King Diamond played Roadrunner – 10/31
Corpse-painted heavy metal icon King Diamond brought his “St. Lucifer’s Hospital” tour to Roadrunner on Halloween night.
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Kim Bendix Petersen – the Danish singer and bandleader who goes by the moniker King Diamond and fronts the long-running band of the same name – knows what time of year to hit the road. Spooky season is the domain of the falsetto’d legend, who made his fame as ringleader of satan-dabbling black metal progenitors Mercyful Fate before embarking on a decades-long run of prog-horror concept albums, and this year Boston had the good fortune to land the King on Halloween itself. You can’t ask for better timing than that.
King Diamond (the band) hasn’t released a new record since 2007’s Give Me Your Soul…Please, and King Diamond (the guy) has been busy with an ongoing Mercyful Fate reunion since 2019, but the Roadrunner stop on this fall tour nodded toward forthcoming multi-album project The Institute with its asylum-themed set pieces and a handful of thematically-appropriate new songs. No King Diamond production is without its visual flair, and for this run, a pair of gothic staircases connecting a catwalk above a row of cells flanked some unfortunate bodies in suspended animation and an “Electro Therapy” prop that did just what it said on the tin. That also left plenty of room for your favorite King Diamond villains of yore – Abigail’s titular child-demon and Them‘s nefarious Grandma – amidst a host of other theatrical touches.
Throughout the night, King himself remained the most theatrical element of all, sporting his signature corpse paint, bone-cross microphone and searing-as-ever vocal pyrotechnics. Backing him up was a cast of old blood and new, including founding KD guitarist Andy LaRocque and Myrkur leader Amalie Bruun as a fresh face on keys and backing vocals. It all came together for an evening of crowd-pleasing heavy metal horror, sampling a range of King’s most spine-tingling tales in his singular style. Every night is Halloween to Petersen of course (as he reminded us on the anthemic Fatal Portrait cut named for the holiday), but it felt pretty special to experience the real thing in his presence.
Unfortunately I did miss the show’s opening sets from Night Demon and Overkill (my street is a demanding locale for trick-or-treaters and I am not about to disappoint them), but check out an extended gallery from the King’s set below.
