Interview by Adrian Hextall
Photos Credit: Victor Chalfant
Just imagine, Crossbone Skully… a legendary Harley-riding party animal and ghoulish rock & roll hero, armed with supernatural powers and a busted-up spaceship, treks back to earth to find the planet in chaos.
If, like me, your attention is immediately held, a grin on the face is apparent, and a raised eyebrow appears when you note that he recruits a mighty band of space warriors, The Misfits of the Universe (Alice Cooper, Joe Perry, Nikki Sixx, Kane Roberts & Sheryl Cooper), to defeat all-powerful Sorcerer (Johnny Depp), intent on using the Evil World Machine to drain the world of its life force and plunging humanity into darkness.
If it sounds like the plot to a Disney movie that sees the Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover with the Star Wars Universe, then you’d be right. It all comes from the imagination of former Warlock member and current Alice Cooper guitarist, Tommy Henriksen who along with super session-guitarist Tommy Denander somehow convinced the legendary Mutt Lange to emerge from retirement to executive produce the project.
Photo Credit: Victor Chalfant
“Holy all time music producers Batman” as Robin might say. That’s some line up. Between the trio, the have fashioned an intergalactic escapade that plays out like a mix of ‘War of the Worlds’ and ‘Grease’ but also tackles the wider socio-political issues of what is wrong in the world today. A sci-fi movie musical extravaganza with heart then?
We spoke to Tommy in a hotel near London’s famous Hammersmith Odeon (now the Eventim Apollo), a venue that feels like it’s linked to Alice’s legacy as much as it is to its own history. As we settle down over a coffee, Tommy, his black hair hanging long past his shoulders is dressed all in black, looking more than a little like…… oh wait, what’s that written on his t-shirt?
“I am not Alice Cooper”.
It would appear that Tommy, when Alice needs to make a quick exit, can stand in for his band leader and mentor as the number of fans that mistake him for Coop borders on the ridiculous. With a winning smile, it’s clear that Tommy can just take it all in his stride.
As we chat about the Crossbone Skully album, what becomes apparent, is the fact that everything just kind of fell together. The assumption that Tommy’s little black book as the A-Z of musicians that he can call upon is actually quite far from the truth. Yes, the is the same Tommy that plays in Hollywood Vampires, knows Joe Perry, Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp and yes, has them on speed dial… BUT there are thousands of A-class musicians out there that you’d think might be in that book but simply are not. It’s not like Club-Med for musicians where they all hang out at the same spa and pool on a regular basis and swap song ideas, although at this point, as my rock-n-roll dreams start to be shattered, Tommy laughs and explains just how it came together.
If you can believe it, the foundations for the album came as a result of Alice Cooper’s lighting guy, Cosmo, hearing Tommy singing in the shower after a show one night and convincing him that the man who sounds spookily like Bon Scott reincarnated, should perhaps consider going front and centre with the microphone. Having let the idea sink in a little, Tommy then enlisted guitarist Tommy Denander (who introduced him to Mutt Lange after collaborating on Alice Cooper’s 2017 album ‘Paranormal’ with Bob Ezrin), keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac (My Chemical Romance, John Mayer, Seal), bassist Chris Wyse (Hollywood Vampires, Ace Frehley, the Cult, Ozzy Osbourne) and drummer Glen Sobel (Alice Cooper, Hollywood Vampires), the late UFO bassist Pete Way and producer/mixer Mike Plotnikoff (AC/DC, Cher, Aerosmith), who helped get him noticed by Allen Kovac’s Better Noise Records. If ever there was a chain of events that pulled everything together it’s this one where one tells the other, tells the other, tells the other who then passes on the word and then before you know it, a band is born.
The icing of course is convincing Mutt Lange to come out of retirement to work with Tommy and the band. Having produced some of the most commercially successful rock albums of the 80s, ‘Back in Black’ and ‘Hysteria’ immediately springing to mind, listeners will be please to know that the Crossbone Skully album contains the best of both camps, all with a liberal sprinkling of Mutt magic over it all. For fans of ‘real’ arena driven rock music that made it big in that decade, then ‘Evil World Machine’ is the perfect release.
“It’s just one of those things,” says Tommy. “Me and Glenn [Sobel] sound check together, and we just do a variety of songs. It was a day like that where we were fooling round and I’m just singing. I learned [my trade] back in the club days, years ago. I was doing like three sets a night. We played till 4:00 in the morning. Yeah, that’s the one cool thing about when you played clubs, back in the day, you learn your craft. And I would sing for example Motley Crüe songs, and I could sing like Vince Neil. When I sang AC/DC, I’d totally go full Bon Scott.
Fast forward to now and when I was doing that in sound checks, when he said, ‘You know, you’re fooling around, when you should be doing this for real.’ and I was like, huh? And it just stuck in my head. I went home when we had a break and the first song I wrote was ‘The Boom Went the Boom’. I didn’t have any time to finish it up, so I sent it to Denander, and I asked him if he could put some guitars on it. He was just like, ‘What is this?’. Laughing at the memory, Tommy continues, “I tell him it’s like, it’s me, and that’s how that happened with him.”
Now the astute observers amongst us, those that either have the album or have heard the single will know that a solo in there comes from none other than Phil Collen. Tommy is insistent that the black book of numbers doesn’t exist, yet Phil who also made one of the biggest rock albums of the 80s and knows one Mutt Lange very well indeed, somehow now plays on the album where Mutt makes a comeback. The universe really is aligning.
Photo Credit: Victor Chalfant
“Well, there’s a lot to this,” explains Tommy. “Better Noise, our label, wanted us to do ‘featuring’ so the first call I actually made, because we are good friends was to [Nikki] Sixx. He’s part of the label side, part of the band, part of that that whole thing. And I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ And he said to me, he said, ‘Listen, doing features opens up algorithms, all this other stuff so that the music can be discovered, found, heard.’ I’m so old school, I don’t give a fuck about algorithms and all this other bullshit, You-fucking-Tube, Tick-Tock and shit like that. I’m old-school, put the fucking record out, let it be on a CD vinyl, cassette, whatever the fuck and let people decide if they like it or not. You know what I mean? Instead of putting a song out here, a song there. Anyway, Sixx knows, and he said to me that I should think about it.
Of course, the first thing I then suggested was ‘Well you play bass so why don’t you play bass on a track?’ I toured with Nikki for over a year, and I would watch him play every night and when people say he can’t play bass, can’t do this, you know how bad he is… I just want to just be the guy that can tell them ‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. This
guy wrote some of the best songs in rock’. I just don’t like it when people talk about him like that because I know what Nikki’s capable of.
So, we got Nikki to play on ‘High On You’ and the label asked me to get someone else to do another one. I was thinking what the obvious choices would be, they want fucking Johnny Depp, Alice Cooper, Joe Perry. But I couldn’t ask those guys as we’d just done a Vampire’s record, so it was a bit too close to that. Then we’d done a gig with Def Leppard, and I was talking to Phil. I’d said that it might be cool to have Phil play a solo on the song so I asked if I could send him a track. It was a case of;
‘Hey man, I’m going to send you track. Check it out if you don’t like it, it’s cool. I just need you to play a solo on it. You know what I mean?’
When I sent it, he called me right away. He’s like, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll have it to you by Thursday’. He didn’t say anything about Mutt. I didn’t say anything about Mutt either so that connection was never there.”
When the solo came in from Phil, and the song, ‘The Boom Went the Boom’, went over to Mutt for him to work his magic, he sent Tommy an initial one-word response. “Wow!”
“I already knew it was good, what Phil had added to it, but to hear that from Mutt, I can tell you there were tears in my eyes, It almost makes me cry because then when he adds his voice to my voice, his ideas to mine, that’s the ultimate dream come true for me. All of a sudden, I knew… Oh my God, that’s the sound I was looking for.”
The collaborations and the songs have resulted in 13 songs over some 51 minutes. Crossbone Skully is an avenging superhero from outer space, returning to earth to save the world and reconnect with his lost deity love Piper and Kid, the son he never knew he had. ‘Evil World Machine’ is a rock concept album that echoes similar dystopian visions such as ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’.
Special guests on the album are many and familiar. Making spoken-word appearances are Johnny Depp as the voice of ‘The Evil Sorcerer’ along with Alice Cooper as ‘The Bringer of Light’, Joe Perry as ‘The Big Bad Bone Crusher’ and Nikki Sixx as ‘The Crooked Crow’, with Kane Roberts as ‘The Alpha Watchman’ among other guests.
If the voice of Skully sounds a little like a disembodied Stephen Hawkings, you’d not be wrong. Tommy created the voice using a no longer available iPhone app (on an old iPhone) that gives him the distinctive sound.
Photo Credit: Adrian Hextall
As with all memorable releases, a good album cover is also necessary and iconic creative/art director Mark Wilkinson, who designed for Iron Maiden, Marillion, Judas Priest and The Darkness, duly delivered the goods for Crossbone Skully.
The influences in the album are many and Tommy proudly wears them on his sleeve. If you have even the smallest amount of musical history about you then you will hear the likes of Slade, Dropkick Murphys, KISS, and even The Sex Pistols. You might also wonder how on earth this all could come together coherently on a sci-fi themed album that has an overarching AC/DC and Def Leppard (produced by Mutt Lange) feel to it.
“If you pay attention”, says Tommy with a smile, “this goes all over the place because every band and genre from Pink Floyd to AC/DC, to Kraftwerk to The Cars, to The Sex Pistols and The Clash, even via Alex Harvey. It’s all in there. That’s what I love about it.”
The trick, according to Tommy is to have a story behind it all. If you didn’t have the story behind, then it becomes an album with too many different styles. By tying it into that whole narrative, the songs exude emotions in all sorts of different ways. A good story needs emotion, it needs that emotion to be expressed in a variety of different ways and by having multiple influences and styles liberally spread across the album, it’s fair to say that Crossbone Skully has it all.
“My initial idea for Skully’s voice was to have Johnny Depp do it,” says Tommy. “However, he was so busy that it wasn’t happening and one day, I was looking at the screen on my computer and I have all the planets and all the universe and everything there in front of me. It made me think about Stephen Hawking and whether that electronic voice of his could be used. I Googled some shit, and I found some app for my old phone that was free that took my voice, slowed it down and pitched it down as well. So, I ended up recording Skully’s voice on my phone, with my mic in my bedroom. I took that, typed out what I wanted to say. And it worked. They don’t make the app anymore, but I still have my old phone just so I can go use it.
Once I had the voice, I had the narrative as well, and I said, alright, I gotta start with Scully. He’s got to tell the story, because he needs to explain why aliens are coming to Earth, why they want to eat everyone’s sins and kill all the rotten fucking human beings that they are, which is 99% of, you know, the people. Skully is out there, and he’s eating all the selfishness and greed and sociopaths out there and then I wanted to present him as… well, I had this crazy idea about him and the others being misfits of the universe. His look, skeletal, dirty teeth, the way he speaks He could do a spoken word thing where he’s telling everyone how it’s okay, that you’re all welcome in this world. It’s a broken world of misfits, misplaced people, broken in some sort of way and it’s okay in this world, whatever you are, if you’re a fucking loser or a failure, you’re all welcome here and I sent this Skully led piece to Mutt and all I had was the misfits’ angle and my opinion on what might work which really means nothing. Anyway, I think that’s the best vocal arrangement that he’s ever done. When you hear ‘Misfits of the Universe’, when you hear Mutt Lange, doing those vocals, and the way he’s arranged everything, it’s mind-blowing. When you really, really listen to that and you go ‘Oh my’, there’s so many melodies going on and when I heard that, it just blew my fucking mind.
All I had initially was a drumbeat, ‘Misfits of the Universe’ title and Skully talking. The final piece, it’s like a sci-fi movie. You have no idea how lucky I am.”
Photo Credit: Kim Moran
Smiling Tommy, exuding warmth from the chair in front of me, goes on to expand just what it means to him to be involved with the legendary Mutt Lange. To come out of retirement to work with him, to input so much into the process and to help deliver what Tommy sees as some of Mutt’s best work ever, well that makes this music pretty special both for fans of Mutt, fans of Tommy, fans of Alice and even for those with a casual interest, curiosity will be piqued because, well, how can it not be right?
“I tell everyone that I talk to, I’ve won already, whether or not, I sell a single record. I don’t care if no one even listens to this fucking thing. You know what? I don’t care because I won. I got to work with the greatest producer ever. Hands down. Not many people could say that, and if I didn’t sell any records, I win because he’d already supposedly stopped, retired. I think about that a lot.
I’ve learned so much from Mutt Lange. I can’t even tell you what it means to me. Like the way, when you hear these songs, nothing is ever cut and pasted, nothing ever sounds the same when we work on it. It’s always changing. And that’s one thing I learned from him. Music today is just cut and paste, the same shit fucking singers, Copying and pasting in Pro Tools to layer the voices of one over the other. It’s lazy and for us, it’s not like that man. We sing everything, we play everything. There’s no cut and paste, there’s no sampled drums and shit like that. Everything we do sounds and is one hundred per cent real.”
No one song sounds the same although the first third of the album lulls the listener into a false sense of AC/DC but it’s short lived as the band tell the story of Skully and his initial desire to destroy the world because of what we’ve become but ultimately how he tries to redeem us. More people should listen to the teachings of Skully, we might learn a thing or two!
If you want to experience what feels like an arena type show BEFORE the band starts to play arenas, then Crossbone Skully will be doing some theatre shows in the US with an eye on festivals and support tours in 2025. The stripped-down shows will be something to remember because if this goes the way Tommy envisions then large-scale productions will follow.
“Whenever I write a song, I think of it like a movie. I’d be picturing it like; yep, I can see this going here, this goes here, totally like the vibe of a movie set. I would love to do that live. Right now, for these first gigs it’s going to be a rock and roll show. You know what I mean? But to have the opportunity to do it on a pretty big scale to have screens where Skully comes to life on stage, where our spaceship could come down. Dude, are you kidding me? I would love to do that. I imagine doing a show like Rammstein, I mean I look at that stuff and that’s a dream come true for me to do something like that. But even you know what this dream is to me, for now it’s just to put it on the road and open it up for a big band in the arena.
But of course,” he adds with a loud laugh, “I got big plans, this is a case of go big or go home and yeah, I got big fucking dreams.”
Crossbone Skully’ ‘Evil World Machine’ is out now on Better Noise Music. Live shows should be following in 2025. Keep an eye on live listings for the ultimate show!
Crossbone Skully – Evil World Machine Review
https://myglobalmind.com/2024/11/11/crossbone-skully-evil-world-machine-review/
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