King Diamond: Obey Your Master! Feature Interview At Blistering.com

King Diamond: Obey Your Master!

After King resurrected the story of Abigail last year, many wondered if King would take the next step and resurrect the characters of arguably his classic album, Them. King seems tempted by the idea of bringing back Grandma, but only if it were done properly on the big screen or in print.

"I love Grandma, I love the character there, she should be the feature character in a movie like Freddy Krueger, if someone wanted to give it a shot. Maybe in a way, no one will ever look at their Grandma in the same way. I am tempted to because I like the characters, but I am so scared that people will say we are out of ideas. But I am tempted to take all of the nutcases from all of my stories and put them in the same house and see how they'd get along. It would be like a reunion that could be tempting sometime in the future; it would be a lot of fun for everyone. I think a lot of fans like that characters, in one way or shape they have to live in the past and it has to be done right. If I had the time, I'd love to put Conspiracy into a novel, but I'd need 6 months, and I can't put King Diamond on ice for 6 months, its a job you know and we have to put bread on the table. It would take someone with a fat check to say, "Why don't you take a break from King Diamond for 6 months." Otherwise it would be real tough. What I want to see is this put on the big screen with the right people and the right director, man it would scare the shit out of people!"

The Puppet Master is another of a long-line of deranged concept albums for King. After being intrigued by life-sized puppets sitting on chairs and hanging on walls in Budapest while on tour in 1999, King got the inspiration to bring his fear to life. The Puppet Master features many strange, yet trademark King Diamond twists, along with some new musical elements.

"I can tell you that it seems we have been able to compress all of the good King Diamond elements into one album. To me, it seems it is more melodic than we've had before, yet we have more raw riffs. The lineup is the same from the last album, but we added something that we've never used before in a King Diamond album. We added a singer from Budapest; her name is Livia Zita who plays the character of Victoria. In the song called "Magic" she sings the first line, then I'll do the second in harmony. There are places where she sings female choir just by herself, so we've never had this before. We've had female voices on some of the other albums, but nothing to this effect. The way this happened was interesting. Livia was studying in the U.S. at the time and she did an interview with me for the Abigail II album for the Bulgarian Metal Hammer. So it got onto the topic of her singing, so I asked her to send me a tape, and I was like, "Oh my God! Wait until you hear what she can do and how'll she'll fit with my vocals."

King goes into further detail into how The Puppet Master was created and how he managed to make The Puppet Master meets his quality requirements in spite of the shoestring budget.

"Andy took all of his recording equipment from his studio (Los Angered in Gothenburg, Sweden) and put them into big flight cases and shipped them over here to my house and we turned my house into a studio. We recorded all rhythm guitars, bass and some vocals, which saved 5 weeks and was less money. We wouldn't have to do it this way if it weren't for all the interned downloading which is hurting album sales. Had we not found this solution, we wouldn't have done this album that would have been it. Those 5 weeks we saved, was enough to make budget and it balanced out pretty well."

Now on the topic of money, King cites internet downloading as the prime suspect for his diminished album sales, which resulted in the loss of the Abigail II tour and the less-than desirable budget for The Puppet Master. Once King got started on this topic, there was no stopping him. His disgust and disappointment were clearly evident in the tone of his voice.

"I feel like people are thieves and taking money out of my pocket. Its only this business that it has been accepted and its been accepted for a while. Now they started to crackdown and make laws, but are there enough laws to make a difference? If this kind of conduct was accepted in other business, we'd die. Do you steal from a bakery? He sweated over the bread, he spent time getting all the ingredients together, and you think it's a joke that people do these things? It's nothing less than theft."

King has definite fears that his career will be cut short thanks to internet downloading. He still has every intention of continuing, but not at the expense of the finished product, which King feels will suffer without proper funding.

"You can try and survive, but one day it will catch up and the faithful fans are going to pay the price exactly as much as ourselves. Those unfaithful fans who steal, they are the ones who are going to kill it in the end. They will be a part of killing what they like. It almost happened with Abigail II, the tour didn't happen; it's all because of the downloading. Its one thing to put out shit that no one likes, but when a lot of those people have it, but don't buy it, that's when they kill their own artist. At least buy your favorite band's album! If you want them to continue, it's all a matter of choice. I love what I do, but its what puts bread on the table, and when that doesn't happen anymore, I'm going to stop. I won't shortchange my fans by recording poor-sounding albums, I will never do that. I have always paid the utmost respect to my fans because they deserve it. I'm not blaming my fans, but I want them to be aware of what is going on. As long as it's not a law, then they can do whatever they want. It's a difficult thing to talk about because I don't want to sound like some insane, greedy idiot. I don't need a castle or anything like that. If I can't live off it, then fine, I'll do something else. It will just be another career."

King Diamond in real estate?

"Yeah, you never know. I'll just back to my old job as lab assistant and do crime lab stuff. I have full education in that, I can always get a job in that, but that's not what I want to do at all."