heavy metalmercyful fateking diamondbecky baldwin
19:59 Thursday, 12 January 2023
When Joey Vera had to drop off the Mercfyful Fate tour due to other commitments, the band were forced to find a replacement, who ended up being Birmingham-based bassist Becky Baldwin, who fits the blackened, blasphemous position perfectly!
BraveWords had the opportunity to speak with her for an upcoming Streaming For Vengeance video interview which will air in the coming weeks.
As you will find out, guitarist Hank Shermann had seen some of her videos (see below) on YouTube and suggested her to the the band. She met with the legends for the first time at the Bloodstock festival in the UK this summer and that’s when she was offered the position. Remember, all this is in honour of late bassist Timi Hansen who passed in 2019. So we asked her two very important stylish questions. It’s one thing to cover the songs with perfection, but what are going to do on stage and maybe more importantly (!), what are you going to wear on stage?
“On what to wear, I actually had a conversation with King Diamond only a few days after I get offered me the job,” Baldwin explains. “He said that I could go anywhere I want on the stage, but just don’t stand in front of me when I’m singing. And that’s something I wouldn’t do anyway, blocking the view of the singer from the audience (laughs). He said that my style was really cool and very metal and that I tend to wear skirts and shorts. Lots of different things. And King said he’d prefer if I would just wear all black, maybe something like leather trousers. And I thought to myself, I’ve been waiting to really treat myself with a very nice pair of custom leather pants. So this is perfect. So I asked my friend Sophie (Turnbull) from Painkiller Clothing to make me a pair of fake leather trousers for the tour and she said ‘hell yes’! King just didn’t want me to wear anything too bright or over the top. And on stage, he just said I could go wherever I’d like. The first show I was more concerned about staying out of the way and watching where the rest of the band were going to go on stage. I just kept an eye out and I didn’t move around too much. As we went on, we kind of spoke a bit more about stage presence. We just tried to figure out what we could do to make it visually more interesting. And I finally figured out where I could go without being in somebody’s way. It would be really embarrassing to knock into somebody and send somebody flying across the stage (laughs).”
Becky Baldwin performed on Mercyful Fate’s fall North American tour and Mexico’s Hell & Heaven Festival and the BraveWords-sponsored Monterrey Metal Fest in early December.
As of this writing, Mercyful Fate has nothing formally planned for 2023 and no gigs are booked. “There is no set thing that’s going to happen,” Baldwin adds. “Mercyful Fate has a bass player in Joey Vera. They really want to stay with him, because he’s an amazing bass player. And he was approved by Timi before he passed. There are no changes on that front. Fans can be assured that there won’t be any drastic line-up changes. Anytime Joey is busy with his other bands, I’m hoping and pretty sure I’ll be their first call. You may see me show up with Mercyful Fate and King actually did say to me that if he needed a bass player ‘I’ll give you a call.’”
Watch for our interview with Becky Baldwin to air on BraveWords' Streaming For Vengeance in the coming days.
(Mercyful Fate live photo by Oscar Sañudo Corona)
