Stryper‘s frontman draws a line between sharing a stage and singing someone else’s words, and says he sought King Diamond out in person rather than avoid him.
Michael Sweet will share a bill with King Diamond. He will not sing for him.
Asked by Scott Itter of “Dr. Music” whether he would ever play guitar in King Diamond‘s band if the money was right, the Stryper frontman turned it down and then immediately offered the alternative.
“You mean, like be in [King‘s] band? I don’t know that I would do that. I would probably safely say no, I wouldn’t do that. I would think that he would probably say the same thing if we asked him to come and sing for Stryper. I could be wrong. But it’s nothing against him as a person, but just I don’t agree with anything spiritually in terms of what he sings about versus what we sing. It’s a polar [opposite]. So it’s, like, I would feel like I’m basically betraying my, my faith, betraying myself and what I stand for. Now, some people might not agree with that, and that’s okay. But now, would we go tour with him and play with Mercyful Fate or King Diamond — Stryper and Mercyful Fate? Absolutely. 100%, 100%,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
The two acts sit at opposite ends of the same genre. Stryper, formed in California in 1983 and named after a verse in Isaiah, became the first contemporary Christian act to sell a platinum record with 1986’s To Hell With The Devil. Mercyful Fate, formed in Copenhagen in 1981 by King Diamond and guitarist Hank Shermann, built Melissa and Don’t Break The Oath on occult themes that made them a reference point for the extreme metal that followed.
Sweet met King Diamond, whose given name is Kim Bendix Petersen, for the first time on December 4, 2022, when both bands played Hell & Heaven Metal Fest in Mexico. He says he went looking for him.
He continued: “Look, I went out of my way to, meet him, to meet Kim. And I look at him as a person just like me. Man, we’re all on this earth searching, we’re all on this earth trying to figure it out. And I really wanted to meet him. Now, I could have gone the opposite, like some dark metal bands do with Stryper. I could have been a d**k to him. I could have mocked him. I could have disrespected him. I could have done any number of things, like I said, a lot of dark metal bands have done to us when we play festivals and whatnot. There’s this weird thing towards Stryper. But I wasn’t about to do that. And I saw that he was set up next to us, his dressing room, and I said to myself, ‘I gotta meet him.’ And I did. And I had a lovely conversation — short but sweet. And his wife is wonderful, Livia. And I just really learned to respect him and learned to respect, obviously, everything that he does because I realized, wait a second, he’s just a guy searching just like me who’s out there, like I said, trying to figure it out. He’s a person that I believe God loves just as much as anyone else. And that’s just what I feel. It doesn’t matter who he is or what he does or what he sings about. And that applies to anybody out there. I posted something about Hulk Hogan. And people started coming against me because, ‘Ah, he was a racist,’ and ‘he was this’, and ‘he was that.’ And it’s, like, but God loves him just as much as He does you.”
Hogan, who died in July 2025, faced criticism over a recording leaked in 2015 in which he used racial slurs. He apologised at the time and was removed from the WWE Hall of Fame before being reinstated in 2018.
Sweet said he would like to spend more time with King Diamond. “I hope I can have the opportunity to hang out with [King Diamond] a little more and go have dinner and talk. That’d be really cool.”
Sweet gave a fuller account of the encounter on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” in January 2023, describing how the meeting was set up.
“When we got to that festival in Mexico, I walked into our dressing room, and right next to ours it said ‘Mercyful Fate‘. And I said to myself, ‘Okay, there’s no way I’m gonna leave this festival without meeting Kim.’ And I spoke to someone, and they spoke someone and arranged us meeting. I went out in the hallway, and there he was. And he said, ‘Michael, nice to meet you.’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s so nice to meet you. What’s going on?’ And he was all smiles and very gracious. And we talked about the weather where he lives and the weather where I live, and just regular stuff. And it was really incredible. Because you have this idea of what it’s going to be — good versus evil; and is there gonna be a war? Is there gonna be this? And it’s the exact opposite. And that’s really the way life is nine out of 10 times,” he said at the time.
Asked by Eddie Trunk whether their beliefs came up, Sweet said they did not.
“No. [It was just] two dudes talking. And we enjoyed each other’s conversation. And if we were out at a restaurant, we would have hung out and had some wine and broke bread together and talked more.”
The reaction to the photograph came from both directions.
“It’s just interesting because some people from both camps freaked out,” he recalled. “Most people were positive, but some people from my camp are, like, ‘Did you get to talk to him about the Lord?’ I’m, like, ‘Really? You’re kidding me, right?’ So I’m gonna go up to Kim and immediately say, ‘Let’s talk about the Lord.'”
On the possibility of the pair recording together, Sweet said the idea had not come up at the time but he was open to it.
He said: “That’s something I would have talked to him about. I did not, and maybe that will happen someday; that would be amazing. But we just talked about regular stuff. And it was brief; it wasn’t a long conversation — maybe five minutes, six minutes. And his wife wrote on my Facebook page about how she wanted to meet me and meet the band and how great it was that Kim and I met. It was just really cool, man. It was amazing.”
Pressed further, he explained his process. “Sure. Of course. Let me put it this way: before I do anything, I think about it, and not to sound silly, but I do pray about it. I pray about everything that I do, like, ‘Should I do this?’ And some people might think, ‘That’s weird,’ but it’s just how I live my life. And I would certainly pray about that, as I did do in Sweet & Lynch.”
That last reference is to his long-running partnership with guitarist George Lynch, who describes himself as a freethinking atheist, and with whom Sweet has made three albums.
Stryper released their sixteenth studio album When We Were Kings through Frontiers Records in September 2024, followed by a Christmas record, The Greatest Gift Of All, in November 2025. Sweet produced both.
Mercyful Fate returned to the stage in 2022 after more than two decades away and have been working towards a new album since, with the current lineup of King Diamond, Hank Shermann and Mike Wead on guitars, Bjarne T. Holm on drums and Becky Baldwin on bass. King Diamond‘s own long-delayed record, planned as the first of a two-part story titled The Institute, also remains in progress.
