MICHAEL MONROE Trivia — 97 Entries
97 sourced facts about MICHAEL MONROE.
Trivia
The club crowd in the Last Train To Tokyo video was assembled in Tokyo. Visiting Japan in August 2019, the band appeared as special guests at an Electric Eel Shock show and played a secret gig that doubled as the video shoot. The idea was Rich Jones', who wanted club footage in the video. They played several times for the cameras and in the end did a full set. The only announcement was that a special guest would be joining Electric Eel Shock, but word spread: they had expected around 150 people and about 300 turned up. Monroe's memory of the night is that he hung from a pipe in the ceiling and the audience hung off it with him, singing.
His February 2024 Japanese shows all sold out, and on a day off he went to Kyoto — to the Toei film park, where he met Tsutomu Hirai, an actor who plays samurai there. Hirai had been there in 1983 as well, when Hanoi Rocks visited the same place, and Andy McCoy had given him one of his scarves. Monroe had also heard that Hirai used to sing Hanoi songs at karaoke. On the 2024 visit Hirai came over to greet him: more than forty years on, he was still working there as a samurai. Monroe said he intended to invite him to the Osaka show in November 2025.
His first visit to Japan was Hanoi Rocks' first Japanese tour in 1983. By 2023 he put the number of visits since then at around thirty — he had counted twenty-five once, he said, but that was a long time ago. He had liked Japanese lettering before he ever went, and wanted a tattoo in a Japanese-style script. The original plan was his then girlfriend's name alongside a rose; his bandmates told him to put the band's name in Japanese-style characters instead, and that is what he did. He likes the kimono and the culture too, and says he came to love the country for the consideration and courtesy people show each other, and for their attitude to life.
Sensory Overdrive was named the year's best in two countries. In November 2011 it won Album Of The Year at the awards ceremony held by the British magazine Classic Rock, and then in January 2012 the Finnish Emma Gaala — often described as Finland's Grammys — gave Michael Monroe the best band award and Sensory Overdrive the best rock album award. The record had also gone to number one in his native Finland.
The name Michael Monroe was never designed at a desk. He was born Matti Antero Kristian Fagerholm, and when Hanoi Rocks came together the whole band agreed there was no point keeping Finnish birth names that nobody abroad could pronounce — after all, neither Marilyn Monroe nor Alice Cooper had used theirs. The first name arrived by accident. A Venezuelan keyboard player in a band he used to jam with asked what he was called; he answered "Makke", the nickname he had carried since he was about eight, and the keyboard player asked whether he could just say "Mike" instead. Mike came out of that, and Monroe decided Michael sounded better than Mike. The surname came from the fact that Marilyn Monroe had died the very summer he was born, and from it simply being a good name.
Razzle joined the band because of a disastrous night out. The first of three London shows was an unqualified mess: Lords Of The New Church headlined, Monroe and Andy McCoy had been up on speed for five days, Monroe threw up on stage in the middle of Don't Follow Me I'm Lost Too, McCoy and Nasty Suicide both broke a string on their opening chord and Yaffa was sick behind his amp. People still came up afterwards to say they had been great. Later that night, standing at the urinal, Monroe was approached by a stranger who told him the band was great but that he should be their drummer; Monroe took his number. Back at the hotel he asked McCoy what they were going to do about Gyp, and McCoy replied that some guy kept accosting him with exactly the same claim. It was the same man. At the audition he was not much of a technician, but his attitude was perfect and he looked the part — a mane of hair, black lipstick and platform boots, which the band asked him whether he really intended to play in. A group at a low ebb suddenly felt locked in again.
The session for Ain't It Fun carried the working method of a dead friend into the room. When Stiv Bators and Monroe used to record vocals together, Bators had a ritual of arranging lit candles in a circle and having Monroe sing inside that "protective" circle. So Monroe and Axl Rose gathered every candle they could find in the studio, built a circle around the two of them, stood facing each other, lit them and sang the song face to face. In places, Monroe says, Rose sounded exactly like Bators — and he remembers thinking the two of them had the same kind of voodoo.
On 23 September 2022, at his 60th birthday concert in his home city of Helsinki, the original line-up of Hanoi Rocks reunited for one night. It was the first time Michael Monroe, Andy McCoy, Nasty Suicide, Sami Yaffa and Gyp Casino had stood on the same stage since 27 July 1982 — a gap of forty years. They played nine songs: Tragedy, 11th Street Kids, Oriental Beat, Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, Don't You Ever Leave Me, Motorvatin', Malibu Beach Nightmare, Million Miles Away and Up Around The Bend. Across the whole evening, counting the Demolition 23. and original Hanoi sections, the set ran to thirty-seven songs. There was a great deal of singing to do, Monroe said afterwards, and his voice held up well.
Sensory Overdrive reached Japan in the week after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake — a piece of timing that Victor Entertainment, the album's Japanese licensee, records in its own artist profile. Three months later, in June 2011, Monroe toured Japan with Hardcore Superstar, and in October of the same year he was back for a third visit, playing the V-Rock Festival.
The colour booklet of the Japanese deluxe edition of Blackout States carries the names of Japanese fans. In July 2015 Victor Entertainment, the album's Japanese licensee, ran a campaign on the Victor Rocks Facebook page under which every single person who liked the page and then either liked or shared the announcement post would have their Facebook username printed in that booklet — not the black-and-white Japanese-made insert that carries the liner notes and translated lyrics, but the colour booklet. The deadline was the 31st of the same month.
On 9 September 2015 the first six Hanoi Rocks albums all became available as high-resolution downloads in Japan on the same day. Victor Entertainment, which listed the six by their Japanese titles, announced it in the month before Blackout States was due.
I Live Too Fast To Die Young! had a strictly limited deluxe edition released only in Japan, which added a live CD titled Live! Too Fast To Die Young In Stockholm!, recorded at a 2016 Stockholm show. Victor Entertainment states plainly that this live album is available nowhere except in that edition.
For his Japanese run in February 2024 he gave each of the two Tokyo nights to a different anniversary. The show at Shibuya's Spotify O-East on 6 February marked forty years of Hanoi Rocks' Two Steps From The Move; the following night at the same venue marked thirty-five years of his solo album Not Fakin' It. The tour ran to four shows, with Nagoya Club Quattro on the 8th and Umeda Club Quattro on the 9th; when the official site announced it on 16 January, Osaka was already sold out and the other three had only limited tickets left.
A special autograph signing was arranged in Tokyo around the February 2024 shows. The Japanese-language announcement on the official site says it was put together at short notice at the express wish of Monroe and the band, and that it was open to the first fans to buy qualifying items from the Victor online store within the set period. It took place on 7 February.
The Japan-only limited deluxe edition of Outerstellar comes with a CD called On The Rocks – Acoustic Live, a recording of an acoustic show played on 9 September 2024 at a venue called On The Rocks in Helsinki, in Monroe's native Finland. The song selection retraces his own history. There are covers of It's Cold Outside, released in 1966 by the American garage rock band The Choir; Medicine Man, released in 1981 by Syl Sylvain And The Teardrops, the band led by the New York Dolls' Sylvain Sylvain; and The Last Year, from Stiv Bators' 1980 album Disconnected. Alongside them sits Can't Go Home Again, from Nights Are So Long, Monroe's own first solo album, released in 1987.
Sensory Overdrive was reissued in Japan on 10 June 2022 as a strictly limited paper-sleeve edition priced at 1,430 yen including tax. Victor Entertainment's product page describes it as the first studio album by the Michael Monroe band, featuring Ginger on guitar and Sami Yaffa on bass, and names Jack Douglas — a producer whose credits include Aerosmith — as the man behind it. The Japanese edition runs to thirteen tracks including two bonus tracks, among them Trick Of The Wrist and '78, and comes with sleeve notes, lyrics and translations. It appeared on the same day as I Live Too Fast To Die Young!.
Electric Eel Shock, the band Monroe guested with at that secret gig, went on to support him on the following UK tour. Monroe notes that the support acts put in front of him tend to be glam bands, because people misread his own band as a glam rock band. They are a rock'n'roll band, in his view, and Electric Eel Shock's punk rock style fits them far better than anything from the glam end.
Of his Summer Sonic appearance in August 2019 Monroe says it may have been the hottest gig he has ever played. He performed at both the Tokyo and Osaka sites, and Tokyo was the worse of the two because it was indoors. The Damned were on the same festival, and Monroe went to watch Captain Sensible — a favourite band and a friend. He was duly called up on stage during Jet Boy, Jet Girl, and by the end somebody had handed him a guitar.
Built For Speed, from One Man Gang, is a Japanese-edition bonus track — which is why it only ever gets played live in Japan. It duly turned up in the encore at his Tokyo show in December 2019. In that same encore he sat behind the drums for the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop, an idea he had while the band was still backstage; he admits he had not drummed in a long time and that it was quite hard work, though he kept a straight face about it. When he then announced that Low Life In High Places — the encore's intended opener — would follow, Sami Yaffa kept asking him whether that really was the right song to put after a crowd shouting "hey ho". Monroe said he would take responsibility, went ahead, and the room went with him.
On that first 1983 visit the Japanese record company marketed Hanoi Rocks as a nice teen pop band, which — Monroe says with some amusement — they emphatically were not. By the following year's visit there were more male fans in the audience, but what met them was Beatles-grade hysteria, with nowhere they could go to be left alone. A female fan once turned out to be hiding in the wardrobe of Sami Yaffa's hotel room and asked for an autograph; how she got in, Monroe still has no idea. On another occasion the same fans who had seen them off on the platform at Tokyo station were waiting for them at the station where the bullet train arrived.
During the 1984 visit he went swimming at a public pool somewhere around Harajuku. Security tried to stop him walking to the subway; he set off anyway, and several dozen fans followed him and told him which line to take. He walked calmly rather than running, on the grounds that running could cause an accident. The water in the pool was very cold and he swam anyway. Then an announcement came over the tannoy, everybody climbed out, lined up along the poolside and began doing exercises. With no idea what was happening, he quietly slipped away.
Michael Monroe appears on L'Arc-en-Ciel TRIBUTE, released on 13 June 2012, covering Heaven's Drive as the album's eighth track. The project had overseas artists cover L'Arc-en-Ciel songs, and ten acts took part in all: Vince Neil, Orianthi, TLC, Eric Martin with John 5, Zebrahead, Boyz II Men, Maxi Priest, Daniel Powter, Clémentine and Monroe himself. Four Japanese acts — Polysics, Sid, Hemenway and Totalfat — contributed bonus tracks.
On 24 November 2025 Michael Monroe played Rock Beyond Rock Vol. 2 at Hall 5 of Intex Osaka, on a bill with B'z, Loudness and Kuroyume. The event was staged to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Rock Rock, a long-established music bar in the Amerikamura district of Shinsaibashi in Osaka.
When the new band was announced in January 2010 the line-up looked quite unlike the one on the sleeve today. Alongside Sami Yaffa, Monroe's ally since the Hanoi Rocks years, it featured Ginger of The Wildhearts, Todd Youth — who had played with Danzig among others — and Jimmy Clark, who had been alongside Monroe and Yaffa in Demolition 23. Then Clark left once rehearsals for the tour began, and Karl Rockfist came in on Youth's recommendation. Youth himself left next, to join former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley's band, and Steve Conte of the reformed New York Dolls replaced him. The line-up had turned over twice before the band had released a single record.
Recording proper for Blackout States began in Sweden in February 2015. That same month, Monroe lost his father. Victor Entertainment's artist profile records that he carried that grief with him while cutting the album's vocals. The record arrived in early October, and from the moment of its release he was out across Europe touring with Hardcore Superstar.
On 28 May 2018 a short note appeared on the official site: Nasty Suicide had dropped by the studio the previous week to play some guitar on the new album, and another "neat" guest had been roped in as well, with details to follow. The band chose to announce that Monroe's old Hanoi Rocks foil had turned up at the sessions in its own words, long before the record itself was finished.
The title I Live Too Fast To Die Young! inverts the dying-young mythology that trails rock history. As Victor Entertainment, the album's Japanese licensee, glosses it, the sense is that he lived so fast he never had the time to die young. Musicians who died at twenty-seven get filed under the "27 Club", and there is a general assumption that rock stars go early; Monroe, who turned sixty in the year this record came out, has simply been moving too quickly for that. The previous year, 2021, had marked forty years since his professional debut on Hanoi Rocks' 1981 album Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks.
Slash of Guns N' Roses plays the guitar solo and additional guitars on the title track of I Live Too Fast To Die Young!. Victor Entertainment, releasing the album in Japan, notes his respect for Monroe as the background to the collaboration. As it happened, the day after the album came out — 11 June 2022 — Guns N' Roses and Michael Monroe both appeared at the Sweden Rock festival.
Michael Monroe has also made a voice-acting debut. He played Darius, the buffalo, in the Finnish-language version of the animated film Sing 2. The same character was voiced by Subaru Kimura in the Japanese version and by the comedian Eric André in the original English one.
In November 2018 the band appeared as guests on the UK leg of Wayne Kramer's MC50, the fiftieth-anniversary MC5 tour. On the official site Monroe called the invitation a great honour and privilege, describing MC5 as always having been one of his favourite bands of all time and one of the most important bands in the history of rock'n'roll. The dates were Glasgow, Manchester and London.
2024 was the fortieth anniversary of Hanoi Rocks' Two Steps From The Move, and Michael Monroe marked it with four special shows. With his own band — Sami Yaffa, Steve Conte, Rich Jones and Karl Rockfist — he played the album in full alongside a best-of set drawing on Michael Monroe material from every era. The dates were Copenhagen on 10 September, Stockholm on 11 September, London's Electric Ballroom on 27 November and KK's Steel Mill in Wolverhampton on 28 November.
In the video for Rockin' Horse, the first single from Outerstellar, Michael Monroe appears without make-up for the first time. Leigh Brooks directed it, and the conceit is a fictional breakfast television programme called Waking Up With Michael Monroe, with Monroe himself as the host. In his comment on the official site he notes that the band all took on different characters for it — and points out, with an exclamation mark of his own, that this is the first time anyone has ever seen him without make-up.
One More Sunrise, from Outerstellar, features Morgan Fisher on piano — the keyboard player who was part of the legendary British band Mott The Hoople. The Finnish musician Oscar Gräsbeck plays accordion on the same track.
The band's two guitar seats carry very different histories. Steve Conte started at the age of eleven, made his first album in the family living room and backed his jazz singer mother at venues around New York and New Jersey. He went on to lead his own bands, The Crazy Truth and Company Of Wolves, and to provide backbone and lead work for Suzi Quatro, Willy DeVille and Eric Burdon; in 2004 he was the man called in to fill the considerable void Johnny Thunders had left in the reformed New York Dolls. Rich Jones came from The Ginger Wildheart Band and The Black Halos, and the official biography calls him as volatile a guitarist as Monroe has ever worked with. He joined in the summer of 2013, standing in for a temporarily absent Dregen — and the kick he gave the band was strong enough that he was invited to stay as a full member.
The rhythm section has a long backstory too. Bassist Sami Yaffa and Monroe go back to the 1980s: Yaffa played bass in Hanoi Rocks, launched Demolition 23. with Monroe, and started the cult band Mad Juana in Spain in the 1990s before joining the reformed New York Dolls and, this millennium, playing with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Drummer Karl Rockfist came out of the Los Angeles trash-rockers The Chelsea Smiles and has played behind figures including Glenn Danzig and Joan Osborne. The official biography calls the two of them the beating heart of the group.
He was born on 17 June 1962, a Swedish-speaking Finn and the youngest of three brothers. Both parents worked in broadcasting: his father was a radio announcer known to more or less the whole country, softly spoken and old-school, and his mother was in radio too, having started out as a recording engineer for radio plays. That is where the two of them met. When a play needed children's voices, he and his brothers were the children, and they turned up in television commercials as well. In the earliest days of Hanoi Rocks he was known as the announcer's son; before very long his father was being introduced as Michael Monroe's father.
The only music in the house was classical. His parents listened to symphonies and to Sibelius; his maternal grandfather played cello and double bass, and that grandfather's own father had been an oboe player. That single-colour world broke open on television when he was eight years old, when he saw Black Sabbath. He had never heard anything like it, and watching the man going wild at the front of the stage he found himself thinking that maybe he could do that too — and that if he could somehow make a living out of it, it would be an extraordinary thing. He has returned to that one moment ever since as the point where everything started.
He started piano lessons at around five and learned to read music, although playing by ear always came more easily to him than following the notes. After Black Sabbath arrived when he was eight he realised he could play rock'n'roll on the piano too, and asked his mother whether he could carry on with lessons. Guitar he taught himself. He also studied classical flute for a year, and it was that year which led him towards the saxophone that became his signature instrument — an instrument he went on to master by blowing along to Little Richard and Coasters records.
The first records in the house came from his father, who walked into a record shop and asked the staff what kids were listening to these days. The first album the family owned as a result was Led Zeppelin II. The first album Monroe owned himself was Deep Purple's Fireball, a Christmas present from the same father. The decisive one came slightly later: his father bought Alice Cooper's Love It To Death for his brother, and it is that record which Monroe singles out as the one that did it.
He could already read by the time he started elementary school, having followed along while his mother read fairy tales to his older brothers, so a classroom full of children still learning the alphabet bored him. He also fell foul of an elderly teacher who had it in for him; he gave as good as he got and ended up in the headmaster's office, and a reputation as a troublemaker duly followed. The school sent him to a child psychiatrist. This was 1969, the boy was gripped by the first Moon landing and knew the names of all the Apollo astronauts, and he explained his excitement and the details of the mission at length. The verdict went back to the school: the child is entirely normal for his age — send us the teacher instead.
Hanoi Rocks came out of an audition he failed on purpose. His jam band and Andy McCoy's punk band Briard shared a rehearsal room in the crypt of a church in Helsinki. Going back one day for something he had forgotten, he fell into conversation with McCoy, who then suggested to Briard's singer that this was the man to take the second guitar seat. The band went outside to discuss it, came back, and made him an offer with one condition attached: he was in if he cut his hair. His hair at the time reached his waist, and he asked them whether they were out of their minds. That was the end of the audition — but not of the conversation. He and McCoy kept talking, decided to put a band together themselves, and started planning what became Hanoi Rocks.
At his first ever gig he was holding a guitar, not a microphone. It took place at a school near where he lived in Helsinki, with a singer a couple of years his senior out front. He had already decided he was going to be a singer regardless. His first gig in that role came with the very earliest version of Hanoi Rocks, a line-up that contained neither Andy McCoy nor Sami Yaffa: it was Monroe, Nasty Suicide on guitar, and three Finnish players — guitarist Stefan Piesnack, bassist Nedo Soininen and drummer Peki Sirola.
In 1979 the first shape of the band was called The Nymphomaniacs. Its guitarist was a Swedish friend of McCoy's, and Monroe went to Stockholm and slept on that guitarist's floor. There was a manager of sorts attached to the venture, who took the guitarist to a pawn shop, ran up an enormous phone bill and then disappeared. Nothing came of any of it, and Monroe moved back to Finland for a while.
In 1980 they left Finland for good and moved to Stockholm. The flat they had been promised never materialised, and Monroe, Sami Yaffa and Nasty Suicide ended up on the streets. Hanoi Rocks started for real at the end of that summer, and the three of them stayed on the streets for its first six months. What saved them was drummer Gyp Casino's rehearsal space beneath a subway station outside the city — a room like a fallout shelter, which they were not allowed to occupy overnight, since a guard came down to sweep it before a heavy metal door dropped. They hid behind the speakers until he had gone and then played until morning. One night they went back up the escalators, prised the gates open and raided a nearby field for carrots. Gyp had a job on the reception desk of a gymnasium for retired people, so their belongings lived in its boiler room and they would sneak in for a shower and a change of clothes before going back out. The gang-like bond of the band, Monroe says, was built there.
The first song he ever performed live was Kill City Kills, the B-side of the first Hanoi Rocks single. It was the song that opened the band's very first gig, with their very first line-up, at a place called Glädjehuset in Stockholm in 1980.
While the band was building its reputation for overindulgence, Monroe himself stayed relatively sober. He simply did not like drinking and was never the man in the pub getting drunk and talking nonsense. The turning point came in 1984, when producer Bob Ezrin suggested he take singing lessons to help his breathing. A classical singing teacher taught him to sing from the diaphragm rather than strain his throat, after which he could get through thirty shows without trouble. While the rest of them drank through the night he would swim in the hotel pool during the day and play the gig at night — and they resented him for turning up cheerful in the mornings.
On the end of Hanoi Rocks, Michael Monroe puts it flatly: Hanoi Rocks died with Razzle. After the band lost drummer Razzle — born Nicholas Dingley — on 8 December 1984, Sami Yaffa left as well, and in one stroke they had neither a drummer nor a bass player. That left Monroe, Andy McCoy and Nasty Suicide, and by then the three of them no longer connected at all; Monroe describes the others as being all the way down there while he was all the way up here. What mattered most to him was ending the band with its integrity intact.
In the immediate aftermath of Razzle's death, Lemmy Kilmister offered Monroe the use of Motörhead as his backing band. Lemmy was badly shaken by the drummer's death, and the way he put it was simply that they would back him up. Monroe was floored by how much the offer meant. Looking back he reckons he was so young and baby-faced at the time that Lemmy's audience would have eaten him alive — but on the size of the gesture, and on Lemmy himself, he is unequivocal: always consistent, always the same lovely man, and he counts himself lucky to have known him.
After Hanoi Rocks ended, Monroe moved in with Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys and Lords Of The New Church. It began with cat-sitting: he used to feed Bators' cat Ziggy whenever Bators was away. Once Bators' wife had moved out, Monroe moved in so the two of them could split the rent. Little Steven then came over to produce the Lords, and Johnny Thunders — thrown out by his girlfriend's family in Sweden — moved in on top of that. Monroe's own name for the period is the good old, bad old days.
The man who talked him into going solo was Stiv Bators, whose argument was that he should get back to writing songs. CBS at that point wanted demos so it could decide whether to keep him as a solo artist on the same worldwide deal Hanoi had, or drop him; he had no real wish to stay on the label but made the demos anyway. Then Little Steven arrived to make Sun City with Artists United Against Apartheid, agreed that Monroe should go solo, told him that Michael Monroe was a better name than Mike, and put both him and Bators on the Sun City single itself. That track was the first thing Monroe was part of in his post-Hanoi solo career, and he remains proud of having been on something that big.
The immediate reason he moved to New York was the Sun City video. Little Steven flew them over to shoot it in Washington Square Park, and when Monroe looked around he found himself among Run-DMC, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Grandmaster Flash, Pete Townshend, Miles Davis, Ronnie Wood and Ringo Starr. Standing there he decided to make a fresh start that summer, because this was where he belonged.
In New York, too, he was homeless at first. What saved him was the Limelight Club, which stayed open until six in the morning and so gave him somewhere to be other than the street. Eventually he got a flat on East Third Street, across the road from the Hells Angels. It was there that he moved in with Jude Wilder, who became his first wife, and began writing and recording.
Nights Are So Long was recorded on a small budget and intended for release in Scandinavia and Japan only. In Monroe's own description it effectively functioned as an international demo — and it did the job it was built for: on the strength of that record he signed a seven-album worldwide deal with Polygram and began work on Not Fakin' It.
In 1989, while Monroe was shooting the video for Dead, Jail Or Rock 'N' Roll in Midtown Manhattan, Axl Rose turned up — to tell him he was a huge Hanoi Rocks fan. Rose had heard a tape of the then-unreleased Not Fakin' It and liked it. The backing vocals on the record itself are Little Steven's, but Monroe asked Rose on the spot whether he wanted to come up and do a couple of takes for the camera; Rose did, and let them use the footage. Monroe reckons the exchange got him a little more fame and got Rose a little more street credibility in return.
The title track of 1989's Not Fakin' It is not a Monroe original but a Nazareth cover, and that single fact is what closed the distance between him and Axl Rose. Both men were Nazareth fans already — no surprise to Monroe, who could hear Dan McCafferty's influence in Rose's singing — but Rose did not know the song. Being told it was a Nazareth number made him like the album even more.
By his own reckoning Not Fakin' It was on its way to being the breakthrough. What killed it was a television commercial the label itself made, which billed him as "the brains behind Hanoi Rocks". There were no brains in Hanoi, Monroe objects, and that was the coolest thing about the band; the ad made the whole enterprise sound calculated, so he told the label to pull it before it destroyed his reputation. The ad was pulled — and the label then decided to let the record die.
Guns N' Roses acknowledged the Hanoi Rocks influence openly. Axl Rose told Monroe that Izzy Stradlin used to tell him to do his hair like Michael Monroe, and Monroe says he can see a trace of that in some of the band's early photographs and in the Welcome To The Jungle video. Guns went further and released Hanoi's European album catalogue in the States through their own Uzi Suicide label. Rose's reason was simple: he wanted people to know who and what Hanoi Rocks had been.
His appearance on Guns N' Roses' Bad Obsession started with a rough mix in the post and a request for harmonica and saxophone. He liked the song, said yes, and was flown to Los Angeles for the session; on arriving at the studio they played him newly recorded material, including Live And Let Die, through the big speakers. He ended up laying down an entire saxophone horn section for the track. Slash had a very specific idea of how the harmonica melody should go, and the two of them worked on it until it was exactly what he wanted.
Guns N' Roses ended up covering the Dead Boys' Ain't It Fun on their 1993 covers album "The Spaghetti Incident?" because of a single cassette. Axl Rose said on the phone that he did not really know the Dead Boys, so Monroe made him a tape of their first album and the best of the second and handed it over when he arrived in Los Angeles for the Use Your Illusion sessions. Driving around Hollywood in Rose's car with the tape playing, Ain't It Fun came on and Rose said at once that they had to record it — and rang Slash there and then.
He asked for no money for Ain't It Fun. Too many people, he thought, saw dollar signs and turned greedy the moment Guns N' Roses were involved, and he found that obnoxious. He asked for two things only: that the album credits carry the line "In memory of Stiv Bators", and that his own name be spelled correctly. Axl Rose said yes, of course. Monroe is plainly glad he was able to do that for a late friend, and that millions of Guns fans would see Bators' name and perhaps go looking for the Dead Boys.
After they finished the Ain't It Fun vocals, Monroe sat down at a piano in the studio and started playing. Behind him, a Rolling Stones pinball machine and a Kiss pinball machine began going off by themselves with nobody near them. Back in the control room he asked Axl Rose whether those machines ever did that on their own. The answer was no, never. Monroe said it must have been Stiv getting his wings, after the line in It's A Wonderful Life about a bell ringing and an angel getting his wings. Rose replied that it was the sweetest thing he had ever heard anybody say about anybody else.
In the early 90s his American career was brought to a halt by a collaborative project with Steve Stevens. Stevens had approached him about taking the guitar seat, but where Monroe wanted Little Steven as producer the label installed Michael Wagener instead. By the time Stevens had finished in the studio the record — released eponymously as Jerusalem Slim in 1992 — had cost something in the region of $700,000, leaving Monroe owing the label close to a million dollars. He decided to wait it out, and the label eventually dropped him. Which, ironically, was what finally set him free.
Free of the label at last, the first thing he made was the Demolition 23. album — with Little Steven producing, as he had wanted all along. It took two weeks. He still calls it one of the best-sounding records he has ever made.
The Demolition 23. tour fell apart before it began. Guitarist Jan Henning had a habit; he was hit by a car in Alphabet City and spent three months in Bellevue Hospital, and then, shortly before the tour, was arrested scoring. Disillusioned and fed up with having no business in the American music business, Monroe planned to move back to London — but his brother had just finished doing up a house in the Finnish countryside, so he went to the opposite extreme instead. He stayed there with his then wife and their cat, Susi, building giant snowmen and lanterns out of ice.
The title Peace Of Mind was a wish rather than a description. Nothing else was going right, everything was dysfunctional, and he thought perhaps he should be thinking more positively — so he named the album in the hope that the title would manifest itself into something. Jimmy Clark played drums on it; Monroe played very nearly everything else.
Life Gets You Dirty was the second album he made in Finland, and again he played nearly everything on it apart from bass and drums. He rates the songs — there are some really good ones on there, in his view — but admits that by the time they got to mixing he was so fried that the mixes were not up to much, and he wants to remix the record one day and put it out again with a better sound.
The Hanoi Rocks reunion rested on two pieces of misfortune. Monroe lost his first wife, Jude Wilder, to an intracranial haemorrhage in 2001, and moved to Turku, a couple of hours outside Helsinki. There he met Andy McCoy again after years of the two having nothing to do with each other — and McCoy had just fallen off a balcony and broken both legs. That he survived at all and could still walk was a miracle; the shattered legs were mostly titanium afterwards. McCoy was recovering from that and Monroe was recovering from losing his wife, and by his own account that is what the reunion was built on.
Five or six songs written for his solo album Whatcha Want ended up on Hanoi Rocks' Twelve Shots On The Rocks instead — the title track among them. The reason was straightforward: he reckoned they stood a better chance with the Hanoi Rocks name behind them.
After Hanoi Rocks was wound up for good in 2009, the band he fronts today began with Sami Yaffa. Yaffa came to Finland playing with the New York Dolls and started talking about wanting to work with Monroe again — and it happened that Monroe was going solo again anyway. The group was assembled from there. Ginger of The Wildhearts left and Dregen came in, and then Rich Jones arrived to complete the current line-up. The earlier records are good, Monroe says, but this is his favourite line-up and the best band he could hope for.
Sensory Overdrive was cut in Los Angeles with Jack Douglas producing — a man whose credits run through Aerosmith, John Lennon, Clutch, Slash's Snakepit and the New York Dolls. Its guests included Motörhead's Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister and the three-time Grammy-winning country and folk singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. It came out on 14 March 2011 through Universal's Spinefarm Records, with a North American release following on 23 August the same year.
Released on 27 August 2013 through Spinefarm Records, Horns And Halos was certified gold in Finland for sales in excess of 10,000 copies inside the first week of its release. It followed Sensory Overdrive, which had taken Classic Rock magazine's Album Of The Year award and gone to number one in Finland.
Rich Jones came into this band through Dregen's absence in the autumn of 2013 — though two explanations of that absence stand side by side. Dregen himself issued a statement in September 2013 saying he would not tour with Monroe for the remainder of the year so that he could concentrate on promoting his own debut solo album, with "the fantastic guitarist Rich Jones" filling in for him; his reasoning was that he had been part of two good rock records that year and neither he nor Monroe intended to disappoint their fans. Victor Entertainment's Japanese artist profile, on the other hand, attributes Dregen's absence from the dates after the November 2013 Japanese shows to his health. Dregen later left the band formally, with the revival of Backyard Babies also a factor, and Jones simply stayed.
The guitar on Wasted Years, from One Man Gang, is played by Hanoi Rocks' Nasty Suicide. Suicide has an ordinary working life as a pharmacist, and Monroe says he has always respected his wish to keep his distance from the world of rock and drink — though he still turns up at their shows now and then and plays. Monroe's assessment of him is blunt: Suicide spent his career in Andy McCoy's shadow, but as a guitarist Monroe rates him the better of the two, and in terms of what he does to the overall sound he compares him to Malcolm Young in AC/DC — not a man who pushes himself to the front. Invited to come down and put a solo on the record, Suicide turned up, was left to do as he liked, and delivered it in one take, as he always does.
The lead guitar on the title track of One Man Gang is played by Captain Sensible of The Damned. The song itself struck Monroe as having something of The Damned about it, so he rang Sensible — a friend — and asked whether he would play on it. Sensible said yes on the spot, and the parts started arriving by email the next day. Monroe likes the solo enough that he says he has been boasting about it to people. The two of them also crossed paths in London at an International Artist Of The Year presentation.
The cello on Low Life In High Places, the closing track of One Man Gang, is played by Eicca Toppinen of Apocalyptica. The two go back a long way — so far back that Monroe cannot pin down when they first met. The crossings are on the record, though: when Monroe was a coach on the third season of The Voice Of Finland in 2014, Toppinen was his adviser, and he played cello when Monroe duetted on Say Something with Siru Airistola, the finalist from Monroe's own team. Monroe has also appeared with Cherry & The Vipers, a separate project Toppinen runs with his wife.
The title One Man Gang was settled the moment the song was written — and Monroe enjoys the contradiction of putting a one-man gang on the cover of a record made by five people. The contents point the other way entirely: he encouraged everybody in the band to write, and ended up writing only about four of the songs himself. Rich Jones kept bringing material in, some of it Damned-like and some of it Clash-like, which Monroe thought was a good direction as well as good songwriting. They recorded eighteen songs, and the ones he thought too good to be relegated to bonus-track status were held back. Jones, incidentally, also designs the band's artwork and merchandising.
One Man Gang sat finished for a while before it came out. The basic tracks were essentially done by March 2018; recording paused over the summer for festival dates; the band went back into the studio in the autumn to finish the work with Rich Jones, and mixing and mastering were complete by December 2018. The album was released in October 2019. Monroe waited deliberately, until the team around it was in place: a manager, a record deal, and United Talent Agency as booking agent. He thought it was too good a record to release badly, so he held the timing.
On In The Tall Grass, from One Man Gang, Monroe uses a softness he had not used before. The lyric takes a teenager's view of realising the world is not an especially safe place, and of childhood innocence coming to an end, so he built the vocal to start gently, almost childlike, and turn fierce partway through. Rich Jones was struck by how well it fitted when he heard it back, and Monroe says an interviewer once asked him outright who on earth was singing it.
The trumpet on Heaven Is A Free State is played by a musician well known in Finnish jazz circles who belongs to an orchestra called Uuden Musiikin Orkesteri. Monroe had played in a band with a large horn section and met him there. When the song was written Monroe had put his own saxophone on it; the decision to switch to trumpet was made in the studio, and it turned into an unusual song for them — one he says he would not have attempted five years earlier. Steve Conte was half laughing at it; Sami Yaffa was enthusiastic from the start. Because of the trumpet part, the song could not be played at their Helsinki show.
The 30th anniversary of Not Fakin' It fell in 2019, and nothing came out to mark it. The reason is ownership: Monroe does not hold the masters. He accepts that remasters and compilations have improved the sound, and says that if the masters were his he would like to do an anniversary edition — he still has plenty of demos from the period. He adds that although several different versions of the record have apparently appeared, nobody even sends him a sample: he heard about one from other people and bought a copy himself.
Hanoi Rocks is generally credited as an influence on the glam metal and hair metal boom of the 1980s, but Michael Monroe does not welcome being filed alongside it. Recognition is always pleasant, he allows — but he is openly irritated that so many of those bands cared more about their hair and their partying than about the music, where what mattered to him was the music and how you conducted yourself. Plenty of them sold millions of records while behaving like idiots and dragging the name of genuine rockers through the mud, and he says it would embarrass him to be counted among them. Growing up in Finland, he suggests, gave him a different mentality.
His documentary film has been years in the making. Asked about it in 2021 on the podcast of Todd Kerns, bassist with Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators, Monroe said he wanted it finished by 2022. Its subject is the decade he spent in New York, which is also where Hanoi Rocks begins. Since it is the kind of thing you only make once in a lifetime, he said, he wanted to get it right. Interviews with Slash, Duff McKagan and Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett were already in the can at that point — and he intended to redo them. He had stopped building the film around his own achievements, because he wanted a story that people with no interest in him or in rock'n'roll could still enjoy.
The reunion was not the original plan. Monroe's first reason for wanting Gyp Casino there was quite different: Casino is a great admirer of Casino Steel of The Boys — he took his stage name from him — so the idea was to have Casino Steel sing his own song Jimmy Brown with Casino on drums. Sami Yaffa was already there and Nasty Suicide was already confirmed when Andy McCoy rang. He had heard about the birthday concert, and if he had a gap in his own world tour he could come and play Tragedy — in other words, he invited himself. That completed the original five, so Jimmy Brown was dropped, Casino's appearance was moved to the end of the night and the plan became a handful of original Hanoi Rocks songs instead. They considered keeping it secret as a surprise, but decided that fans might be angry at not being told in advance, so they announced it at a press conference at Tavastia. Tickets had been selling well already; by the afternoon after the announcement the show was sold out. They released every seat they could, including ones with a partly obstructed view, and more than 8,000 people came.
That night Gyp Casino sat behind a drum kit for the first time in forty years — he had not touched the instrument since leaving Hanoi Rocks. He played bravely regardless, Monroe says, and got through it without trouble, which Monroe found close to unbelievable. The two of them had met again the previous December, in Stockholm, during filming for Monroe's documentary. The reunion was strictly a one-night affair, with nothing planned since.
The remixed edition of Hanoi Rocks' second album Oriental Beat happened because a set of master tapes nobody could find turned up. The original mix had been a standing grievance in the band: by the time they heard it the record had already been pressed and nothing could be changed. In the early 90s, when Guns N' Roses wanted to release Hanoi's European albums in the States, Monroe wanted to remix it then too — and the Finnish label told him the masters were lost. Then, around 2020, word reached him that tapes had been seen in a Universal Music warehouse. He contacted the label's president and asked for a photograph; the words "Advision Studios London" on the box confirmed these were the Oriental Beat recordings. Work began at E-Studio with Petri Majuri, who has mixed all of Monroe's albums bar the most recent; Sami Yaffa sat in, and the results were sent to Nasty Suicide and Gyp Casino. Andy McCoy, whom Monroe had not seen for some twelve years, came into the studio last to finish it. Monroe's own joke about it is that this is the album that took the longest to complete.
Nothing on the Oriental Beat remix was newly recorded; everything used came off the original tapes. Alternative vocal takes surfaced for four songs — the opening of Oriental Beat itself now uses a take that was not the one chosen originally, complete with a scream that is not on the released version. One backing-vocal track turned out to have Andy McCoy and Monroe talking on it. Exactly one song was left alone: the closing Fallen Star. They tried remixing it and concluded it did not need changing. McCoy wrote it when he was very young, and on the album it is dedicated to the silent-film actress Mary Pickford.
Monroe remembers making Oriental Beat itself fondly: it was Hanoi Rocks' first time recording in London. Katrina of Katrina And The Waves, later known for Walking On Sunshine, came to the studio and sang harmony on Don't Follow Me — this was before she had her hit. She was very cool, he says, and he enjoyed the time they spent together. What he never worked out was what the producer's vision actually was, and the atmosphere around Gyp Casino was not good either. The playing came out reasonably well, in his account; it was the mix that ruined everything.
I Live Too Fast To Die Young! was recorded at Inkfish Studios in Helsinki across November and December 2021. The band produced it themselves together with engineer Erno Laitinen, who also recorded and mixed it; Svante Forsbäck mastered it at Chartmakers. The players are the current five: Monroe on lead vocals and harmonica, Steve Conte on guitars and vocals, Rich Jones on guitar and vocals, Karl Rockfist on drums and Sami Yaffa on bass, vocals and guitar. It was Monroe's second album for Silver Lining Music.
In June 2023, at Finland's Rockfest, Michael Monroe met Mötley Crüe's Vince Neil in person for the first time. The two men at the centre of the December 1984 crash that killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle — Nicholas Dingley, who was twenty-four — had never actually met. Monroe wrote on his own Instagram that meeting Neil for the first time was one of the most important moments of his life. He recorded that Razzle had always wanted the two of them to meet because he thought singers were alike; that under different circumstances the two bands would probably have ended up good friends, but fate had other plans; and that although they had not said much, Neil's eyes had told him more than a thousand words could.
After that first meeting, Michael Monroe wrote Vince Neil a letter, because he could see that Neil was still in pain over the crash. On the day itself Monroe had meant to join Mötley Crüe on stage with his harmonica, but arrived five minutes before they went on and watched from the side instead; the meeting happened as soon as their set finished. A week later he wrote the letter and asked Nikki Sixx to pass it to Neil. A couple of days after that, Sixx reported back that Neil had come to his room, read it, and said with a broad smile that it was amazing. Monroe's view is that Neil should stop being tormented by the whole thing, forgive himself and live happily — because that is what Razzle would want for him.
The acoustic solo shows Monroe keeps playing in Finland began almost by accident and stuck. The first public one was for the eighth anniversary of The Riff, the rock bar run by Jussi 69. The second, at Haikon Kartano in Porvoo, ran to three and a half hours. Without drums or electric guitars he can talk to the room while he plays and take requests — people ask for Stiv Bators and Johnny Thunders songs, among others. Three hours has become normal, and the last show of the autumn 2024 run, in Oulu, reached four and a half, his longest yet. Somebody once told him they preferred these to his 60th birthday concert at the Helsinki Ice Hall, which he recounts with some amusement.
The eye filling the sleeve of Outerstellar is Michael Monroe's right eye. It was designed as a companion to Sensory Overdrive, released in March 2011, which used his left. The idea came from guitarist Rich Jones. The colour schemes are deliberately opposed as well: the Outerstellar eye is cold where the Sensory Overdrive eye was warm. One idea under consideration was that opening out the record sleeve would show both eyes together and complete his face, and the label suggested an eye mask printed with both. The Japanese edition's notes point out that Outerstellar is built around blue where Sensory Overdrive was built around red, and that the Sensory Overdrive cover art is tucked into the Outerstellar artwork as a hint at the connection.
On the set of the Rockin' Horse video, Monroe held a door for a stranger who had walked into the studio — and the stranger was Sami Yaffa. Neither man had recognised the other. The shoot took place about a year before the video came out, during the UK tour on which Monroe broke a rib, at a studio en route from the London show to Wolverhampton. Beforehand he had gone to a second-hand shop and bought the dullest ordinary clothes he could find, a grey jacket and a white shirt, and added a pair of glasses. He phoned his mother from the shoot to show her, and she said he looked like his father. He has two older brothers and thinks the elder of them, Jari, is the one who resembles their father — but his father wore glasses, so he suspects the glasses did it. The original plan was for the band to revert to their usual selves at the end of the video; since they had already made plenty of videos as themselves, they decided to keep the disguise up to the last frame instead.
In the autumn of 2025 Monroe cancelled a tour because of a torn meniscus. Speaking to BARKS that November he was still signed off sick, though he said the knee was gradually improving — and promised that the Osaka show on 24 November would be a great rock'n'roll show.
His 2023 UK tour was a three-band bill with Phil Campbell & The Bastard Sons and Black Star Riders. By way of thanks, Monroe joined Campbell on stage to play blues harp on Born To Raise Hell, and sang alongside Ricky Warwick on Black Star Riders' Tonight The Moonlight Let Me Down. He had played a saxophone solo on the album version of that song; with Scott Gorham's guitar solo going in as well, he sang harmony live instead and it became a duet with Warwick.
There is one record he uses as a reference when he mixes his own albums: Ian Hunter's 1975 self-titled solo debut, co-produced with Mick Ronson, and above all its drum sound. It still has the greatest sound of anything, in his view. He also names Boy, from that same album, as the song that makes him cry, and calls it a masterpiece.
Asked what he would like played at his funeral, he named the long organ piece that closes Alice Cooper's Killer — with a caveat. He used to say that as a child, he explains, and then decided he did not want to die. The fact that nobody has yet lived forever is not proof that it cannot be done, so perhaps he will. All the same, the probability is that he will leave this body like most people do, and on that occasion he would like a few close friends to remember him while the end of Killer plays.