Kim Bendix Peterson, or better known by his stage name of King Diamond is the legendary frontman of the black metal bands Mercyful Fate and the eponymous King Diamond. King’s very distinct falsetto vocal style is one of the most unforgettable in the history of heavy metal. Born in 1956 in Copenhagen, Denmark, King began playing in heavy rock bands in 1974. In the late 70’s, King began to experiment with horror theatrics and began to incorporate satanic themes into his stage persona.
In 1980, King formed the band Mercyful Fate. Mercy recorded their self-titled EP in 1982, and then went on to release the classic albums “Melissa” (1983) & “Don’t Break the Oath” (1984). In 1985, Mercyful Fate split up due to musical differences and King Diamond went on to pursue a solo career under his own name. Mercyful Fate reunited in 1992 and recorded five more albums while King Diamond simultaneously continued on with his solo career. Mercy has remained dormant since 1999 but King has never ruled another possible reunion someday. King Diamond’s self-titled band has recorded twelve studio albums so far and is still going stronger than ever.
Along with King’s unmistakable vocal style is his trademark stage persona with iconic makeup. King’s makeup has changed several times over the years, but always incorporates his traditional black & white color scheme along with horror and occult symbolism. Most of King Diamond’s albums have been conceptually themed, usually incorporating horror and occult elements. Each of their albums follows a specific horror story. King Diamond is also known for their highly theatrical, massive live stage shows. King uses horror concepts from multiple albums in their stage productions.
In 2007, the band King Diamond was nominated for a Grammy for their “Give Me Your Soul…Please” album. In late November 2010, misfortune struck as King suffered several heart attacks and had to have triple-bypass heart surgery. The surgery was successful and he left the hospital in mid-December. King convalesced at his Dallas home and all musical projects were halted. In December 2011, King performed on stage with Metallica during their 30th anniversary celebration and in June 2012, King performed his comeback concert in Sweden. Today, King says he’s healthier than ever and his voice is better than it’s ever been. King Diamond has continued to tour Europe playing huge festivals across the continent.
King Diamond’s nearly 40 year musical career is one of the most legendary in heavy metal history. King’s future albums will feature new horror stories, concepts, haunting orchestrations, and metal music the way only King Diamond can bring to the world. Join me as I have a fascinating and nearly 100 minute chat with King himself, as we discuss his recovery from heart surgery, the supernatural & horror, his music and much more!
Horror Society: I wanted to say it’s a real honor to speak with you King, I’m a horror journalist and I 
normally cover actors or directors, that sort of thing. I rarely get the chance to interview musicians. I’ve been trying to interview you for a year now and I’m glad I finally got the chance. I’ve been listening to your music for 30 years and I’m a huge fan of yours.
King Diamond: Oh man! Awesome, wow! You need to get the chance to see the new show soon.
HS: I would love to, if you come to Chicago, that’s where I’m out of.
KD: Right, yes yes. It’ll be a little while before we do get the chance to do a U.S. tour but it’s all up and running again now and it’s running very well. We definitely have the show that we’ve wanted to have and it’s come together really nicely now. We’ve done a lot of shows here lately in Europe in all these big festivals and headlining a lot of them. Next stop is actually Japan in October where we’ve never been before.
NOTE: [The King Diamond show headlining the Loud Park 13 Festival in Tokyo, Japan which was scheduled for October 19th-20th, 2013 was abruptly cancelled by the show’s promoter on October 18th.]
HS: That sounds awesome.
KD: Yeah, they invited us to come and headline the biggest indoor festival they have and we’ve never been there. I don’t understand it but we’ll take it you know. It’s really cool.
HS: Great. To start off, I don’t want to talk too much about your surgery because I know you’re probably tired of talking about that stuff, but it’s been almost three years since your triple bypass heart surgery. Is your recovery complete now?
KD: I don’t think it will ever be complete. Things are different now you know; there are things that I now have to deal with. There’s medicine you have to take of course, that’s one thing that has to be taken care of every single day. There can be side effects, I have to stay out of the sun, and I had to do that anyway being a vampire (laughing). Food is very very different now, my wife has become a nutritionist now, full blown I would say because she knows every single thing I can eat or cannot eat. You learn a lot yourself too about what you intake and what it can do. Good fat – bad fat – good cholesterol – bad cholesterol, going to the doctors and getting my figures updated, they check the heart to see how it’s going. So all that stuff…when you see results like I’ve seen, it’s encouraging and makes you want to go on. It definitely motivates you in continuing the path you’re on now.
Also the workout part is rough, and that’s specifically designed by the doctors. For me, the best thing is to get some power walks at least five days a week and that’s really power walking. You come in and you’re drenched. That’s about it for what I have to do, but it’s also a lot because it’s a very strict diet and I can’t do a lot of things outside of it. When you get on a strict diet like that, your stomach gets used to that too and if you suddenly get exposed to something that’s outside of the norm then you might get some bad pains. The stomach becomes more sensitive to foreign spices and stuff like that. We pretty much go to only one restaurant, that’s it, it’s a healthy restaurant that does food in an amazing way and I can pretty much eat everything that’s on their menu. I use no salt anymore; no butter, no this, no that, I don’t drink milk anymore, and I drink soy milk instead. Gives me the same things that the other would’ve given but I don’t get the bad fats and when the doctors check you out and they say “How in the hell do you get your figures to be the way they are?” because they are through the roof in the good area. They came out of the scale in the bad area, that’s because it has something to do with my family, it was family related as well and because of the smoking. I quit smoking completely; I haven’t had a drag since that happened, so it’s been two and three quarters of a year now. I have no urges what so ever, I couldn’t even imaging taking a drag now, it’s that far removed from my life.
Those things bring a lot of good stuff too, as well as all the horror. I was probably as low as you can get because I was dead. You get to where you have to learn to walk again, I couldn’t really take a step, and my body was shot, really shot down. Now I have this big metal rod, kind of, it’s a braided metal rod, you can say. It was wound around my rib cage; it was sewn through the whole way in the front so they could open you up like a double door practically. It’s pretty brutal shit and the bone has to grow in around it and some of it I can feel under my skin. I have real metal in my chest now and
my voice has gotten so much better than ever, and that’s something you don’t hear from a singer at my age, they usually start struggling, they can’t keep up with the keys that they used to sing in and sometimes they have to ask the band to detune a little bit to try and keep up. For me it’s become easier now doing all the high stuff, I have more room still to go than I ever had before. It opened up a lot to stop smoking which I had no idea it could, that was a big thing for me of course. I had to learn to breathe again because they collapse your lungs for the operation, so when you start up again having to be on a machine, each breath hurts every single one, reeeaaaalllllyyy hurts. For a while they won’t let you go back home until they know you can breathe on your own and don’t have trouble. It took me 10 days and then I was home and I was really making an effort by walking and walking at the hospital to gain strength back as quick as possible, but yeah it was 10 days. Lots of horror there I can tell you.
HS: Wow! So how is your back now, I remember even before your heart surgery you had a lot of back issues, how’s your back now?
KD: I had a herniated disc and I avoided an operation by following doctors orders, I got a tempurpedic mattress, that helped me but it took me a full year after I got that injury, it took me a full year before I could actually sit down, up till then I either had to lie down or stand up. For a while, I simply couldn’t walk, in the beginning my legs were in horrible shape. That was really a bad experience, but of course, the next one was worse. The pain associated with the herniated disc was, I cannot describe it, and there are no words I can ever use to describe it.
HS: I know exactly what you mean; I’ve gone through three back surgeries in the last couple of years.
KD: For me, it was trying to avoid the surgery because they say that once you start, you can only go so far then at some point they can’t do any more for you, right? So tell me about yours.
HS: Right. First I had a herniated disc just like you did in my lower back and I wouldn’t wish that kind of pain on my worst enemy. It’s the most intense pain I can ever describe.
KD: Had I lived on the third floor, I would’ve jumped.
HS: (Laughing) I know what you mean.
KD: I had four spots apart from the sciatic, two in the front, very specific spots on my front thigh. It felt like when I try to walk out to the kitchen for instance, it was a struggle. I felt like a little kid was running around with a big hunting knife around me and I never knew when he would plunge it into one of my thighs and once he did, he would just twist it for 15 minutes, it seemed like that. It didn’t matter what I did, I could crawl on the floor, and nothing helped because you can’t just decompress your spine yourself, just like that. It just had to go away. I tried to hang on my arms on the kitchen counter or something like that. It just won’t go away and it’s that pain that I talked about for 15 minutes straight and there was so many times a day that happened. If it wasn’t there, that spot, then it was my shins and on my shins it felt like someone stood with a flame thrower and just “You like this, then let me give you some more” you know, here – here you go for 15 minutes, just a flamethrower on your shins. It was just like burning up you know.
HS: I can totally relate, let me tell you.
KD: Worst tooth ache, worst ear ache, combine them and multiply them by 100 and it’ll still be like watching birds chirping in a park compared to this pain. There is nothing, even the doctor said that too. That is the worst pain a human can experience, there is nothing worse…so, there you have it. I took pain killers only one time and I said, “Nope” not for me. So I didn’t trust the pain killers. I wanted to make sure I was not lying in the wrong position all drugged up, not feeling anything and then waking up having lying in the wrong position and then having it make things worse. So I wanted to make sure I knew what was going on the whole time. Man that was some serious pain.
HS: Do you think your heart surgery was the toughest trial in your life that you’ve had so far?
KD: Yeah also for both of us, me and my wife. I mean I was supposed to be in surgery for 5 1/2 hours and the operation was 7 1/2 hours. My wife was told if we don’t come out and say how it was going, doesn’t mean its going bad or anything is wrong. No one came out and she was sitting there for 7 1/2 hours not knowing and was told it was supposed to be 5 1/2 hours. Afterwards, when you come to, my body was brown practically. It looked like it had been beat up, the whole thing except my back and face, everything else looked like it had been completely beat up, probably because I was in there for a while. I couldn’t even lie in a bed; I sat in a chair trying to sleep. I could sleep for one hour at a time, I’d wake up late at night and my wife would be sitting there in the hospital and I would tell her it was ok. That was total horror the whole way and you get thrown through these ups and downs like you’re really getting rung through the ringer with everything. I had three little white spots on my neck so I’ll never forget. That is where I had tubes in me, which was some of the places. I had tubes going in under my ribs on my left side; I had a thick tube going up the back up to my heart from the backside. That was the most painful thing I had while I was there. It was rubbing; I can still feel some of the bone that has a dent in it from that tube. When they pulled that out, they warned me that it was longer than you think. I still had wires coming in in two places right under my ribcage in the front up to the heart in case they had to restart it. The things they can do are amazing, and I had from what I heard at the hospital, one of the absolute best surgeons for this, so I was very lucky. I was in great hands. It went well but it’s tough and it’s weird and there is so much stuff that you can’t prepare for.
I had one operation one day and that was to go in through a vein in my thigh up to my heart and take a look at the situation. That went well, you are actually conscious when they do it, but the results were not good. Then when they come in and say well…”Let’s do this and that tomorrow”, I said “I just had this today, am I strong enough for this and everything?” So then comes all the paperwork and shit and then you’re faced with death, you know. It’s right there in your face, you have to make decisions now and this might be the end. There are no guarantees here and to have to do that with your wife, it’s like…”this is bullshit; this is not part of the plan at all.” I don’t take things for granted at all, that
part has changed in my life. Yeah, you’re faced with that and you sign these papers and this and then you roll in and roll down there. I have a special necklace, the one that I have and the one my wife has. For me there is a power in it that was given when something supernatural happened when we lost our black cat that was called “Magic”. We had her for 18 years but that whole night, something unique happened and what she did was something supernatural and we went and got these made. That’s one thing that we do, grab sometimes and what happened here was they said of course you can’t have that on you for the operation and I’m like…”That’s it, I need that fuckin’ power.” Then my wife said, “It was OK, don’t worry” and she took hers off and she was going to hold them both through the whole operation and she did.
There are things you think about when they roll you in there. I don’t know if it’s the last time I’ll see her face, in this world anyway. Who knows what is beyond…no one. So you’re like hmmmm…OK, I would like to come back here because I don’t feel I’m done. Those things are really tough when you face them. OK, this might be the last time, so you go in there and when you wake up again, I woke up in a straight horror. It was like being part of Metallica’s video “One” where you are in a horrible situation, you want to communicate something to someone else but you can’t. You’re in this fuckin’ limbo that doesn’t do anything for you. Some of these things have to go on the next album, there are so much horror and deep feelings in it, I have to not write exactly these things but those moods and feelings have to be in there from these things I experienced, they have to be in the story. Not saying that it’s going to be about hospitals or anything like that, not at all. I don’t know what it’s going to be exactly. Getting back to those feelings I got when I woke up, I came to too early after the operation. My wife was sitting there by the bed but I couldn’t see her though. I saw doctors bend over me, three in black and white, it was so weird man. It could’ve been a spaceship or something like that, it could’ve been doctors from another world, a parallel universe or something like that but something weird was going on that only I could see but no one else could see but it was in black and white. I remember they had mentioned to me that if I felt like it, I could breathe myself without the machine. I should try and communicate to those who were there, to a nurse or whatever. That was the first thought because I was being choked to death, I felt like I was being strangled. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had, not being able to control my own breath. When I tried to communicate, there was no response and I got into a panic mode for survival. So I started to remove the tube myself from my throat and my wife had to ring the bell for them to come running in and try to stop me. Then I remember people suddenly being there and they took my arms and my legs and they strapped me down to the fucking bed. I tried to communicate to get the fucking pipe out of my mouth, I am choking to death here, the whole feeling was so bad that had you been able to hear me talk, I begged them to kill me, it was that bad that I was feeling. There was a lot of horror that came with it, and then the other things that come afterwards you know.
Everybody was great at the hospital; they helped to do all the right things. Me and my wife had to do our part too. You’re struggling to try and get through this, you want to get home, you want to try and get stronger, you don’t even know if you’re going to make the next week, you have no idea anymore. Hour by hour is how you struggle on then you get to that point where they think you might be able to go home tomorrow. We had to do some checks, since you had that drop in your neck, those three there for so long, we need to go down and have an ultrasound to see that there’s nothing there that will be loose when they take them out and go up and give you a stroke in your brain. “What! Are you joking?” OK, so that’s where we are. Then we have to take you in a wheelchair and go down to the bottom of the hospital. We start rolling these hallways and it’s like “Oh wow, I’m in a horror movie now!” You go forever down hallways down where no one else is, you don’t meet another person, just the one that’s pushing your wheelchair with you in it. It’s like it could’ve been American Horror Story Asylum, you just feel like it. You go by doors and they say “Staff Only” and you wonder what the hell’s in there? They could do anything they wanted down there and no one would ever know. You get the feeling like “Wow, man!” I’ve got to be able to use this too on an album. You go in and suddenly they open the door, 
you come in there and there’s one person sitting in there in front of all this electronic equipment, it’s going “Beep, beep and boop, boop” everywhere and you go in there and they hook you up to some stuff and they test this and that and once they’re done you say “Ok so what does it look like? I’m interested in whether I’m going to be done for or not?” “Yeah, I can’t tell you, the doctor has to tell you, and I can’t comment on these things, I don’t have the authority to do that.” “You must be able to, I can take it. Just say good – bad, anything.” “You have to wait until the doctor comes by for tomorrow’s early rounds.” “You’re joking right?” For procedures you can’t do shit, you’re in the system and it’s just the way it is. You wait until the next day and they come and say “Well, it looks good, so we should be good to take it out today and you can maybe get home this afternoon.” Then they come in and start to take it out and you get these feelings of hoping things are all right. You start to feel this thing coming out of my neck and wonder what now? Am I going to get this pain in my head or what the hell is going to happen here? You get another round of worry and it’s just a roller coaster of emotions you have to go through the whole way. And then afterwards you get all these pains in your chest. Nerves are trying to find each other again and they warn you about all this stuff. They say everything looks good and all this and all that, eventually they cleared me. The 10th day after the operation I was sent home, it was December and we do get snow sometimes here in Texas and we had snow outside. My legs were so swollen that I couldn’t even fit in my shoes, so I was walking in the snow in a pair of Adidas slippers and socks into the wet snow, there was no choice. They said when you come home today, you have to go out and walk half a mile and again it’s like you’re not serious right? No, you have to and everyday now and until I see you next Friday, that day I want you to walk a mile. And it’s like, OK, that’s going to take a while. You’re walking these slow steps and I kind of experienced some of my own lyrics, “walking the halls at night from the graveyard”.
My wife helped with a lot of the nurse stuff, she was allowed to. She would go home and take care of the cats and stuff, sleep a little there then come back. I would continue after saying goodbye, then I would just walk for hours and they would say, “Mr. Peterson can’t sleep”, I gotta get home so I gotta walk, it’s the only way I’ll get home. So it was just that over and over and over. But then you get out eventually and you do this, I started walking and often got the feeling of not belonging. When you are walking the street, people are going to work and here you are walking, trying to just get back to having a life and it’s a different feel. The first three months, I had to touch my wife’s shoulder and say “Can you feel this, can you see me here when I wave my hand? Can you hear me?” I felt like I was not there. In December, it was three years ago.
I breathe different now, but it certainly works still with the singing and all that. The body is probably a lot healthier but
still, there is this thing that you are not sure of. I have three pieces of vein from my thigh sitting in my heart now, that’s the way it is and so far it works. I don’t take anything for granted anymore, I can’t. I’ve been able to do a lot and you do certain things for yourself to move on and take the next step. With the band, from what Brian Slagle says from our label, it’s very much coming full circle. We’ve got a lot of very nice positions. We’re headlining so many stages and then some festivals entirely as well. This summer in Europe, we had the biggest production we’ve ever had and it works, it really works. The set list, the band plays better, the lighting engineer has a brand new set up this year, the sound engineer, the crew is the best we’ve ever had, just amazing. We haven’t sounded this good, we haven’t looked this good; it’s just really coming together.
It was from that some people saw us up in Finland headlining a festival where we have been the most requested band for 10 years that they’ve had the festival. Then a Japanese offer came in. It would be the first time ever, we’ve never set foot in Japan before and now we’re headlining the biggest indoor festival. It makes no sense to me, but we’ll take it and we’ll do it. It’s going to be great because it’s also going to be with a full production and it seems like it’ll be recorded too, with 10 cameras. We have to give the promoter five songs I think it is, for a TV special as part of the deal, but we do get access to the whole concert. Maybe we can do a special Japanese DVD release of the whole concert, we’ll see what happens, there’s nothing for sure. There are a lot of good things coming with it. We already have been confirmed for playing the biggest German festival at Wacken Open Air next year, it sold out in two days. Probably not because of us you know, but we had a little bit to do with it. We were the biggest band they announced, it was us and a lot of other really good bands that were announced. Everybody knows they’re going to come with some real big headliners you know some of the real heavy duty bands, they’ve had Maiden before, they’ve had Rammstein and other giants, maybe Metallica will come, who knows what it’s going to be. It’s going to be hardcore; big bands are going to be there. We are headlining the black stage one of the days over there, which is the second biggest stage. 75,000 sold out in two days, I don’t think they ever expected that. Last year, they were sold out in November someone said, so they were wondering if it was going to be October or maybe even late September this year and then two days after the first of August, it was sold out. We are going to be booking a bunch of festivals again in Europe next year because it went so well and the production we have now, which is really amazing is going to be expanded. People are going to lose their jaw when they see it next time. If we can do what we intend to do, which I think we can then it’s going to be something unique to see and then the production will go to the U.S. too.
HS: Great!
KD: That’s a lot of stuff there, a lot of horror, a lot of stuff we are going to start recording new material very soon. We do a lot of things different now, better I think. We bring the fans into it, we’ve had quite a few meet & greets in Europe. They were all done in a way that is completely free to the fans; they don’t have to pay for extra packages or extra money for extra tickets, special tickets or whatever. We don’t want to do that; we don’t want to take advantage of the fans in that way. You can win it and be lucky and if you win it doesn’t cost you anything. The promoter gets nice advertising for the festivals. The 15 winners will sit and talk with me for 45 minutes and sign some things and have a good time. It’s a good thing you know, we also have a Skype channel and we’re going to start that up again, it’s been of course down while we are touring, but I’ll call fans now and then, we record it and talk to three fans at a time. I just call them up, we put it up on the fan club site so others can listen to what we talk about and they can get a lot of info. It’s a different way of doing it, it also works great. With all that stuff, we try to do something for the writing process where we are getting a brand new recording system, the same identical system that Andy is getting and installing in his house. He has a big studio himself that has all the big systems. For him, writing at home, he’ll get that system in there and I’m going to get a totally top pro board installed in my house so I can do all vocals here. Top pro microphones, everything will be the same as you would find in the studio, it will just be here. I will not have to go into a studio to do my vocals; I can go in and fiddle around with vocals anytime I want. I’ll never have to sing with a hoarse voice again. Now I can take a day or two off and my voice will be fine. I’ll be able to when writing songs, check out if certain keys and key changes works for the vocals. If it doesn’t work, I’ll change it. It will be really cool for the voice and I can test it full power and not sit and hum at home, it’s going to be a big difference. I expect the quality to go up big time, in what we write. Certainly my performance too with the vocals and now my vocals are even better than ever. So, that’s a lot of stuff that’s going in the right direction and we’re doing it differently and it seems to work so far.
To be continued in Part 2 tomorrow!
Watch a fan video for the track ‘Halloween’ here:
Watch the official music video for ‘Sleepless Nights’ here:
