Nick Snelling at Australia's Beat.com recently spoke with MÖTLEY CRÜE guitarist Mick Mars. The following is an excerpt from the story.

He’s the little hunched one. The sinister gnome-like character in the background, dressed in raven black, features hidden under a crinkled top hat. Like some cartoon villain, he at times resembles the dour Wednesday from the Addams Family, but for all the notoriety of his fellow band members, Mick Mars’ monstrous slide-work and signature guitar riffs make him the quiet man behind Mötley Crüe’s sleezy brand of glam rock, an act that is now celebrating their 27th Anniversary with a new album Saints Of Los Angeles.

Mars is calling from Jones Beach, halfway between New Jersey and New York, in the midst of Crüe Fest, a massive American stadium tour dubbed ‘The Loudest Show On Earth’ and the latest branch of the Mötley Crüe franchise. So then, should we be imagining the guitarist in stately repose, occupying the spa bath of some plush suite, surrounded by buxom young bikinied ladies, just like the Crüe of legend would suggest?

“If that’s what you want to think, then I’m not phased.” chuckles the guitarist. “It’s actually nowhere near as exciting as you might imagine – I’m just here hanging out with my girlfriend having coffee. She’s from Sweden,” he adds as an afterthought. “Just mellowing out. I tried to prep myself before a show, and not get too wound up, so when I go onstage I can be real relaxed.”

Saints Of Los Angeles is the first Crüe record in almost ten years featuring the original line-up. How does he feel it stacks up against their back catalogue?

“Most of it, I really like,” muses Mars. “There’s a couple of songs on there, like every album that we’ve done, that I call ‘fillers’. But for the majority, I think it’s a really good direction and step that we’ve taken.”

The process for writing and recording was a different one for the band this time – rather than rehearsing and jamming the songs as a normal band, individual schedules forbade it, so most of records came together in the studio after Mars and bassist Nikki Sixx (the band’s prevalent songwriters) assembled the songs piecemeal.

“It was mainly constructed in the studio as a couple of the other guys had prior commitments to do other things, so Nikki and I did a lot of writing, along with James Michael and DJ Ashba (Sixx’s partners in the SIXX A.M project), using ProTools. It meant that we got to explore a lot of our ideas without any limitations. In the old days, we’d rehearse and then sit down to record it, and if we went ‘Oh, I wonder what it would sound like if put the chorus where the verse is’ then we’d have to re-record it. Nowadays, you can just chop it, move it around, listen and go ‘Oh no, that sucks’ or ‘Yeah, that works’, you know? It gave us a lot more freedom.”

Part of the band’s infamous legacy of excess is also their reputation for infighting and some serious tantrum-throwing. What does the guitarist put down to the fact, that even after all the internal bickering and members coming and going, the original Mötley Crüe have ultimately been drawn back together in the end?

“I think from the very beginning, even back in the early ‘80s when we were really naïve, our goal back was to be like the Stones and stay together,” he says. “But what we didn’t know about was all the rough spots along the way; drugs, alcohol abuse, egotistical stuff….but now, we’ve all reached a point where all four of us know where home is – and that’s Mötley Crüe. Generally, I think we all share that goal now, and it also okay for us all now to go off and do other things, experiment, have solo projects, but there’s always something in our minds saying ‘ this is our real gig, right here.’”

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