Motley Crue to tour Australia amid legal spat with guitarist Mick Mars
When the US rock act returns to play three stadium shows in November, it will be lugging more excess baggage than most bands.
When Motley Crue returns to Australia to play three stadium shows later this year, it will be lugging more excess baggage than most bands.
The Los Angeles-born hard rock quartet will co-headline concerts with British rock act Def Leppard in Brisbane (November 8), Sydney (November 11) and Melbourne (November 14).
During the 1980s, Motley Crue’s name was as synonymous with excess and debauchery as it was with hair spray and leather pants. In 2023, though, its inner tensions have spilt into the public arena in an ugly war of words among rockers now in their 60s.
Fronted by singer Vince Neil and featuring drummer Tommy Lee, who pioneered playing drum solos while his entire kit revolved and spun, its stadium-filling hits include Kickstart My Heart, Home Sweet Home and Dr. Feelgood.
Yet after claiming to retire from live performances following a final world tour in 2015, including six Australian concerts, its return was kickstarted by a Netflix adaptation of a warts-and-all 2001 band autobiography titled The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, which screened in 2019.
Last year, the quartet returned to the live arena by playing 36 stadium gigs around the US and Canada. But the Crue has recently been embroiled in legal spats surrounding the departure of guitarist Mick Mars, 72, who resigned from touring in October due to chronic pain from an arthritic disease named ankylosing spondylitis, which causes vertebrae to fuse.
His bandmates sued to force the guitarist into arbitration, while seeking to determine that he was no longer a member or shareholder, with any of the rights conferred.
Mars countersued, and when the band announced more shows with a replacement guitarist named John 5, who has played with Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson, Mars began dishing the dirt again.
In an explosive interview in April, Mars told Variety, “I carried these bastards for years”, “those guys have been hammering on me since ’87, trying to replace me,” and that he was the “only one that has no criminal record. I’m pure. I’m clean as a freshly washed baby.”
On this latter claim, Mars had a point: singer Neil was charged with vehicular manslaughter in 1984 after he killed Finnish drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley while drink-driving with a blood-alcohol content of 0.17. Lee served six months in county jail in 1998 after the drummer assaulted his then wife, Pamela Anderson.
Bassist Nikki Sixx, meanwhile, has only been convicted of misdemeanours, not felonies: he pleaded no contest to inciting a riot by kicking a security guard in the head and urging fans to attack the guard during a 1997 concert.
In response to Mars’s claims, which included accusations that the band’s bass and drum parts on the 2022 tour were largely prerecorded, Sixx shared a link to one of Variety’s online articles wherein the band’s lawyer spoke in their defence.
“Sad day for us and we don’t deserve this considering how many years we’ve been propping him up,” Sixx, 64, wrote on Twitter. “We still wish him the best and hope he finds lawyers and managers who aren’t damaging him. We love you Mick.”
After that flurry of mud-slinging in April, the Mars-Crue legal matter has gone to ground, or at least behind closed doors. Its co-headline tour with Def Leppard, meanwhile, is presently playing to huge crowds across Europe.
