King Diamond — Melissa (Live at Graspop 2016)
Kim Bendix Petersen singing the title track of the album that started Roadrunner Records, 33 years after he recorded it, on a Belgian field. No reinvention. No late-career pivot. The falsetto, the corpse paint, the same old good stuff. That is exactly the point.
Some artists spend their careers running from their past. Kim Bendix Petersen built a five-decade career by standing perfectly still, and this Graspop performance of Melissa shows why that was the smarter play.
The song deserves its spotlight. Melissa, released 30 October 1983, was Mercyful Fate’s debut and the very first album Roadrunner Records ever put out. Recorded in Copenhagen in July 1983, written by Hank Shermann, fronted by that impossible falsetto. The title track closes the record: a slow, mournful witch-burning epic that proved this band could do atmosphere as well as speed. Metallica were such devout fans that they recorded four of the album’s seven songs as the Mercyful Fate medley on Garage Inc. Whole careers grew in the shadow of those seven tracks. Demon Spell, one of our best-performing reviews, exists because this record exists.
And here he is in Dessel, 33 years later, hitting the same notes in the same paint. No reinvention. No electronics phase, no stripped-down acoustic album, no apology. People call that a lack of innovation. I call it a man who got it right the first time and had the discipline not to fix it.
The falsetto still lands. The theatre still works. Some things do not need updating. They need maintaining.
Listen to this: Mercyful Fate - Melissa