18/08/2025
ON THIS DAY ... in 1983 - ALIEN S*X FIEND. 34 photos from a Zigzag magazine session in 1983 at https://mickmercer.substack.com/p/on-this-day-in-1983-alien-sex-fiend-a64 - free to subscribe.
“What I drew on for my influences was The Stooges and the mad Alice Cooper stuff. One of those things where…I still do it! Where you put the record on and then just jump all round the room.
“I always love the way the lyrics were delivered on those, like ‘I Love The Dead’, they create a feeling of the graveyard after dark…you wouldn’t see me in one. I ran through one once for a shortcut and that was it. Never again. I’m not into digging people out of the ground but at the same time there’s something very mysterious about it. I like doing paintings and drawings of things which, if they came to life, would frighten the s**t out of me.
“When Punk first came along no-one admitted to liking things other than ninety miles an hour. When people like Bauhaus and the Furs used to say, ‘Oh, we like some things from the 60’s’, everyone went ‘Urggghh! Drugs and that!’ Then a new drug culture started up and people let their minds…I mean me, even me, when Punk first started I thought people who took drugs were weird and everything I did was a thousand miles an hour, full of beer and too aggressive. What’s really good is that it’s expanded. The same as the beat thing with The Who, The Beatles, The Stones and The Doors. They were all similar, then they expanded.
“I know it’ll sound like a load of bulls**t but we’re not contrived. I used to draw all these characters and Chris used to say, ‘why do you paint yourself?’ They were characters in different situations and it finally found the footing where I was confident enough to carry on like that and wear that sort of make-up. It is very much like Alice Cooper to one extent in that I become a central character. One week you’re a vicar, the next an escaped lunatic. I see it as a release of a lot of emotion and tension. I used to sit and smash my room up. I come offstage sometimes badly bruised and cut and people say, ‘hey, that was a good act;’ and I say, ‘That was no act! If you’d come near me you’d probably have had your arm broken’.
“Two guys came up to me at Manchester and said they’d like to be part of the show. I remember socking one of them onstage and them fighting back, one of them dragging me by the hair. How do you explain that? I can disappear for about three minutes in a song and when it finishes I can feel the song oozing out of me. I gradually reassess myself and look up. It’s weird, like a trance. You can emit yourself into a trance, because whatever the music does to you, it takes you away. Sometimes when there’s just a blue light and all these heads, and the muslin, I wonder where the hell I am!”
