from a church”), a copy of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible, with the edges burnt and a human skull, called Melissa, who was to become a crucial part of Mercyful Fate’s stage act, until it was nicked by person or persons unknown a few years later. And on the door of the living room was a drawing I’d not noticed the previous night: it showed a nun holding a cross, and using it to pleasure herself. King was proud of that, almost more than anything else in his flat.
I left there convinced that King Diamond, although personal and articulate, was most definitely not a man who dabbled in the dark arts simply to gain publicity – he was the genuine article.
As I said goodbye to the band, before heading to the airport, guitarist Hank Shermann took me to one side, and asked what I thought of their ‘eccentric’ singer.
“He’s a character,” I replied, unsure of what Shermann himself might have to say.
“Yeah,” he mused, almost distracted. “But he means all this Satanic shit, you know. He does worship the Devil. It’s his religion. The rest of us are really worried about what forces he may unleash, without meaning to do so!”
I met King Diamond many times in the next decade, and he was always courteous, But I never forgot that night in his flat.
Originally published in Metal Hammer Presents: The Devil’s Music, Vol.2, July 2006
