Years ago, guitarist Mick Mars read a review of a gig by his band Mötley Crüe that stuck in his mind. It wasn’t what the journalist wrote about the show that stood out, it was what they wrote about him.
“It said: ‘Mick Mars comes out to the front of the stage with his little troll body,’” he recalls. Other people might have been offended by that, but not the guitarist. “I thought: ‘Cool!’ It sounded creepy.” He laughs. “I’m the little goblin guy.”
What the reviewer didn’t mention, or more likely didn’t know, was that in his twenties Mars had been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis (AS), a genetic condition that over time fuses bones in the body together.
“What I have now is bamboo spine,” he says, referring to his spine now effectively being one single bone – something borne out by his rigid posture and the occasional grimaces of discomfort during our chat.
Yet despite his physical condition, he’s funny, wry and far more self-deprecating and egoless than any man who spent 42 years as member of Mötley Crüe should be. In many ways, Mars – born Robert Alan Deal in Indiana in 1951 – was an unlikely 80s-metal superstar. He was 29 and had already been around the block several times when his future bandmates responded to an ad he’d placed in local newspaper The Recycler in which he described himself as a “loud, rude and aggressive guitar player”.
But it was Mars who helped get the band off the ground, via financial backing from a mysterious benefactor he refers to today only as “Alan”. And it was Mars, hunched and glowering, who brought a malevolent edge to the Crüe’s cartoon glam-metal pirate ride.
He can’t talk about last year’s messy departure from the band, amid claims and counter-claims of backing-tape use and general inability to play.
This is partly due to impending litigation, but also partly due to an unspoken sense that he’s still hurt by it. Instead his attention is focused on his imminent, and long-gestating debut solo album, Co-written with former Winger keyboard player Paul Taylor, it’s a blast of melodic yet surprisingly convincing
