RockMusicStar.com's John Jeffrey has issued an interview with BLACK N' BLUE frontman Jaime St. James. The following is an excerpt:

Q: To start things out, let's go back to the Nasty Nasty CD. As great as that record is - I personally rank it up there, as one of the best mid to late 80s albums out there - it seemed to be a downward turning point in the band's career. What happened, or what didn't happen at that point, to really make Black 'n Blue take off, as a successful group?

A: "Nasty Nasty came out in '87, and was the follow up to Without Love. I love the Without Love record, but it was Bruce Fairbairn, Bob Rock and the record company, REALLY taking control of us. Trying to get us to become commercial. But Nasty Nasty was us saying, 'Hey, we want control back'. That's why we asked GENE SIMMONS to be our producer, because we knew he would be on our side. It was kind of us wanting to return to what we want to do. It was a good record. I think a lot of things were done wrong with us. It may have been our fault partially. Maybe the record company's fault as well. We weren't really handled right. Luck just wasn't on our side, for some reason. I think we've done a lot of really good records, and I can't tell you how many times people tell me, 'You guys should have been way bigger than you were'."

Q: Did the band ever "officially" break up or just become inactive?

A: "We kind of fizzled apart. We released In Heat in '88, and then we went on tour. Then we slowly fell apart. We lost our record deal, after doing four albums on Geffen. At that point, it got kind of difficult. We tried to keep going at it, as we were writing songs and working with Gene Simmons still. And Gene Simmons wanted to put us on his label, as at the time he had Simmons Records. We just felt it wasn't working anymore. It was also during a time when we were just coming into the '90s, and our kind of music, was kind of on the 'out'. I think the first thing that happened was that Tommy (Thayer) just kind of went on his way. And without Tommy, I just kind of went my own way. Slowly, we just kind of fell apart. And we didn't get back together until 10 years later."

Read the full interview at this location.