Motley Crue RETURN! 2005 Tour DATES!

It’s now official. The original members of Motley Crue, the raucous rulers of the sex-and-drugs-fueled nightlife on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, returned to their old stomping grounds today to announce their reunion and a new world tour--"Mötley Crüe: Red White & Crüe Tour 2005…Better Live Than Dead." After announcing their reunion plans, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, Mick Mars & Nikki Sixx gave the assembled 2,000 person crowd of worldwide media and invited guests a surprise taste of things to come by performing 5 songs-the first time the band has performed together in over six years.

The event at the Hollywood Palladium began at 5:30 p.m. with a press conference announcing the tour, a new anthology album and the debut of a fresh single and autobiographically-driven video, "If I Die Tomorrow." The new tour, it was revealed during the press conference, resulted not only from strong demand by homegrown audiences, but was largely fueled by the diligent efforts of Mags Revell, a UK promoter with Metropolis Music Group, who launched his own grass-roots campaign in the UK designed to get the band to reunite. Taking the unprecedented steps of placing advertising in UK media and putting a hold on concert venues in the UK for June, 2005, Revell’s efforts quickly gained traction with fans in the UK who added fuel to the fire by taking to the internet and spreading the word around the world.

Said Revell, "I honestly did not know until now whether Motley Crue would respond to our efforts. With the help of tens of thousands of fans in the UK and around the world, I wanted to show the band that there was a real demand for their reunion and I took a big risk. This is the band that we all never thought we'd have the chance to see live again and I strongly admire them for responding to their fans. It is the realization of a dream for so many people for whom Motley Crue represents what rock music is all about."

Over the weekend, Revell, along with the band’s UK agent, Neil Warnock, and a host of international media were summoned to Los Angeles for the big announcement. Said Jordan Berliant, a senior executive at the band’s management company, Tenth Street Entertainment, "Motley Crue are a gang that have always thrived on passion. It is the element that fuels their creativity and guides their decision making. The band first starting thinking about a reunion after being excited by some of the new songs that Nikki had begun writing. When they learned of the overwhelming groundswell of support from fans across the world as well as from members of the music industry, it became obvious to them that the time was right to climb the mountain once again."

Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee, the original members of Motley Crue, whose stature as the world’s most infamous rock band was made legend in their NY Times best-selling autobiography ‘The Dirt’, will be touring the world in 2005, beginning with 26 arena dates in the US and Canada beginning in February. The first announced dates in the UK & Europe were announced as follows. The UK dates, which will feature Killing Joke as a support act, go on sale today.

June 7 Helsinki, Finland Icehall Monsters of Millenium
June 8 Turku, Finland Rock in Turku 2005/Ellysee Arena
June 10 Oslo, Norway Spektrum Skooks Out 2005
June 11 Solvesborg, Sweden Sweden Rock Festival
June 12 Bologna, Italy Gods of Metal January,
June 14 Glasgow, Scotland SECC
June 15 Manchester, England Evening News Arena
June 17 Birmingham, England NEC
June 18 Cardiff, Wales International Arena
June 19 London, England Wembley, Arena

Additional dates in Europe are expected to be announced shortly.

The world tour will also make stops in Latin America in May and in Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia in November/December. A second leg of North American dates is expected in August and September.

In conjunction with the tour, the band’s US & International record labels also announced the release of a definitive 2-CD Greatest Hits collection that chronicles the band’s entire career. Scheduled for release on February 2nd, the set, entitled Red, White & Crue, includes three brand-new Crue songs including the first single "If I Die Tomorrow", which features a highly stylized and autobiographically-driven music video.

The Mötley Crüe saga began in a musical era when rock was still recovering from the emasculation of disco and the punk rebellion has already begun to take root. In 1981, bassist Nikki Sixx left his glam-rock band London and met drummer Tommy Lee, both strung-out adolescents with a penchant for the party life and a knack for creating fist-in-the-air anthems. With the recruitment of guitarist Mick Mars and singer Vince Neil, the band adopted the moniker Mötley Crüe and recorded their first album, Too Fast for Love, a paradigm-shifting effort which stoked the growth of the glam-metal movement based in Los Angeles. Picked up by Elektra, the Crüe released a string of classic albums through the 1980s: Shout at the Devil, Theatre of Pain, Girls, Girls, Girls and Dr. Feelgood, generating hit singles from most of their cover tracks as well as "Smokin’ in the Boys Room," "Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)" and many others. They were also selling out stadiums, eventually to the tune of over 10 million concert tickets.

Yet the forces that made Mötley Crüe’s kick-ass music so authentic, namely their own reckless lifestyle of excess, gradually took its toll. In 1989 Nikki Sixx was revived after flatlining from a heroin overdose, the most extreme example of the band’s indulgences. The band’s current reunion comes at a time of re-growth for all of its members: Tommy Lee is currently shepherding his best-selling biography, Tommyland, along with a new NBC reality show to debut in 2005; Vince Neil, having toured continuously as a solo artist, has appeared on several TV sitcoms as well as the WB reality series "The Surreal Life"; Nikki Sixx has been touring and recording with Brides of Destruction, writing songs and is preparing to release his autobiographical The Heroin Diaries; and Mick Mars, having struggled since his teens with the chronic, degenerative illness ankylosing spondylitis, has been successfully recovering from hip replacement surgery.

A theatrical film based on Motley Crue's best-selling autobiography, "The Dirt", is currently in the works with MTV Films/Paramount. The just-completed screenplay was written by Rich Wilkes (XXX).

www.motley.com