Early 80s glam-punk peacocks Hanoi Rocks were one of Finland’s biggest musical exports. The five studio albums they released between their formation in 1979 and their split in 1985 were an influence on Guns N’ Roses, Poison and even Alice In Chains. But it’s their fourth album, 1983’s Back To Mystery City, that captured them at their best. In 2013, singer Mike Monroe and guitarist Andy McCoy looked back on the making of a cult classic.
Led by blond bombshell Mike Monroe and his guitar-slinging partner in crime Andy McCoy, Hanoi Rocks were skinny motherfuckers from Helsinki who slithered out of the London gloom and saved rock’n’roll with an album that was equal parts Shangri-Las, Johnny Thunders and the MC5.
Irresistible, chiming, good-vibe anthems like Mental Beat and Malibu Beach Nightmare promised ice cream, endless summers and a million pretty girls, and everything, quite suddenly, was gonna be thoroughly alright. Back To Mystery City was both warm and familiar and shiny and new all at once, a glittering diamond in a sea of scuzz.
If you’re too young or have suffered too many wasted years to remember 1983, here’s a recap: it was grim. Post-punk and pre-party metal, if it wasn’t on Top Of The Pops in ’83, it was down on the streets with the skinheads and the goths, a joyless division of bored youth and rabble-rousers.
At that point, Hanoi Rocks had already been together for four years and had released two albums to various degrees of success, mostly at home in Finland and Sweden. But Hanoi Rocks wanted the world. And the world, in 1983, started in London.
“I’d already basically made it to multi-platinum status by the age of 18 in Finland,” drawls a sleepy Andy McCoy from his kitchen in Helsinki. A teenage McCoy had joined Finnish punk band Pelle Miljoona Oy during their most successful period, and had reaped the rewards. “So of course, you realise you’re restricted by the borders of one country. So the first thing for us was to get out of Helsinki and go to Stockholm, where I grew up.”
“We wanted to get as far away as possible because we were afraid we were going to get stuck in Finland,” adds Mike Monroe, also in Helsinki. “We used to play these weekend shows here where people would just get completely shitfaced, so it was useless to rehearse new material because people couldn’t even tell if you sounded like shit or if the song was good or bad. Half the time they didn’t even know what band was playing.
“When me and Andy started the whole idea of Hanoi Rocks, basically the idea was to get the hell out of Helsinki. Helsinki in the late 70s, it was dangerous to walk around… we just wanted to get the fuck out of there.”
Since McCoy had already lived in Stockholm, it was up to him to set the band up in their new city. He left and called the band to meet him a couple of weeks later. Monroe, bass player Sami Yaffa and guitarist Nasty Suicide all met up with McCoy outside a subway station.
“McCoy says, ‘Well, this is it,’” Monroe recalls, “And we’re like, ‘This is it?’ We were at a fuckin’ subway station. He said, ‘We can practise inside the station and we can live on the street.’ Well, okay. I mean, how much did we need, really? We just started panhandling for money.”
McCoy had it a little easier. He had a girlfriend in Stockholm and was living comfortably. The rest of the band survived on shoplifting chickens and sleeping on couches during weekend-long parties.
“I remember at one point Nasty had no socks,” Monroe laughs. “He had creepers with no laces, so he was walking like he was skiing, just to keep them on. But in a way, it was probably the happiest, coolest time of my life, because I had nothing to lose. No one could take anything away from me because I didn’t have anything. All I had was a suitcase, a cardboard box and a great rock’n’roll band. That was all I needed. I was sure I was going to make a million dollars, and if I get a roof over my head, hell, that’d be a luxury.”
Things were looking bleak, but help was on the way. Back in Finland, the band had met a fledgling manager/promoter named Zeppo. He was interested in working with the band but vanished to Turkey for six months, vowing to catch up with them later.
“So he came to see us in Stockholm six months later when we were living in the streets,” Monroe says, “and he booked us some gigs in Finland, and that’s how we first starting making some income. He went to London because he was looking for a partner or something, and he ended up becoming partners with this guy over there named Richard Bishop, and he started getting us shows in London.”
Of course, some serious lifestyle adjustments had to be made. Hanoi were famous back home. In London? Not so much. “It was hard, starting all over again,” McCoy says. “I remember the first club gig we did in London, I think we had three paying customers. A few other people got in for free, and I’ll never forget it, there was this three-legged, half-blind dog walking around.”
“At first we’d play a few shows in London and then we’d go back to Stockholm,” says Monroe. “But we got more gigs, so we started staying in seedy hotels in London, and eventually we got a flat. Our first shows when we came back, we did three shows opening for Wishbone Ash, of all people. The first show was about two or three thousand people, and I don’t think they knew we were the opening band. We came out and everybody started cheering, and then they turned the lights on and it was total silence. Just silence.”
“But hey, things started turning for the better pretty fast,” says McCoy.
Indeed they did. But first, the band needed to write and record a new album, one that would shake London to the rafters and make rock’n’roll safe for gypsies, tramps and thieves once more. And that’s exactly what happened. But before that, there was some ugliness to endure. The still-broke band set up camp in natty London suburb Tooting Bec. Immortalised on Back To Mystery City in the iconic Tooting Bec Rec, the Hanoi band house was a cesspool of angry neighbours and snapping vermin.
“God, that’s a shit town,” McCoy laughs. “It was a dreadful, dreary place to live. We moved out when the rats moved in. London in the early 80s, it was rainy, gloomy, bleak. That song is very introspective, lyrically. That’s how it felt living in a shithole like Tooting Bec and not having much money.”
Still, the band carried on. Back To Mystery City was recorded in early 1983. The songs were written, mostly, by McCoy.
“Yeah, I wrote about 95 per cent of the album,” he remembers. “Mike co-wrote Beating Gets Faster. The rest of them, best as I recall, are mine. Lyrically, that whole record is like a diary of my life at that time.”
“Stiv Bators [Dead Boys/Lords Of The New Church singer] would give me a lot of pointers for song arranging when we were making that album,” Monroe says. “Like on Until I Get You, he told me that I should think about it until I’m in tears, and then sing it. So at the end of that song, I really am in tears, crying. I was bawling my eyes out. I had a situation in my life, I had a relationship that went bad, and I was really heartbroken, so it was for real. I hadn’t really started writing yet. I hadn’t come into my own as a songwriter back then, because Andy really wrote most of the stuff and it was good, and if I had an idea, he’d usually go, ‘Yeah, that’s good, but I’ve got something better,’ so eventually I’d give up.”
Occasionally, however, Monroe’s influence would pop up on the record.
“Like Malibu Beach Nightmare,” he says. “The original version was a joke song, it was sung like Ian Dury, and the back-up vocals were like the Chipmunks, just a joke. And then one day, we were on the tour bus and I said to Andy, ‘How about we play it like the Ramones?’ So we gave it a rock’n’roll arrangement, and we started playing it live, and that became our first single on the album.”
Interestingly, given the band’s penchant for the perils of rock’n’roll decadence, there’s a wide-eyed innocence to the songs on Back To Mystery City. Squint a little, and it almost feels like a 50s doo-wop record.
“I was always a big fan of that shit,” says McCoy. “I’ve always loved 50s and early 60s rock’n’roll, the girl groups and so forth. So that was in there.”
The album was produced by Dale Griffin and Paul ‘Overend’ Watts, better known as Mott the Hoople’s founding rhythm section.
“We always loved Mott The Hoople as a band,” McCoy explains. “We wanted to sound like us, without anyone screwing it up. Overend and Dale started hanging out with us, they checked out a few gigs, and they were just the right choice. They really dug the band in a genuine way and we got along like a house on fire, so it came together pretty easily.”
There was another important new element to Hanoi during the Mystery sessions: their new drummer, Nicholas ‘Razzle’ Dingley, a gangly, happy-go-lucky charmer known, if at all, for his go-nowhere metal band The Dark, or a couple of buzzy punk singles with Demon Preacher, a band he formed with future Alien Sex Fiend, Nik Fiend. Razzle was recruited after the band were forced to fire their long-time drummer Gyp Casino, who was struggling with drug addiction at the time.
“There were moments when he would just stop playing in the middle of a song and walk out of the studio and go walk around the block to cool down or whatever,” Monroe remembers. “Once, in the middle of a show in Finland, Andy started yelling at a roadie about something, and Gyp jumps up from his drumset, walks across the stage and punches Andy in the face. In the middle of the fuckin’ show. Talk about timing. I mean, if you wanna kick the guy’s ass, wait until the show is over, at least. Or after we get paid, even better. But by that time, it had become obvious that Gyp wasn’t really part of the band any more.”
“He was being fired to protect himself from himself,” says McCoy. “Nowadays he’s got himself together and he’s really a wonderful guy and a wonderful friend, but it got pretty bad there at the end. It was a hard, hard thing to fire a good friend, but it had to be done for the band to continue.”
Luckily for the band, Razzle fitted right in.
“I met Razzle at a Johnny Thunders show at the Marquee, but I was in such a state at the time that I didn’t remember,” laughs Monroe. “I met him again at the Zig Zag Club and he was like, ‘Don’t you remember me? We talked in the bathroom at the Thunders show,’ and I was like, ‘Uh, yeah, sure.’ And he said, ‘I told you, I’m your drummer. Your band is great, and you gotta pick me as your drummer. Your drummer sucks, where is he? Cuz I’m gonna break his fuckin’ legs…’ So we’re thinking about drummers, and Andy says to me, ‘There’s this guy that’s been harassing me about being our drummer.’ Turns out it was the same guy. So we gave him an audition. Technically, he wasn’t the greatest drummer, but he had such cool style. I mean, he wore platform shoes to the audition. That’s not ideal for playing drums.”
“He was a funny guy, he got the humour back in the band,” McCoy remembers. “We had toured pretty constantly since we started, and I think the sense of humour went out the window for a while. Razzle brought it back. He was a barrel of laughs.”
The album was recorded at a residential studio. They were in and out in three weeks. The end result was perhaps Hanoi’s finest hour, and their most well-liked album – for most people.
“Our next record, Two Steps From The Move, that was the first Hanoi record I could listen to without squirming,” Monroe says, “Without going, ‘Man, I wish Andy had sung that part instead of me,’ you know, because of whatever corny thing he was doing. I mean, Lick Summer Love? It’s supposed to be cool and sleazy, but it’s really not. This album, it was fun to make, but it didn’t really sound like the best we could do. I’m glad people think so highly of it, though.”
Back To Mystery City was released in May 1983. It reached 87 on the UK charts, which is nothing, really, but the damage was done. The entire landscape of the London rock scene changed soon after. Glamour was back. As was authentic, good-time rock’n’roll.
“When we first arrived, you had your Oi! scene, which was just coming up around then,” McCoy says. “Punk was just dying out, and I suppose there really wasn’t anything new happening at the time, except us. Because of Hanoi, a whole wave of new bands started coming up.”
Of course, by that point, even London was too small for Hanoi. “It got really busy,” McCoy says. “We did a lot of live shows, and that’s when it really started to take off. We played everywhere.”
“We were really the darlings of the press at that time,” Monroe says. “Everybody loved Hanoi Rocks in the music papers, but we were getting sent to the weirdest countries to play. You’d think they’d send us to Europe to play for fans in places like France or Italy or Spain, but that’s not where we went – we went to fuckin’ far east India. We went to Bombay and New Delhi, and then we went to Hong Kong, and we ended up doing a whole week in Tel Aviv. We stayed there a whole week and played every night at a club that was around the corner from the hotel, and we barely got out of the country. We had to pay a huge fine for damages, and there was a headline in the paper about us: ‘Havoc in the Holy Land!’”
“That’s around the time we started to notice people were noticing us,” McCoy says. “You reach a point where you’re like, ‘Shit, I can’t hang out where I used to because people won’t leave me alone.’”
You know the rest of the story. By the end of 1983, Hanoi Rocks were huge in Japan and big everywhere else. Turns out there really were a million girls waiting for ’em, so they chased them around the world for a year, until Razzle’s untimely death in December of ’84 essentially ended the band. By that time, Hollywood had stolen Hanoi’s dimmest bits and used them to create the monster known as glam metal.
“People were calling me The King Of Glam,” laughs Monroe. “I always just said we were a rock’n’roll band. I don’t want to be responsible for glam. I don’t think people should dress like me. Most people would look silly dressed like me. People should just try and be themselves. People wanted to blame me for the glam movement in LA. Don’t blame me for that shit. Most of those bands played their hairspray cans better than their instruments.”
The fellas in the band formed offshoots, released solo records, went to rehab. They even got back together for a few years. “Yeah, we had a rebirth, or a ‘regurge’, more accurately,” laughs Monroe. “Me and Andy had met each other after I moved back to Finland after living for 10 years in Manhattan. This was around 1996 or something, and over the next couple of years, we kinda got reacquainted.
“We got to know each other in a different way, and he had gained a lot of respect for my solo career. By that time, my solo career had been longer than Hanoi’s career. We were getting along and I thought, ‘Let’s see what we can accomplish at this point in our lives.’ We ended up doing three albums, but it ran its course and it really wasn’t fun any more, so we decided to end without any arguments or falling outs. We did a farewell tour, and that was it.”
For Monroe, his solo career remains high profile and high intensity. As for McCoy, he spent some time as a reality TV star before returning to his first love, painting. He has since tried to keep rock’n’roll at bay. It’s not working. It stands to reason that the surviving members of Hanoi Rocks might be tempted to relive the former glories of Back To Mystery City. But Mike Monroe is decisive on this matter.
“No,” he says, emphatically. “I can’t see us getting together to do anything, never mind Mystery City. The original Hanoi Rocks is the only Hanoi Rocks worth mentioning in the rock’n’roll history books. Hanoi Rocks will never get back together.”
McCoy is slightly more receptive to the idea. “It might be OK for a couple gigs, but after that, I mean, why? That’d be the big question,” he shrugs. “I’d rather play new stuff. “
Probably, I suggest, because lots of people want to revisit 1983.
“Well, they still haven’t invented a time machine,” chuckles McCoy, “so I don’t see the point. Call me when they do.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 187, July 2013
