#Drummer from hanoi rocks that died series#

But even with a major label behind him, the singer couldn’t resist the temptation to pour sand in his own gearbox. This period represented Michael Monroe’s last shot at fame. At all times he resembles a rock star as imagined by the Muppets. Engulfed by laughter, he slaps a hand on his thigh and throws back his head at a whiplash angle. With armour-piercing eyes and cheekbones like pinball-flippers, he speaks in scenic-route sentences that circulate like passages from Gravity’s Rainbow. We're talking in his dressing room at the 02 Academy in Islington, the kind of small-to-medium-sized club that has been his home for more than 30 years. If Michael Monroe is at all troubled by thoughts of what might have been, he isn’t showing it. We were a real street gang… and had we become big and famous, it wouldn’t have been the same. We decided to quit because we wanted to maintain our integrity and remember it as the fantastic band that it was.” I have great memories of us as a great band that never sold out. Of course we could have continued, but maybe with the wrong guys. Michael Monroe says that “the main thing for me was to stop Hanoi Rocks. I touched his shoulder and said, ‘Bye Razzle.’”īut the crash in Redondo Beach ended it all in an instant. I went to see the body and he looked like a wax doll. It was a nightmare for him to see his friend in that way. It was our tour manager that went to identify him, and he never got over it. I’m glad that I wasn’t there because I probably would have demanded to see him. “Razzle was dead on arrival at the hospital,” says Monroe, who at the time was Hanoi Rocks’ singer. The vehicle careered into the path of oncoming traffic and smashed into two other cars. Michael Monroe could have been famous had his friend not been killed by a rock star. On December 8 1984, Nicholas ‘Razzle’ Dingley, the drummer with Hanoi Rocks, was a passenger in an orange-red 72 Ford Pantera sports car driven by Vince Neil, the front man with Mötley Crüe, when Neil lost control on a stretch of road near Redondo Beach in California. How did lead singer Michael Monroe carry on? He talks to Ian Winwood Hair metal pioneers Hanoi Rocks were destined for stardom – until fate intervened.

#Drummer from hanoi rocks that died series#

Behind the music: A weekly series celebrating music's untold stories, from band-splitting feuds to the greatest performances of all time.