HANOI ROCKS TRIVIA
Trivia
The band did not begin under the name Hanoi Rocks. By Michael Monroe's account, the first version, put together in 1979, was called The Nymphomaniacs. The guitarist was a Swedish friend of Andy McCoy's, and Monroe went to Stockholm to sleep on his floor. A man acting as their manager took the guitarist to a pawn shop, ran up a large phone bill and vanished; nothing came of it, and Monroe went back to Finland for a while.
Hanoi Rocks exists because of a refusal. Michael Monroe met Andy McCoy — then guitarist in the punk band Briard — through a rehearsal room they shared in the crypt of a church in Helsinki. McCoy suggested to Briard's singer that Monroe join as second guitarist. The band stepped outside to discuss it and came back with an answer: he was in if he cut his hair. Monroe, whose hair reached his waist, said no. That was the end of it — but the two kept talking, and decided to put a band together themselves. It became Hanoi Rocks.
They were already a name in Finland and Sweden. In London nobody knew them. By Andy McCoy's account, three people paid to get into their first London club show; a few others came in free, and a three-legged, half-blind dog wandered about the room. He says he has never forgotten the sight.
Why the mix of Oriental Beat went so badly wrong is on the record from the people involved. The engineer, Peter Wooliscroft, was not a rock producer, and according to the band's manager Richard Bishop he tried to make the album sound like Spandau Ballet. Sami Yaffa has called it the worst-sounding album of their career, and Michael Monroe has said the producer had no idea what the band was about and that his mix was horribly wrong.
Razzle was not chosen by the band; he sold himself to them. By Michael Monroe's recollection, Razzle cornered him at the Zig Zag Club to say their band was great but he should be their drummer — and had already told him the same thing at a Johnny Thunders show at the Marquee. Around the same time a man had been pestering Andy McCoy about being their drummer. It was the same man. At the audition Razzle was not technically the finest player, but he had style: he turned up to play drums in platform shoes.
Right after Back to Mystery City made them favourites of the British music press, the places the band were sent to play were strange ones. By Michael Monroe's account they expected France, Italy or Spain and got Bombay and New Delhi instead, then Hong Kong. The high point was Tel Aviv, where they spent a week playing every night at a club around the corner from their hotel. Getting out of the country cost them a large fine for damages, and a local paper ran the headline 'Havoc in the Holy Land!'.
Michael Monroe and Vince Neil came face to face on 9 June 2023, backstage at Rockfest in Finland. Razzle had been close to Neil, but Monroe himself had never met him. Monroe posted a photograph of the two of them and wrote that meeting Neil that night was one of the most important moments of his life. Razzle had always wanted the two of them to meet, he wrote, and had thought the two singers had a great deal in common; under different circumstances the two bands would probably have become good friends. He thanked Neil for making the time and added that Neil had sung superbly that day. He saw Nikki Sixx again the same evening.
On 23 September 2022, at the Helsinki Ice Hall, the five original members of Hanoi Rocks stood together at Michael Monroe's sixtieth birthday concert: Monroe, Andy McCoy, Sami Yaffa, Nasty Suicide and the first drummer, Gyp Casino. The last time those five had been on a stage together was 27 July 1982, at Tavastia in Helsinki.
Their standing in Japan long predates the split. The Classic Rock feature states that by the end of 1983 Hanoi Rocks were huge there. After the reunion they came back to Japanese audiences at Summer Sonic in 2002, toured Japan in February 2003, and returned that October for the Rock Legends Special and three further dates. At the Nippon Budokan show on 8 October they played early material — 'Oriental Beat', 'Tragedy', 'Malibu Beach' — alongside 'People Like Me' and 'A Day Late, A Dollar Short' from the comeback record, and closed the encore with 'Up Around the Bend'.
Sami Yaffa and Michael Monroe have not been apart since the 1980s. Monroe's own site describes the core of his band as Yaffa and the drummer Karl Rockfist. After playing bass in Hanoi Rocks, Yaffa launched Demolition 23 with Monroe, started the cult band Mad Juana in Spain in the 1990s, and went on to play in the reformed New York Dolls and with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.
There is a reason none of them used their real names. Michael Monroe was born Fagerholm and was proud of it, but nobody could pronounce their Finnish names, so when they put the band together they all agreed to take new ones. Marilyn Monroe and Alice Cooper had not used theirs either, as he saw it.
Michael Monroe grew up in a broadcasting household. His father was a radio announcer — softly spoken, old-school, widely known. His mother worked in radio too, starting out as a recording engineer on radio plays, which is where the two of them met. When a play needed a child's voice, Monroe and his brothers were sometimes used. In the early days of Hanoi Rocks, he says, he was known as that announcer's son; before long his father was known as Michael Monroe's father.
In 1980 the band left Finland for Stockholm. The flat they were supposed to have fell through, and Monroe, Sami Yaffa and Nasty Suicide ended up on the street; only Andy McCoy, who had a girlfriend there, had a roof. Hanoi Rocks proper started at the end of that summer, and the three of them spent the first six months of it sleeping rough.
Asked where the band-as-a-gang feeling in Hanoi Rocks came from, Michael Monroe's answer is unambiguous: from looking after each other on the street. Us against the world, nobody can stop us, don't touch this gang — that attitude was learned there, and the bond between him, Sami Yaffa and Nasty Suicide, he says, has never changed.
The Wishbone Ash support run in 1981 was three shows. By Michael Monroe's account there were two or three thousand people in for the first one, and none of them seemed to know who the opening act was. The band walked out in the dark to cheering; the moment the lights came up, the room fell completely silent.
It was one manager who carried the band to London. Zeppo, a fledgling manager and promoter they had met in Finland, took an interest and then disappeared to Turkey for six months. When he turned up again, they were living on the streets of Stockholm; he booked them shows back in Finland, which became the band's first income. He then went to London, went into partnership with Richard Bishop, and began finding them London gigs.
The second album, Oriental Beat, was recorded in London in 1981 at two hundred pounds a day. It was made at the height of British punk and new wave, when the band were around everybody in that city from Phil Lynott to The Damned.
The band wanted to redo Oriental Beat and could not for forty years. The label had run out of money, so it was released without a remix or a re-recording, and then the master tapes went missing. Only when the tapes turned up in the Universal vault could the record finally be remade. The fortieth-anniversary edition appeared on 17 March 2023 on deluxe vinyl and CD, mixed by Petri Majuri at E-Studios in Finland together with the band, with nothing overdubbed and nothing sampled.
Firing the first drummer, Gyp Casino, was a hard decision. By Michael Monroe's account he would stop playing in the middle of a song, walk out of the studio and go round the block. At one show in Finland he saw Andy McCoy shouting at a roadie, got up from the kit, crossed the stage and punched him — mid-song. McCoy's own account is that he was being fired to protect himself from himself, that cutting a friend loose was genuinely hard but had to be done for the band to go on, and that Casino long since got himself together and is a good friend now.
What Razzle brought was not only drums. By Andy McCoy's account the band had toured almost without a break since forming, and somewhere in there the humour had gone out of it; Razzle brought it back — he was a barrel of laughs. Michael Monroe has said that the band only became whole when Razzle joined: they were not in good spirits at the time, and his arrival gave them a real lift.
Razzle was not unknown before Hanoi Rocks, exactly. Born Nicholas Dingley, he arrived with a metal band that went nowhere, The Dark, and a couple of buzzing punk singles with Demon Preacher, a group he formed with the man who would become Alien Sex Fiend, Nik Fiend.
The third album, Back to Mystery City, was made at a residential studio and finished in three weeks. Andy McCoy wrote almost all of it — about ninety-five per cent, by his own reckoning. Michael Monroe's name appears as co-writer on 'Beating Gets Faster'. Lyrically, McCoy says, the record reads like a diary of his life at the time.
The crying at the end of 'Until I Get You', the ballad on Back to Mystery City, is not acting. By Michael Monroe's account, Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys and Lords Of The New Church was giving him pointers on arrangement during that record, and on this song told him to think about it until he was in tears and then sing it. At the end of the track he really is in tears. A relationship of his had just ended, and he was genuinely broken up by it.
'Malibu Beach Nightmare', the album's first single, started life as a joke. By Michael Monroe's account the original was sung in the manner of Ian Dury with Chipmunks-style backing vocals — a gag and nothing more. On the tour bus he suggested to Andy McCoy that they play it like the Ramones; that gave it a rock'n'roll arrangement, they started doing it live, and it became the single.
Back to Mystery City was produced by Dale Griffin and Overend Watts, the founding rhythm section of Mott the Hoople. By Andy McCoy's account the band had always loved Mott and wanted to sound like themselves without anyone spoiling it; the pair started spending time with them, came to a few shows, and were exactly the right choice.
Tooting Bec, the south London suburb in the title of 'Tooting Bec Wreck', is where the still-broke band settled in London. Andy McCoy is not kind about it: a terrible town, dreary and depressing to live in. They moved out when the rats moved in. London in the early eighties was rainy and bleak, they had no money, and the lyric, he says, is that feeling turned inward.
There is a remade version of the comeback album Twelve Shots on the Rocks. By Michael Monroe's account the 2002 release had been mixed while the band were away and did not satisfy them, so after a British tour in 2003 they went back into the studio, re-sequenced it and mixed it again. Andy McCoy's description of the result is that it runs to about ninety minutes — the length of a double album.
Michael Monroe has consistently refused the role of founding father of eighties glam metal. Speaking to a Japanese interviewer in 2003 he said being called a forerunner of the eighties metal bands was a nuisance. To Classic Rock he said people called him the King Of Glam while he always answered that they were a rock'n'roll band, that he does not want to be held responsible for glam, and that people should simply try to be themselves — and that the Los Angeles glam movement is not his to answer for.
The first Hanoi Rocks album Michael Monroe says he can listen to without squirming is Two Steps from the Move. With the earlier ones, he says, he cannot help thinking that a given part would have been better sung by Andy than by him.
On how the band ended after losing Razzle in December 1984, Michael Monroe's account is short. When Razzle died, Sami Yaffa left; he, Andy McCoy and Nasty Suicide were not connecting, least of all he and McCoy. He had no idea what he would do next and simply wanted to end Hanoi Rocks and leave it as it was. He then moved in with Stiv Bators — and Johnny Thunders moved in after him.
On Vince Neil, who was driving, Michael Monroe said this in a 2026 interview: having met him for the first time a couple of years earlier, he could see that — leaving aside the people injured in the crash — Neil must have suffered more than anyone else who knew Razzle. That whole thing ruined his life. There is nothing more to say about it, in Monroe's words, than that it was bad luck.
Michael Monroe was explicit that the performance was not a reunion. This was the only fitting time and place for the five of them to play together, he said, but it was not a Hanoi Rocks reunion — it was one part of an anniversary concert. He had intended to keep it secret and then thought better of it: it would not have been fair, particularly to the fans, to give no notice. Demolition 23, who had not played together since 1995, were on the same bill.
As of 2013 Michael Monroe ruled a reunion out flatly. The original Hanoi Rocks is the only Hanoi Rocks worth a place in the rock'n'roll history books, he said; he could not see them getting together to do anything, and Hanoi Rocks would never get back together. Andy McCoy left slightly more room: a couple of gigs might be all right, but what would be the point beyond that — he would rather play new material.