Motley Crue reunited

"Motley Crue band member Tommy Lee answers a reporter's question during a news conference announcing the rockers' reunion tour"

.. Lock up your girlfriends, wives, fiancees and maybe even your grandmothers if they have a taste for tattoos and guitars.

Motley Crue, the self-described world's most infamous band and one of the biggest selling groups of the 1980s and 90s, is heading for Australia.

The four original band members - Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars - announced today they were re-uniting for a world tour in 2005, with concerts slated for Australia and New Zealand in November and December.

The band, whose hits included Dr Feelgood, Girls, Girls, Girls and Kickstart My Heart, has not played together for six years.

''What's important right here right now is the fans want it,'' Lee, whose marriage to Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson made him a tabloid favourite, a jail inmate and amateur porn star, told a press conference in Los Angeles' famous Hollywood Palladium auditorium.

''The promoters called us and said 'You guys have to pull this together, C'mon'.

''So that's what we're going to do.''

The band promised fans in Australia and other stops on the tour - North America, South America, Asia and Europe - plenty of mayhem on and off the stage.

The group's bouts with drugs and alcohol have become rock folklore. Even the official Motley Crue biography handed out to reporters talks up the group's darker side.

''With the possible exception of Ozzy Osborne, no band has consumed as much booze without dying as the LA quartet Motley Crue,'' the biography says.

Lee said work was underway to create a stage show that will stun fans.

''We're meeting with some very, very crazy people right now,'' Lee said.

''So I can't tell you what the outcome will be because I don't have a crystal ball, but I can pretty much guarantee you when you get all these people in the room there will be some ...shit going on.''

The tour begins in the US in February and ends in Australia and New Zealand in December.

Motley Crue will also release a 2-CD greatest hits collection entitled Red, White & Crue, which includes three new songs.

Tour organiser Neil Warnock said venues and dates for the Australasian leg were still being set.

But he warned:''They'll be causing a lot of mayhem in Australia.

''They'll start here (the US) in February and cause a lot of trouble, then they'll move to South America, cause more trouble, then Europe and then we're going Downunder so get ready.''

Warnock laughed off suggestions the group might party so hard in the other continents they won't make it to Australia or New Zealand.

''They'll survive it. This is going to be one hell of a tour,'' Warnock said.

The tour announcement did not go exactly as planned as a fire marshal vetoed the band's plan to arrive at the Palladium via helicopter.

Motley Crue opted instead for a black hearse.

All four members have had their own personal mayhem.

In 1984 Neil was involved in a car crash that killed a friend.

In 1989 Sixx ''died'' from a heroin overdose but was revived with adrenaline.

In 1998 Lee went to jail in for beating up Anderson.

This year Mars had a hip replacement operation caused by a degenerative rheumatoid disease he suffers.

The band, which played five songs at the Palladium for 2,000 fans who camped overnight for a ticket, used their final words at the press conference to thank the fire marshal in their own special way.

''We had everything OK to drop the chopper in the parking lot, but the fire marshal dude decided to go on a power trip and wouldn't let us do that,'' Sixx said.

''So we have a message for him.''

At that moment the four band members lifted their middle fingers as the departing gesture.

The bad boys remain bad.