Kerry King looks the part all right. But however forbidding his on stage persona might be, when Lick Library pitched up at the Music Live show in Birmingham, UK, and asked him for an interview, he politely asked if we’d mind waiting until he’d finished his day’s work. And then politely answered our questions, even though he was jet lagged, and even though he’d been on the stand for seven hours.
This is what glamour means to a top metal guitarist. King, having been on the road for over a year with Slayer, promoting their latest album, <i>Christ Illusion<i>, was officially on leave. The sensationalist press would have us believe that means drinking long and late, stumbling out of bed in the middle of the day and then doing it all over again. Not Kerry King. He got up early, jumped on a plane and set about promoting his signature Marshall amp (and his signature BC Rich guitar) at a show 6,000 miles away from home. There’s glamour for you.
“Well I just flew in yesterday,” he begins. “I signed yesterday, we ate, I slept as long as I could, came in here, played and signed till they closed.”
‘Yesterday’ had been Education Day at Music Live – which basically means they flood the place with schoolkids until Health & Safety closes the turnstiles. And ‘signing’ means sitting at a booth, pen in hand, to sign posters, t-shirts, CDs or whatever memorabilia the fans turn up with. Plus spending a little time with each of them, because – after talent (and a record deal) – fans are a musician’s most precious commodity. And King has a lot of them. Our interview was scheduled for 5pm when the show closed, but ran a little late because of the number of fans waiting in line for their hero’s autograph. In fact, we’d got the lights and cameras all set up ready to roll and there was still a line snaking right round the Marshall stand.
The number of people queueing up to meet the man would tell you how big Kerry King is, but, exhausted though he must have been, he wasn’t big time. No, ‘sorry fellas, it’s been a long day’, not even ‘give me ten minutes to relax’… He simply put his pen down, got up from the seat he’d been sitting in for the last hour and a half solid, and wandered back into to the demo booth where we were waiting to bombard him with questions.
To be fair, it’s not all signing on the Saturday and Sunday. In between times King works even harder, presenting clinics… and that’s where we start our questions. He has a radically different (and very engaging) approach to these events. Instead of standing there and blowing his audience away with his technical ability, he actually engages them with the process. The audience (at least the ones with enough bottle to get up there with him) become the stars. So there is glamour involved… but it’s the audience who end up basking in it.
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