As some of you may or may not know, The Empire Hideous is no longer a functioning band; meaning the band no longer has members and no longer does public performances. In February of 2008, Myke Hideous (lead vocalist and founder of the band) made an announcement to Hideous fans that he was no longer going to continue the process of the band’s effort. However, Myke kept one last promise to Hideous fans that he would release one last studio recorded album of new material and one last album of remixed songs and never before released material.
The last studio recorded album to come from The Empire Hideous was called: The Time Has Come and features 14 tracks of newly recorded material and one bonus track. All the music was written by Myke Hideous, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by Myke and guitarist Johnny Nickel. Together they worked on the album for more than four years until it was complete.
A side note about this album: In January 2009, Myke met with longtime friend Peter Steele (Type-O-Negative) and Peter offered to produce the album, as well as help get the it signed to a label. Unfortunately, as Peter sat listening to the demo’s material, making pre-production notes and writing down ideas, he suffered a heart attack and died in April of the same year. Unfortunately, this was a massive blow to every one of Type-O-Negative’s fans, as well as Myke and Johnny, who were left to finish the album on their own. And so they did.
The Time Has Come was independently released in the early part of 2011, made available through MykeHideous.com and EmpireHideous.com, ONLY.
In the winter months of 2014, Myke released the very last album to come from The Empire Hideous called: Remixes Through Time. This full length album CD contains 14 tracks of original and re-worked Hideous songs, and one bonus track recorded live. This album was released through New Dark Age Productions, operated by Myke’s long time artist friend, Doktor John, who incidentally is the artist responsible for creating the image that appears on the cover of the CD.
With the release of these two final Hideous album’s Myke Hideous has officially retired from the music scene, devoting 100% of his time to his art and photography.
Aside from the last Empire Hideous CD’s that were released, one other musical project was finally made available to the public after 13 years of laying dormant. The full album of the music from SpySociety99 (SS99) was released in the beginning of the year in 2014. This long awaited album comes from the band Myke produced after his short time singing for the Misfits in 1998, after which SS99 was formed as a four man band, performing throughout the east coast of the USA. SS99 had recorded an album’s worth of original material, but it was never released for reasons unknown. In any event, the album was independently released with three newly recorded songs from 2013. The album is titled: Die Punk, Die! which contains 14 tracks of songs never formerly released. This CD can only be purchased through MykeHideous.com, EmpireHideous.com and SpySociety99.com. Once again, since there are no musicians to back this project in live performances, now shows will booked for its support.
Lastly, at the writing of this article, Myke was awaiting the final proofs of his manuscript which was to become the re-release of his autobiography entitled: King Of An Empire To The Shoes Of A Misfit – The Memoirs Of Myke Hideous. The original book was released through 1st Books Publishers in 2002. After the book sold a few thousand copies, Myke ended his business relationship with the publisher in December 2005, due to a breach in contract from the publisher. In early 2014, Myke announced that he’d be re-releasing the book after spending the summer re-editing the original chapters and writing an entirely new chapter for the book’s end, bringing the reader up to date, and 30 new photographs were added, for a total of 55 photos in all.
The book was supposed to be released from the publisher in October, 2014, but a massive issue has erupted with the publisher and Myke, as he battles to recoup everything back to his possession and find a new publisher.
You can obtain more information and updates at: FaceBook.com/HideousMyke and Hideous777@yahoo.com
