So we tried it with him and it worked out, better than we expected! I brought it up to Sami and Todd and we all decided it would be great to have him in the band if it worked out. He came to talk to me in December at an Alice Cooper show in Helsinki and said he would like to play guitar in my new band. I worked with Ginger on a couple of songs last summer but he was still touring with the Wildhearts throughout the fall. I thought that he would be the perfect guitar player for my new band and he was really into it. I got together with him in LA last October and we hit it off right away and started writing songs. MM: I met Todd through Sami Yaffa who I have always kept in touch with. PB: You have a real power-house of a band with Todd Youth, Sami Yaffa and Ginger. PB: Has your time since concluding Hanoi Rocks been spent focusing on your solo career? MM: Because we’d taken the band as far as it could go and wanted to end Hanoi Rocks on a high note. PB: In 2009 you disbanded Hanoi Rocks, why did you decide to do that? I was keen to see what Michael Monroe had done in the interim between Hanoi Rocks and the new project, how he had formed the Michael Monroe band, the direction he intended the music to take and just how he saw the future unfolding. He has played with an astounding number of bands as a guest musician on albums and has been cited as a direct influence by the Foo Fighters, Guns 'n' Roses and the Manic Street Preachers.
In many ways I can see Todd and Ginger's reasons for wanting to play in a band led by Michael Monroe, as Monroe is often regarded as being the musician's musician. Michael Monroe has also declared war on the music industry and is not backing down. Todd Ginger and Sami are noteworthy musicians and are more than capable of leading their own band. Since then it seems Michael Monroe has been very busy for the Los Angeles press conference announced that the Michael Monroe band would include Ginger, the lead guitarist and founder of rock and roll act Wildhearts Todd Youth of the punk rock band Chelsea Smiles, and Sami Yaffa who was the bassist with Hanoi Rocks in the 80s and is now with the New York Dolls. Later that year Michael Monroe briefly joined with Andy McCoy to write the official band autobiography, ‘Hanoi Rocks: Wasting Time’. Hanoi Rocks played their last gig to a sell-out audience in Michael Monroe's home-town of Helsinki in January 2009. Thus I was understandably shocked when, a few months after my interview in 2008, Michael Monroe announced that Hanoi Rocks would be permanently disbanded.
#Hanoi rocks michael monroe series#
Nearly twenty years later, Michael Monroe and Andy McCoy, Hanoi Rocks’ lead guitarist, reformed the band with two members from Electric Boys, and proceeded to release a series of impressive albums. Hanoi Rocks never really recovered from their loss and disbanded soon after. Sadly Hanoi Rocks’s drummer Nicholas ‘Razzle’ Dingley died in a car accident in 1983.
Hanoi Rocks formed in Helsinki in 1979, and, despite never gaining critical commercial recognition, they nonetheless developed a significant devoted following. The last time I had spoken with Michael was in March 2008 when despite searching for a new drummer, he was enthusing over his forthcoming tour with Hanoi Rocks and the positive reception their ‘Street Poetry’ album had received. On 25th January, 2010, a press conference in Los Angeles announced something I believed would never happen: Michael Monroe, the former lead singer of Hanoi Rocks, was returning to the music industry.
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