Well, Hello..!

Long time & no word from "Yours Truly". Well it's about fuckin' time, right? Thanxxx for all the birthday wishes. They were lovely. Yeah, sure I've been busy and all that... But I must admit that all the absurd chaos in the Guestbook surrounding the rebirth of Hanoi over a year ago was not all that encouraging either... (I know: "Get over it, Michael!") It's hardly amusing when someone, who was barely an itch in his daddy's pants when Hanoi was already out rockin' the world, claims that I have no right to use the name "Hanoi Rocks"! ...You just gotta love it.

In most recent news..: We have completed remixing the Hanoi Rocks "Twelve Shots On The Rocks" album and it sounds fuckin' brilliant, I might add. It has 3 new tracks, a different tracklisting and now it really sounds the way it was originally meant to sound... more raw and rockin'... For those of you who may not know: The first version of "Twelve Shots.." released before last X-mas was mixed without our presence as, due to a major fuck-up in communication, we ended up touring the U.K. when the mixing was supposed to take place (in order to meet the release deadline before X-mas in Japan & Scandinavia). So, understandably there were many things we wanted to improve upon. Thus also enhancing the record for its European and U.S. releases up and coming...
There's a great new video of "A Day Late, A Dollar Short" and an EP with the remixed version of the song plus two of the new tracks off the renewed album, "Moonlite Dance" and "Bad News". The latter one is my new personal favorite and we're already playing it live nowadays.

The recent Scandinavian dates went pretty ok... It was great to get to play in Copenhagen (first time) and Sweden was cool too. Regrettably the Oslo date had to be postponed due to circumstances beyong human control... We apologize again. Lacu's hands were totally torn apart. The skin on his fingers was so badly peeled off, it was painful to even look at...
Then there was the Stockholm gig, which could have been brilliant, but for some reason the sound on the stage was terrible. Everything was unbearably loud and I couldn't hear anything separately - just noise. I even had to ask the monitor guy to turn my vocals down, which I never usually have to do.

I only hope it wasn't quite as bad in the audience. I heard: "Yeah but it sounded great out front, man!" which is one of the most commonly told lies in Rock & Roll... If things are too loud on stage, it's difficult for the sound guy to mix the sound in the house.
Anyhow, the crowd was great...

The two Finnish Festivals, Rockperry in Vaasa and Ruisrock in my hometown Turku were cool, only that I've had this summer-flu I can't seem to shake...

Happy summer to everyone!

I promise I won't let a year go by 'till I'll write again!

Love & Respect,

Michael Monroe