I’m talking with Tommy Henriksen of Alice Cooper and Hollywood Vampires fame who now finds himself with his own band in the form of the very exciting Crossbone Skully.

Crossbone Skully have their debut album out – Evil World Machine – produced in part by the legendary Mutt Lange. I‘ve been listening to the album over the last couple of days, it’s really good. I’ve really enjoyed it. “That’s so good to know, a lot of people think it’s very AC/DCish, but when you start getting into the record, you go, No, it’s not, it goes in all these other ways”.

Absolutely. There was a lot of influences I could hear through it and we’ll get into that a bit later as I’ve got a few questions around it. The biggest thing for me is you’re well known for, not only playing guitar with Alice Cooper and Hollywood Vampires but you’re also the musical director. So, surely, you’ve got a full, massive, full time job there? “See, everyone thinks I’m the musical director for Alice Cooper, which I’m not. It’s actually Chuck Garric, the bass player. But the Hollywood Vampires I am, it’s different. You know, you can’t direct Johnny Depp, Joe Perry and Alice Cooper – musical director. Yeah, that sounds good, but really, it’s a bunch of bullshit, you know what I mean. And hopefully, Paul, you hope that everyone knows the fucking songs. (Laughing) I’m the musical director? No, you don’t got to direct anyone if they know that gig and they know what they’re doing, Dude, you just get up there and you play the shit. That’s it, you know?”

Haha, well, that’s in the press release they put out for you. (Laughing) “There’s so many things that I see in these, I go, where’d they get that from? I never said that. I’ve never said I’ve been the musical director for Alice Cooper; Vampires, it’s different. But I always say, you know, musical director, it sounds good, but at the end of the day, who you directing? Anyway, I just get a kick out of it”.

So how long has Crossbone Skully been running around your head, banging to get out? “Since about 2018, I believe it’s one of those things where, you know, it’s like, I’m always doing all different types of music. I’ve never been like, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. Because music is, I don’t know… music – it’s life for me. You know what I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s all about, when I do music, I do it because I love it. I don’t ever sit back and go, I’m going to do it for money, or I’m going to try and write a hit song. And when I started Crossbone Skully, it actually was born out of sound check, pretty much, myself and Glenn Sobel, the drummer for Alice Cooper and Hollywood Vampires. Uh, he played all the drums on the record. Me and him would jam AC/DC songs during sound check, and I’d sing them. And our lighting guy just happened to say ‘you should do this. You’re missing out’. And I looked at him, I was like, What do you mean man? He’s ‘you should be doing it’. I used to do it back in the club days, when I was, like, eighteen years old, I was doing all that stuff. So what I did was, you know, whenever someone tells me anything, I always say, I’m like a recorder. I’m always taking information, and I’m processing a lot of shit all the time, you know? I went home and I thought about it, and I started writing a couple songs, and the first song I did was The Boom Went The Boom“.

That’s a great song. “Lyrically, I’m always writing stuff that is from my personal life experiences that, you know, I want to share with people. Maybe they have the same experiences. Maybe they don’t, maybe they, you know, maybe don’t like what I’m saying, you know, but it’s different for everyone you know. Just like it’s different people, whatever or however you take the music, you know?”

That is the great thing about music. People can take whatever they want out of it. “Right! Exactly!”

So, when did you feel that it was really going to be able to actually turn from this idea in your head, to be able to come together? What did that mean to you? “When it did so, I was writing songs, and they sounded really good. So, I had to go back on the road. I called up one of my dear friends, this guy, Tommy Denander, who’s a guitar player, a phenomenal guitar player. I said to him, Hey, man, I need some guitars done on some tracks, because I’m going on road. Would you want to work on some of these tracks? I sent it to him, and he loved it. And then we just started working together, going back and forth. And when we had seventeen or eighteen tracks, I was mixing it in LA and at Johnny Depp’s house, he has a studio upstairs. Mine’s downstairs, I’m so grateful for him to let me have this freedom and this access to his studio, and I was down there, mixing and this guy, Ross, Halfin walked in. You know, Ross, the famous photographer, sometimes you can’t hear anybody walking in, Because I got the music going, it’s blasting, so there’s loudness. Probably, like, I don’t know, one hundred and ten decibels. Ross hates everything, you know what I mean. He’s very selective about what he likes. And he just tapped me on the back where I was. He’s like, ‘What is this?’ I say ‘why?’ He goes, ‘because I like it’. And I was like, you do? I was expecting he’d hate it, you know? And I said, Well, you’re probably gonna hate it now. He goes Why? I go, because it’s me, Ross!”

“He brought some record company dude down. That’s where it got serious when I got that validation from Ross. That changed a lot for me right there. And he brought down this, this record company dude who runs some label, like Universal, something like that, and the record dude said he won’t sign it. And I looked at him, I was like, okay, and he never signed it. But thing was, at least it was cool. And now I go back to Switzerland, because Tommy had kept on working. He said, ‘you know, we should get Mutt Lange involved’. And I was like, how are we going to get Mutt Lange? I’m like, some dirt bag from Long Island. You’re this guy playing guitar in your bedroom in some apartment in Sweden, and he’s like, I’ll send it to him”.

“And he did, and Mutt called me up and he liked it! Then that was one of those things where that’s a life changing moment. I mean, it doesn’t sound important to some people, but for me and Tom, it was one of those moments where it was like, Wow! He really likes this, you know, and he likes my voice. And I’ll show because, you know, I was just doing my, you know, my whole Johnny Rotten, Alex Harvey, Bon Scott… I’m doing everything that I love, that’s in my DNA. And it’s great because I was pushing myself as far as I can go. Every time I do something. Paul, I’m always pushing myself as far as I can go, you know, that’s important to me. And what’s always important to me, even before Mutt Lange got involved, Every morning I wake up, I go, ‘What would Mutt Lange do’? Ask myself, ‘What would Mutt Lange do’? And I never, I can never deliver what Mutt Lange does, but I try my best”.

I can hear it in your voice, like it’s such a buzz to actually have someone so decorated, to be able to actually to be supporting you, and to be actually really interested in driving this project. “So it’s like the one thing with him, when I’m singing my backgrounds and stuff, when I’m doing, The Boom Went The Boom. Like, you have no idea how many layers of that I do to try and sound like Mutt Lange, so when I heard his voice and my voice together on that dude, I cried like a fucking baby. Man, that’s that sound where I go ‘that’s the sound’ man, and that’s still me, like when we work on a track, You know what? You know, the record comes out. If people don’t like it, that’s okay. You know why? Because I fucking love it. We got Mutt Lange to be the executive producer, and, I wrote, like, the best songs with Mutt Lange too. Man, songs like I’m Unbreakable, and The Last Night on Earth, it’s like, that’s… that’s the dream come true for me. And I can’t thank him enough, and I’m grateful for everything he’s done. And, you know, we’re still doing songs together right now, which is amazing for me”.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Because the longevity of that side of things, it sounds like it was much, much more – that it’s building into a friendship and continued collaboration. “I call it like a mentorship, like he’s mentored me in ways that, you know, it’s like when you’re doing songs, I don’t know, man, it’s like, I don’t mean to sound like a hippie, but it’s like this. It’s like the universe and it’s like magic. Why can’t it happen all the time? This is what drives me nuts. It takes me, like, thirty songs to get that one. You go up, there it is. But every day you know, I wake up, I go, I want to, I want to try and write it right. And you know, most of the times you come up short, but every once in a while the universe drops that bomb on you, where you go, Yep, okay. Thank you very much. And it is. It’s like magic. And I love that, you know, because I don’t know where it’s going to go, and I don’t know what mood I’m in, you know, maybe a pissed off mood. And the song dictates that for me, you know, like the song, I go, Oh yeah, yep, this is going to be one of those angry songs, okay”.

But that’s what’s makes it so special. If you did it every day and every song come out great, you just wouldn’t appreciate it as much, right? “Yeah, yep, yeah. And that’s the brilliant part about it. So really is, it’s the magic part of it. You know what I mean? And I would say it’s like, different for everyone, it’s just how you experience it. I just love the art of making music. Even though everything’s been done, every chord, every note, every time I do something, that sounds like, blah, blah, blah (another song). And I’m like, Oh, that’s cool. Without even realising it, until you play it back, you go, we got to change that. You know, it’s not even plagiarism. It’s just like, I’m sorry. Yeah, I love your music. So whenever I write something, it just happens to come out. Sometimes when I go, Oh, it sounds like that. It’s not to rip it off. Here’s another one; when we did Let’s Bust The Trust, I was thinking, I want to do an Irish song. I want to do a song about, like cereal, Lucky Charms, or something, I don’t know. And it just so happened, let’s just do something Irish, you know, puts all the shit on there, violins, fiddles, everything. And next thing I know, it’s turning into…  it sounds like Slade. I don’t know that until I’m at the keyboard player’s house. This guy, Jamie Muhoberac, who’s like, this musicologist, he’s like, a scientist, this guy, you know, on some other level shit. Jamie, he knows every song written, everything. Whenever I bring something to him, he’ll be like, Oh, that sounds blah, blah, blah. So we’re working on it and he has that face. He’s like, Huh? ‘What you just did reminds me of Run, Runaway’. I was like, ‘You’re right, was that a good or bad thing?’ He goes, it’s good because it has – it has the vibe to it, but it’s not the song. Mutt did his magic to it. He turned that song into, like, that thing, man, where he just chops. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s just, he’s got a skill”.

I’ve read many times where, a lot of stars have  said he’s the best guitarist and the best singer in the room. Is it still the case? “Uh, absolutely. Well, I’ve never been in a room with him, to be to be honest, like. We did Facetime with him, and then sessions. So he’s the best all around to me in the world, not the room. Ain’t nobody better than him. Nobody. He’s got the record to prove it hasn’t he? That guy is amazing. I don’t care what kind of genre music it’s like, from Billy Ocean to Bryan Adams, Shania Twain, AC/DC, to Def Leppard and The Cars. It doesn’t matter what genre, whatever, he’s just got the skill, yeah”.

You touched on before that you had a fair bit of the songs structured, and Mutt wrote with you a bit. So, when you went in there, you had, like, probably ninety per cent of the songs there, and you just wrote a bit extra? “All the songs are pretty much written and arranged when he gets there. And it’s like, when I’m sitting here mixing and doing edits and arrangements, I’m trying to think ‘What would Mutt Lange do’ again, you know, but try and figure out how we do this. And then I’ll take the whole mix and the session, and I’ll send it to him. Then he’ll say, don’t listen to any of the demos. We don’t go back. We only go forward. I was like, wow. Okay, so we never go back. We never go ‘Let’s go listen to version one.’ There’s a lot of producers out there to do that, where they get stuck on demo. Not us, man, let’s just keep on moving. So, say now we’re at version seventy. We’re never going ‘Let’s go to version twenty again’. So we are continually moving and that’s one thing I learned about him. It’s like, just keep on moving forward. Never go backwards”.

Yeah, that’s good. It doesn’t get formulaic. Then it’s much more natural and spontaneous. “And it’s always changing. All of a sudden I get it back. Holy shit. What happened to that part? And then you got to listen to it about like, fifty times ago. Oh, I see what he’s doing. And it’s pretty amazing, that process, there’ll be a lot of surprises man, all of a sudden you… you’ll love this part. And he wanted to have a lot of space. That’s what he said. He’s like, there’s no more space in music. He’s like, let’s make it. Let’s concentrate on the hi hat. Let’s make space”.

Different way of thinking about it. “Think about it. Listen to every song, every new thing you hear. It’s like, they don’t stop. It’s like, stop… and it’s auto tuned. It sounds like a computer did it. And that’s the thing, this ain’t got auto tune in it. It’s like, real drums, real guitar, real everything. You know what I mean? I’m not saying that none of it’s tuned, but I’d say if anything, it’s very slightly tuned. You know what I mean? I’m saying it’s sharp and flat all over the place. You know, that’s the thing. If you’re singing and you’re telling stories and you’re trying to get the message across, and its punk rock, dude, you can’t have that stuff tuned. Nah, nah”.

Takes away from it. That’s for sure. “Personality and the attitude, you know what I mean? Because this is from personal experiences that I’m trying to, you know, put out there – my experiences from my life, how you know about survival, you know, fucking mental states and fucking people starving and welfare, and fucking how the world and humans are fucking like rotten people, ther’s a lot of evil humans out there, man, It’s just like they want to hate they don’t want to fucking embrace anything. It’s like the way they talk online, dude. If you don’t like what I’m doing, then don’t listen to it. Why do you gotta attack me personally? That’s another thing too. What do I do to you? It’s just crazy. Everyone’s got an axe to grind nowadays, but I don’t get it? How about if you don’t like it, don’t listen? I never say anything, like my mother used to say ‘If you ain’t got nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all’. If you don’t like the music, say ‘I don’t like that it sounds too much like blah, blah, blah, or I don’t like your voice, like your look – then I’m cool with that. But when you attack me, you know what I mean? It’s too easy, man, too easy these days, they don’t actually have to front up to people. I respect it more if you just say who you are. Just send me an email, tell me how much you hate it. I’m cool with that, and I really am. It’s like, growing up in New York, Paul, I’ve been through so much, all of this stuff. That’s why I feel bad for young kids today just trying to show their stuff, on Instagram or YouTube and people make fun of people, they attack them. Just give the kid a fucking break. It’s just, it’s just sad to me, man, it’s just like, I don’t get it anyway”.

You put together a pretty cool band there, you got some well known people that you worked with previously, Chris Wyse (bass), Glenn and Tommy, as you said. But the likes of Jamie – have you worked with any of them previously, because it sounded like he’s just come together, and you’re really gelled nicely. Obviously, with the people you play with, a lot that’s to be expected, but with guys that you haven’t done much work with? “I’ve been playing with Glenn for like, over thirty four years. I’ve been playing with Chris for a long time. When I first met Chris we were touring with Alice Cooper and Ace Frehley was opening up for us in Australia”.

Yeah, I went to that gig, actually. “Playing his bass solo. I walked over to Coop (Alice), and I went, Hey, Coop, can you come out of your dressing room. He’s like, why I go? I want to show you the bass player for the Hollywood Vampires. So here’s Chris playing, I think the Halloween base line, doo, doo, doo, doo. And I go, just watch this guy, Coop. That’s our bass player. He went, you’re right. So that’s when we started with Chris. Tommy, we worked with together on Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare 2. That’s where I was introduced to Tommy. Then we did the follow up, which I think was Paranormal (2017), and we did a couple things like that. But as far as the live band, that was just mostly in the studio, there’s only like five people playing on it. Glenn’s playing all the drums. Tommy’s playing guitars. I played guitars here and now on certain things, this guy, Jake Roller, played guitars and fiddle on one song, and Jamie Muhoberac played all the keyboards. That’s it, and myself, I did all the backgrounds, and Olle Romo mixed it and engineered it. You know, we all did bits and pieces. And Mike Plotnikoff also engineered it, and he’s the one who got me the record deal on Better Noise, which is really cool”.

It’s just mixed brilliantly. It sounds like you can see you doing it in a live setting, and just it feels like it would just come across that way as well. “So, we just did two sold out shows at the Viper Room in Los Angeles on November 20 and 21st and it was amazing. We put the band together, because when, when we finished the record, I was like, saying to myself, I knew this wasn’t going to be the live band, but because I wanted a bunch of young kids, to, you know, empower some kids, and I found this incredible guitar player out of Newcastle on Instagram. Her name’s Anna Cara and she’s an incredible asset. And this kid, Sam Bam Koltun, and the drummer thing has been like this revolving drum, because when someone can’t make it, we put the other guy in. So that’s the only revolving position we have right now. Chris Wyse plays bass, and he also played bass on the record.

So you’ve had the couple, you’ve had the couple of big gigs, so you got any bigger plans on the horizon? “Yeah, we’re trying to set up a tour right now, I mean, we also have, like, the Hollywood Vampire movie that’s coming out next year, the documentary is a movie. And we got a bunch of Alice dates. We’re gonna have some Hollywood Vampire dates, I just don’t know., Waiting on that one, and in between, I’ll do the Crossbone Skully stuff, when it allows me and see what happens. But we got some good stuff going. Man. Everything right now. It’s like, right now the latest single is High On You, which features Nikki Sixx on bass. It’s doing amazingly well in Germany and Switzerland. Like it’s incredible. And The Last Night On Earth, which is like the sleeper of the record, it is doing, like, amazing. So, it’s really cool when you go, ‘Oh wow, that’s cool.’ And I’m just happy, man, I’m happy the way things are going. It’s going great. The fans have been nothing but driving the record. It’s a word of mouth record, you know, it’s not a top band. It’s not a gimmick, even though people like to say, I look like Ben Stiller in a wig, which I actually think it’s funny, because I go, Yeah, it does have a little bit of the Zoolander thing, but with a sword”.

Yeah. Well, look, as I said, for me, funnily enough, you talk about the guys saying ‘it sounds like’… I think your voice at times sound like Brian Johnson, but it’s sort of also like, I don’t know how much you’ve dealt with Airbourne like, over here in Australia? “That there’s Joel (O’Keefe). Joel’s more Brian Johnson than me. He’s got that thing down. You know, see, I always just say, like, when people hate on me, because it sounds like AC/DC, I was like, Airbourne gets a pass because they’ve been doing it so long. So I’m the new guy to hate. You know what I mean? Because I always look at it this way. If you could sound like Bon Scott or Brian Johnson or Alex Harvey, yeah, I don’t know many people that can. I’d say, Run with it as far as you can”.

But look it, as I said, for me, I heard a lot of lot of influences there. I heard bits of Def Leppard. I heard some of the Alice stuff. I heard some, AC/DC and it has it all. As I said, I had about three or four listens there last night. Really enjoyed it. “Great man, that that makes me happy, and I appreciate that. And, you know, it’s like when you sing with Alice Cooper every night. How could I not? Yeah? And I’m singing with him every night for the past, I don’t know, fourteen years. And I’ve been in the studio with him two years before that, so for like, sixteen years. And I know everything he’s gonna do. You know what I mean, which is great, and I’ve learned so much about performance from Alice Cooper, like, I can’t thank him enough for all of that stuff”.

He’s a legend of the music industry. “Yeah, right, amazing, right? Yeah. And to be able to actually work alongside someone you’ve liked that long, it’s osmosis. You just pick up that stuff. So if you don’t, you know, I mean, come on, it’s like, I was looking at this. I’m like, an old, beat up cassette tape. You know what? I mean, my record buttons on… I’m trying to get all this info from everyone and put it in here. You know what I mean?”

You got a graphic novel and animated film come along with support the expansion of the story of the album. How’d that come about? “That was one of those things where it’s just like when lyrically and (famed artist) Mark Wilkinson, who came up with the Crossbone Skully, dude. I had these conversations with Mark where I wanted to have this alien pirate, you know, swashbuckler, Robin Hood, you know, to come back and save Earth from all the sociopaths and selfishness and rock fucking human beings and kill them all, you know. I mean, start all over, keep the good ones and just eradicate the evil, you know, I still feel that way. Anyway, yeah, so we did this thing called Thing One, and we made this animated film, and we had Nikki Sixx be a guest, Johnny Depp, who’s the sorcerer. Alice Cooper, Joe Perry, Kane Roberts, Mark Wilkinson, Cheryl Cooper, you know, my son and my wife and Tommy, everyone. Everyone put in dude and this kid Riley Donahue did an amazing job on the film and the animation. It was one of those things. It was like, I didn’t know it was going to take, like, eight months to make this. You know, I learned a lot about animation, how expensive it is and time consuming. So had a great time, and I’m planning on doing another one too. Thing Two is on its way”.

Well thank you Tommy, it’s been an absolute pleasure, and I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to chat with me. We’ll get the interview out and hopefully a lot more word of mouth about the album. “Thank you and I appreciate the phone call and sorry if I went on a bit of a rant (laughs), but that shit pisses me off. I was like ‘Tommy get back’… Right on man”.

Crossbone Skully’s Evil World Machine is out now; Read our review of the album HERE

Original Tommy image by Sigrid F. Storli