Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx weighs in on being clean for almost 20 years ahead of UK tour | Music | Entertainment

There’s hard-living rock and roll behaviour and then there’s Mõtley Crüe. For two decades, the heavy metal hell-raisers defined how to party, making the antics of Ozzy Osbourne and Led Zeppelin look like those of Cliff Richard.

Storming out of Los Angeles in the 1980s, the poodle-haired rockers became famed for outrageous stunts like swallowing light bulbs and breaking bottles of booze over each other’s heads.

Drummer Tommy Lee – who was engaged to Baywatch star Pamela Anderson – and bassist Nikki Sixx had bets on who could go the longest time without showering while still attracting groupies. Their shared apartment in LA was infamous for its debauchery, where Sixx, Lee, singer Vince Neil and guitarist Mick Mars would use socks and band posters as toilet paper.

Mõtley Crüe’s mayhem was the subject of an acclaimed 2001 biography, The Dirt, which is seen as the gold standard for chronicling lewd behaviour in rock. It was turned into a smash Netflix biopic in 2019.

Unsurprisingly, such hedonism often overshadowed the band’s actual music, even though their 1989 album Dr Feelgood reached No 1 in the US and they enjoyed hit singles including Girls, Girls, Girls, Shout At The Devil and Smokin’ In The Boys Room.

But now they are having the last laugh, still together after over 40 years and playing the biggest shows of their career, including headlining Wembley Stadium this summer.

READ MORE: Motley Crue and Def Leppard tickets: Here’s where to buy world tour tickets

Chief songwriter Nikki Sixx believes their colourful capers have stunned young music fans, who see Mõtley Crüe as a contrast to today’s crop of clean-living stars like Ed Sheeran and Coldplay.

“When The Dirt film came out, younger music fans had only kind of heard who Mõtley Crüe were,” admits Sixx, now 64.

“When those kids saw the movie, they went: ‘Holy ****! They don’t make bands like that anymore!’ There are still plenty of kids who love rock’n’roll who are discovering classic rock like us, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica.”

The Dirt – in which Sixx was portrayed by British actor Douglas Booth, who had previously played Boy George in 2010 biopic opic

Worried About The Boy – gave Mõtley Crüe a new generation of fans, as Sixx explains: “The Dirt did a really good job of telling the truth about our behaviour, but not exposing every single wart – which would have been unwatchable.

“In a long career like Crüe’s, the reality is so outrageous that you could try to stuff every single incident into a movie at the expense of any music. We grew up in public with non-stop touring and making music, and that was in the film too. They got the balance right, I feel.”

Mõtley Crüe formed in 1981 but, after living through so many wild moments, Sixx has been clean since 2004. Nowadays he lives quietly in Wyoming with his wife of nine years, model Courtney Bingham, and their three-year-old daughter Ruby.

IXX – who once died for two minutes of a heroin overdose before being revived by a paramedic – laughs: “I’ve been sober for along time. After seeing The Dirt, some people tell me: ‘Oh man, it’s so great that you’ve finally got your life together.’ That’s a fantastic sentiment, but ‘finally’ was along time ago.

“Staying sober isn’t difficult. I try to remember who I am on a daily basis as a human being, not as a rock star. I try to be the best version of myself, as a husband, a father, a bandleader, a writer. Sobriety comes before anything else in my life.

“If I use drugs or alcohol, I will lose my family, my band, my house, my financial security. If I use drugs or alcohol, I will lose everything, so there’s nothing more important to me.”

As their name implies, Mõtley Crüe were a gang of misfits when they started out in LA’s club scene. Real name Frank Feranna Jr, Sixx had a troubled childhood in Idaho. His father, Frank Sr, walked out on mum Deana when the musician was a young boy. It was his grandparents who raised him, before he fled to LA aged just 17, legally changing his name to Nikki Sixx soon after. Sixx was so unhappy about his childhood that he “killed” his past life as Frank Jr in Mõtley Crüe’s 1981 song On With The Show.

But he says now: “I spent a lot of my life running from my Frank upbringing, but I don’t feel that way now. I know that he’s part of who I am.”

Sixx researched his childhood for his recent memoir, The First 21. “My aunt and uncle have recently told me a lot about who I was as a boy, that I was already into music and writing,” he explains. “They helped me have empathy for my father too. A lot of what they said made me think ‘Wow!’ about the similarities between who I am now and how I was as a boy.”

Music proved to be Sixx’s escape. “My hometown in Idaho had a population of 4,000,” he remembers.

“The albums that fired my imagination were mostly by British artists, even though I was about as far as it gets from the UK.

“The first time Mõtley Crüe came to the UK, we thought: ‘This is it! This is where Slade is from, and The Sweet, Led Zeppelin and Queen’. Every time we play in the UK, our band has that same sense of excitement, remembering how our influences came from there.”

Mõtley Crüe arrive on these shores for a joint stadium tour next month with Sheffield rockers Def Leppard. The two bands toured North and South America together last year, their tour the highest-earning in the US in 2022, selling 1.2 million tickets.

“I have to pinch myself that, 40-something years into our career, we’re playing these stadiums,” enthuses Sixx. “We have three generations of Mõtley Crüe fans to play to now.”

For their South American tour, the two bands hired a Boeing 737 airliner to fly themselves and their crew between cities. “I know having our own jet looks as ostentatious and bloated as The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin in the 70s,” Sixx admits.

“But it helped make us a well-oiled machine, fitting our gear in the plane. Our two bands playing together means fans get three hours of hits and the camaraderie between us has made it an effortless tour. It’s how it should be.”

Although, at one point, he says he preferred to hang out with the crew at the back of the plane, telling them: “I don’t want to hang out with the other musicians, they’re a bunch of divas!”

Although it’s effortless now, Sixx admits that Mõtley Crüe looked finished back in 2015 when they played what they then thought was a farewell world tour.

“I should have known that Mõtley Crüe just won’t die,” he says with hindsight. “But at the time, we were really tired. We’ve learned better how to schedule time off, so that we don’t look at each other and go: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’

“I could easily sit on my couch for three years and do nothing apart from maybe taking up some new hobbies – but I’d miss the Crüe.

“Ending Mõtley Crüe for real would need a good vampire killer to take us out.”

The band has just started making their first new music since their 2008 album Saints Of Los Angeles and Sixx hopes it will further endear him and his bandmates to a new generation of fans. In general, though, he fears for the future of rock music.

“We’re in a place now where bands’ behaviour is controlled, the sonics are controlled and the playlists are controlled,” he reveals.

“If a band came along now with that classic rock attitude of Mõtley Crüe-meets-Guns N’ Roses, a large group of people would be stoked. But the streaming services like Spotify would want them to fit into their niche.

“Even if a new band were living the life we did – wrecking hotels, crashing cars into pools – they couldn’t reach the attention of fans who’d really want them.”

Nevertheless, the band are still enjoying life as much as they did in their 80s heyday. Well, almost.

“So long as we’re playing shows that are as cool as our tour with Def Leppard, we’re happy,” Sixx adds of their plans for this summer.

“We’re having too much fun to want to stop now.”

• Mõtley Crüe and Def Leppard’s joint tour kicks off at Sheffield Bramall Lane on May 22, then Wembley Stadium, Lytham Festival, Dublin Marlay Park and Glasgow Hampden Park from July 1-6. See motley.com for tickets