Motley Crue: 'We got away with murder. Absolute murder'

This month will see the release of The Dirt – a Netflix adaptation of Motley Crue's sleazy, bestselling 2001 autobiography, subtitled Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band. More than a decade in the making, the film charts their rise from Californian wannabes to the tattooed kings of the heavy metal scene, and stars The Riot Club's Douglas Booth as bassist Nikki Sixx and Iwan Rheon from Game of Thrones as lead guitarist Mick Mars.

Achieving record sales of more than 100 million, Motley Crue became the big–haired poster boys for an obnoxious amalgam of glam and punk rock. Dressed in spandex, high heels and make-up, they fetishised a life of pure hedonism. Indeed, so uncompromising are the accounts of partying, sex and drug abuse in the book of The Dirt that many had assumed it to be unfilmable. Until now.

"Netflix have steel balls," says Sixx, before explaining a female executive at another film company once vowed the movie would only be made over her dead body. The Dirt's unstinting fidelity to the book – it opens with a jaw-dropping scene in which Lee's girlfriend performs an astonishingly explicit party trick – is already a point of pride for Lee, who is played on screen to great gangly effect by rapper and actor Machine Gun Kelly. "Oh boy," Lee chuckles, "this might be the first time people actually enjoy the movie more than the book."

Directed by Jackass veteran Jeff Tremaine, The Dirt arrives on screen at a time when the rock biopic is riding high. The Oscar-winning Queen film Bohemian Rhapsody is edging towards a billion dollars at the global box office; an Elton John film, Rocketman, is set for release in spring. Yet, Lee says, there have been so many lame rock'n'roll movies over the years. Although he enjoyed Bohemian Rhapsody, he was bummed out that it swept Freddie Mercury's homosexuality under the rug. He wishes they would have got into that some more and really let people see how weird things got in the band.

Things certainly got weird in Motley Crue. The Dirt depicts both Sixx's toxic relationship with his parents and the later, rampant heroin abuse that led, in December 1987, to cardiac arrest – and him being declared clinically dead. He was only revived when paramedics injected adrenalin directly into his heart. (The band wrote one of its biggest hits, Kickstart My Heart, about the incident. Every cloud...)

Today, Sixx, who turned 60 in December, is sober. He is more intense in his delivery than Lee and prone to rehab-speak, as one might expect of a man whose addiction was so deep-set that the only thing he chose to rescue from his Los Angeles home during an earthquake was his pipe.

Growing up, he had a volatile, sometimes violent, relationship with his mother and stepfather (he has no memories of his biological father) and says he first turned to drugs to fill an emotional hole. For Sixx, watching parts of The Dirt was uncomfortable but cathartic. "Because you know what? We survived."

Despite its often gritty content, tonally the film sidesteps the bleakness of music biopics such as Alex Cox's 1986 Sid Vicious film Sid and Nancy and steers closer to the sprightly feel of a buddy movie: the lights are bright; the fives are high. It doesn't duck the issues so much as douse them in Technicolor. It shares an upbeat sheen with Bohemian Rhapsody, although it leaps into sleazy rock'n'roll waters where the Queen film merely dipped a toe.

To record four new songs for The Dirt soundtrack, Motley Crue returned to the studio for the first time since they disbanded in 2015, joining Bob Rock, producer of their career-high 1989 album, Dr Feelgood. Sixx says it felt so good to play together again. With filthy guitars overlaying Lee's pounding drums, the new music is classic Crue: polished, forceful – and as subtle as a sledgehammer. There is an ironic cover of Madonna's Like A Virgin, its chorus sung at menacing half speed by lead vocalist Vince Neil. And, putting paid to any hopes that the band's lyrical concerns might have matured, the title track The Dirt (Est. 1981) includes a reference to strippers with nice big tits.

Ah yes: women. The most charitable thing one could say about Motley Crue's sexual politics was that they were of their time. Another way of putting it would be to point out the band members were misogynistic pigs. The Dirt – both book and film – records countless lewd backstage antics involving groupies and girlfriends; a flagrant display of male rock star privilege as far out of step with the MeToo era as it's possible to be.

"That was the '80s, man," Lee protests. "And you know what? There really were no rules. This was before people wore condoms, there weren't crazy diseases, this is like a free-for-all. I think people will enjoy [the film] for its outlandish, crazy style, because really during that time anything went. Anything. That was before people had cell phones and Instagram and all this stuff, so we got away with murder. Absolute murder."

Getting away with something doesn't make it OK. I ask Lee how he would characterise his behaviour towards women at the time. "It's how it was then," he says. "There was certainly no disrespect. I think we just enjoyed everybody."

There is a moral ambiguity to some of the male-female relationships depicted in the film: in one scene, Lee's raging girlfriend repeatedly insults his mother. So he punches her. It makes for queasy viewing, and leaves us to draw our own conclusions as to who is the victim.

I wonder if Sixx thinks the band treated women with enough respect back then. "No," he laughs. "Are you kidding? We didn't treat anybody or anything with respect. It's just the way it was. We grew up with the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks and Black Sabbath. You're looking at Ozzy Osbourne and Johnny Rotten, Aerosmith and Keith Richards. Am I supposed to be in the Backstreet Boys now?"

Sixx responded to questions from Rolling Stone magazine over a chapter in The Dirt in which he admitted to "pretty much" raping a woman at a party. In a statement to the magazine, he claimed the story was "possibly greatly embellished or [I] made it up".

Do they have any regrets about their past behaviour? "Hell no!" Lee says. And Sixx? "I mean, my liver. If you want to look at my liver under a microscope..." He gets serious. "There's regret. Of course there's regret. There's regret in how we treated each other, too. But we didn't know any better." Now, he says, he sees the world differently – and stands 100 per cent behind the MeToo movement.

However, Rheon says, it's important that MeToo doesn't mean actors and filmmakers stop telling stories about subject matter that may seem outdated through today's lens. "It's in the book. It's what they did," he says.

This is where Lee's comments about modern bands come into play. People, particularly those in the public eye, have become so straitjacketed by political correctness they can no longer be carefree, he argues. He hopes that younger bands will see the extreme partying in The Dirt and realise what they're missing.

"Maybe life would be a little more interesting for some of these rock bands," Sixx says, "if they didn't look like bankers."

These days he looks to rap music, rather than rock, to see attitude, passion and evidence of a life lived to the max. Sixx was baffled recently when he asked a friend who manages young rock bands whether his charges were out there having the time of their lives and getting arrested, as Motley Crue did. No, he was told. Young bands today do pre-show yoga, watch YouTube in their downtime and are in bed by 11pm.

Sixx and Lee remain unrepentant: you feel they see The Dirt less as a snapshot of a bygone era than a call to arms. "Maybe our movie is a necessity right now," Sixx says.

The Dirt is out on Netflix, and The Dirt Soundtrack is out on Eleven Seven Music.

The London Telegraph