Mark Linkous

Mark Linous

I met Mark Linkous a few times in the mid 90s and again about five years ago. I wish I had some great insight to give you based upon these meetings which consisted of a couple of interviews, a conversation after a gig and a few chance meetings where only small talk and small gossip was exchanged. Perhaps I should tell you that he was a generous man, a kind man, a beacon of hope in a hopeless world. He may well have been, but I’m fucked if I noticed it. Maybe I should say that I saw right away that he was spiralling towards an unhappy end. That would just be bullshit.

For example: one of the occasions that I spoke to him was in London in 1996 just before he went back to his hotel, had an overdose and collapsed in such a way that he almost had to have both legs amputated. When I spoke to him he seemed fine. A bit laconic and tired, but no more so than any other jet lagged American junkie muso that struggled to answer my asinine questions in those days.

Hearing what happened that same week was shocking. But it was one of those classic overcoming adversity narratives that everybody loves and nobody wants to question too deeply. You know the story: he’s a great artist, but he has problems  with drugs. He nearly dies but he survives against the odds. Then he comes back and makes a stunning life affirming piece of art. And gets the girl. Freeze frame and roll credits to some high energy 80s power ballad.

But let me tell you something: surviving death and feeling overjoyed at being alive, you’d be surprised how fucking quickly that fades. You’re left with the same problems that you had before with some new ones added for good measure. Linkous could never walk properly again and had to wear braces on both legs. He never complained but then you’re not allowed to complain. You’re supposed to feel blessed, or lucky to be alive, an optimistic good sport, not some self obsessed depressed and miserable old cunt with two gammy legs.

Linkous, we’re told, struggled with depression all his life. Like many people who do, he self medicated with drugs, which may have compounded his problems but some of which may have numbed him physically and mentally enough to make it to the end of another day. Maybe we’ll never know what the text message he received was, the one that supposedly upset him enough to go and get his rifle and shoot himself through the heart. That’s not important. The cause can be any trivial, insignificant event. All thinking people consider suicide at one time or another. It takes a ‘perfect storm’, where all the necessary elements come together. Most suicides start days or weeks before triggers are pulled or high windows are opened.

What Linkous had in common with Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, Pete Hamm, Nick Drake, Vic Chesnutt, Kurt Cobain, Billy MacKenzie and  Per Yngve ‘Dead’ Ohlin is not that they created introspective music that contemplated the shadowy side of life. No, what they had in common was being male.

Men are nearly three times more likely to kill themselves than women. Among men under the age of 35, suicide is the second most common cause of death. Suicide is more common than homicide. Among middle aged men – Linkous was 47 – the rate has soared over the past decade.

There are kneejerk explanations for this: men can’t talk about their feelings the way that women supposedly do; men are a redundant sex; men are full of bad chemicals that makes them predisposed to depression and suicidal tendencies; men are just plain bad. Is is economic boom or bust? Too much responsibility or too little? The truth is that nobody knows why and all snap ‘common sense’ judgements are wrong. All of the artists mentioned who killed themselves were able to express themselves very articulately through their music. Linkous wasn’t a great confessional songwriter; he conjured up skewed wonderlands, a musical and verbal equivalent of the films of Tim Burton or Jan Švankmajer. But it’s unlikely that you’ll find many clues to his death on any of the Sparklehorse albums other than that Linkous was no stranger to the ‘dark side’.

Linkous had drug issues and was also upset by the suicide of his friend Vic Chesnutt earlier this year. Suicides sometimes have a nasty habit of spreading like a contagion.

It has been suggested that people who are depressed are actually seeing the world as it actually is, and it is everyone else who is deluded, clinging onto false hope, convincing themselves that life is worth living. People who kill themselves are just incapable of bullshitting themselves anymore.

But what could anyone have done? Maybe not allowing him to live as a virtual recluse. Maybe intervening in his drug use. Maybe forcing him to talk about what was going on in his mind. Nothing he’d have thanked you for or actually allowed anyone to do.

Linkous was a great talent. Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot is one of the best albums of the 1990s. He never topped it but always seemed to promise that he would. Maybe his Dark Night Of The Soul collaboration with Danger Mouse and David Lynch is the classic last word. Maybe something he had secreted in his beloved studio is the final masterpiece.

More likely there will just be a few tantalising odds and ends and a lot unresolvable questions.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Music journalism, NME, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse, Suicide

ROBERT CALVERT Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (Atomhenge/Esoteric)

The great Calvert

Although often described as “overlooked” or “neglected”, Hawkwind’s sometime frontman Bob Calvert’s first solo album  actually scraped the album charts and was – along with an afghan coat, a quid deal of red leb and a Mayflower paperback edition of one of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books – an essential possession for the mid 70s adolescent Brit stoner, filed there alongside Warrior On The Edge Of Time, Fish Rising and something pre-Virgin by Tangerine Dream.

It’s a Hawkwind album in all but name, the line-up augmented by various Pink Fairies, Viv Stanshall, Jim Capaldi, Arthur Brown and (uncredited) Brian Eno. It’s popularity with the ‘heads’ can be put down to the Pythonesque sketches that link the songs – surreal skits about Luftwaffe pilots wearing make-up and dodgy Yank jet salesmen that are even funnier when herbally enhanced – but also to four absolute killer space metal songs The Aerospaceage Inferno, The Widowmaker, The Right Stuff and Ejection. It was everything that Hawkwind promised on Silver Machine and Urban Guerilla.

It’s more straight ahead punk rock before there was punk rock metal, alluding to other Calvert songs and stories, moving “sideways through time”, that sort of thing. Calvert, as a boy wanted to be a fighter pilot but a perforated eardrum put paid to that dream. With Hawkwind he lived out his fantasies – a few years later he appeared onstage dressed as some glam rock combination of Biggles and Lawrence Of Arabia. And in these songs he seems to be flying with an afterburner.

The concept is about the Lockheed Starfighter, sold to the revitalised West German Luftwaffe in the 50s to help build the Federal Republic as a bulwark against the commies at the height of the cold war. The crashed and burned in alarming numbers as poorly trained pilots and ground crews earned them the nickname Flying Coffins and The Widowmaker.

Calvert’s songs have an almost JG Ballard-like fascination with the crashing aircraft, eliciting an almost sexual thrill from the disaster. You sense that he didn’t so much want to fly a starfighter as crash it into the ground.

Of all the songs on the album, the greatest is the masterful Ejection, probably the best song ever written about bailing out of a fighter plane. Legendary rock hack Nick Kent, a longtime champion of Calvert and Hawkwind, described Ejection as having the best riff since (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and although he was no stranger to hyperbole, in this case he was bang on.

The remastering on this edition gives the sound a much needed punch. The only disappointment is the additional tracks: a more complete collection might have included The Widow’s Song, planned for inclusion with Nico on vocals, though eventually recorded by Calvert and his girlfriend just before his untimely death.

That’s a petty quibble though: a brilliant monument to the great psychedelic warrior poet of the English underground.

Tommy Udo

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, hawkwind, Robert Calvert, Viv Stanshall

Black Sabbath: still the soundtrack to these heavy times

This was written for  the 2006 book 100 Albums That Changed Music, edited by Sean Egan.

 

BLACK SABBATH

BLACK SABBATH

Released US June 1970 UK February 1970

US: Warner Brothers

UK: Vertigo

TRACKLISTING: Black Sabbath, The Wizard, Behind the Wall of Sleep, NIB, Evil Woman, Sleeping Village, Warning

PRODUCED BY: Roger Bain

DONG…dong…donggggggg! Are there three greater notes in the entire history of popular music than the opening clanging chords,profound bass and church bell stabs that kick off Black Sabbath‘s debut album? As an introduction, a statement of intent, it has to be up there with the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth and the theme from The Flintstones.

1970 was a heavy year: the war in Vietnam continued to rage, the hippie dippy dream went sour at Altamont and there was a new mood of paranoia in the air. Sabbath articulated that perfectly. Sabbath spoke to a generation of kids who were too young to give a shit about Bob Dylan or Eastern mysticism or sticking flowers into the barrels of guns. They caught the more pessimistic mood of a generation who really expected to be fried in a nuclear war before they got a whole lot older.

Black Sabbath was recorded in three days for £600. By their own admission, the band had no idea what they were doing:everything about the album is a sort of happy accident. They were booked into the studio by their then manager Jim Simpson who also secured them a deal with a new and very hip progressive label called Vertigo. Sabbath were apparently very unhappy at the amount of money that they were offered, but went along with the deal because they felt that getting a record out would help them to get paid more for gigs. The production on the album by Roger Bain was rough; he was to work on the follow up – and commercial breakthrough album – Paranoid and its successor Master Of Reality, but he was comparatively new to studio production and was appointed by the label rather than being the band’s own choice.

The seven songs on the album are fairly representative of the live set that they were playing at that time, though they already had songs like Paranoid written for the second album which was recorded only a few months later. They recorded Black Sabbath more or less as a live album; apart from a few overdubs and effects like the rainstorm at the beginning of the title track that opens the album, it was pure unadulterated no frills Sabbath.

The album was preceded by the single Evil Woman, a cover song originally written and recorded by an American band called Crow, and very atypical of Sabbath’s later sound. Evil Woman is a fairly standard R&B riff, an uptempo, soul-influenced song that sounds as though it was tailored for the disco scene of the day. It bombed.

The album fared better, entering the UK album charts where it stayed for 42 weeks, peaking at number eight. They were also big in Germany, regulars on the rock TV show Beat Club. When the album was released in the US in June it quickly accumulated a sort of cult status, mostly through word-of-mouth.

From the start Sabbath faced a press that was at best indifferent and at worst hostile: the term “heavy metal kids” was applied to their fans as an insult, though interestingly they were never actually dubbed “heavy metal” until the very late 70s,”heavy rock” being the preferred – and even the pejorative – term for their music. Sabbath were caricatured as “rock’n'roll from the building site”, a sneer at their working class origins, or “downer music”, referring to the supposed penchant of their fans for cocktails of tranquilizers and cheap wine. Sabbath did it all the hard way, building up a following through hard labour, playing gigs for as little as £70 wherever they could set up.

There are actually no ‘Satanic’ songs on the album: the song Black Sabbath is a horror story about demonic possession; The Wizard is about somebody using magical powers for good; Evil Woman is a fairly standard blues theme about a lowdown-cheatin’ no-good gal; NIB, rumoured to stand for ‘Nativity In Black’ was actually a nickname for Geezer Butler [his beard looked like the nib of a pen, according to Ozzy]; Behind The Wall Of Sleep, despite borrowing a title from pulp horror writer HP Lovecraft is just about dreaming and waking up. But decisions made by the record company – the album cover which the band did not see until the record was released with the inverted cross in the gatefold; the publicity department’s rumour mongering about their occult involvement in an attempt to generate press interest – as well as their name tapped them into a growing occult underground, particularly in the US. Their first US visit was supposedly cancelled because of the ongoing Manson Family trial.

Alex Sanders, the UK’s self-styled King Of The Witches, attended several Sabbath gigs and tried to get them to attend his covens supposedly on the strength of cover.

“I have no idea to this day who the girl on the cover was,” says Tony Iommi. The picture – credited to Marcus Keef, the in-house designer at Vertigo records – was actually taken at Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames and was supposedly an actress hired for the shoot who met the band long after the album had been released. The washed out colours of the image suggested a witch or a ghost and further reinforced the supposed links to the occult.

The impact of Black Sabbath resonates to this day; it is far from being a perfect album – Evil Woman and their cover of Aynsley Dunbar‘s The Warning are fairly ropey – and the jury is still out as to whether Master Of Reality or Volume 4 is THE all time classic Sabbath album. But the song Black Sabbath itself doesn’t sound dated in the way that, say, most of Led Zeppelin III now sounds like a period piece. And the impact that the album had helped to spawn a sort of heavy rock arms race, where bands tried to outdo each other for sheer weightiness. Although debate rages as to whether or not this was the first proper ‘heavy metal’ album – Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf and Blue Cheer had all beaten the Sabs by a couple of years – it did nail down the formula – downtuned guitars, Satanism, thundering volume – that would eventually become a global franchise.

Sabbath are still the soundtrack of these heavy times.

Tommy Udo

 

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, 100 Albums That Changed Music, Black Sabbath, Early heavy metal, Satanic rock, Vertigo records

Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral

This re-evaluation of The Downward Spiral was written for a 2006 Metal Hammer special on 90s music. This is, for me, an album that’s every bit as important as Highway 61 Revisited, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Bitches Brew, Master Of Reality, For Your Pleasure, Low, Closer, The Correct Use Of Soap and just about any other undisputed classics you care to mention.

In 1997, Trent Reznor was named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people, sharing the honor with the cartoon character Dilbert and then US Secretary of State Madeline Albright. He was called “the anti-Bon Jovi” by Time. His “vulnerable vocals and accessible lyrics led an Industrial revolution: He gave the gloomy genre a human heart…Reznor’s music is filthy, brutish stuff, oozing with aberrant sex, suicidal melancholy and violent misanthropy. But to the depressed, his music … proffers pop’s perpetual message of hope: There is worse pain in the world than yours. It is a lesson as old as Robert Johnson‘s blues.” 

Reznor was the latest in a long line of brooding, dark romantic figures that included David Bowie, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He was also an overlooked recording genius, a studio nerd who pioneered a polished, aggressive hard rock sound that is still ubiquitous today.

He seemed an unlikely icon before and an even less credible one today. He’s still a figure of some importance and influence, yet the idea that he was perceived as the spokesman for generation x now seems faintly ludicrous.

Perhaps this is because he is now perceived as the Svengali behind Marilyn Manson, the puppet master who lost control of his creation. And for all his spikiness and the threat to the American way of life that he represents, Manson is more easily digested on MTV than Reznor ever was.

Throughout the 90s Reznor transcended genres and tribes: he appealed to goths because of his emaciated, pale demeanour; he appealed to fledgeling nu metalheads who loved the abrasive guitars and in your face beats; he appealed to ‘cyberpunk’ types who read Wired because it seemed that he seemed to be orchestrating the bleak future world of frazzled tech depicted by William Gibson in Neuromancer. Before the rise of his protégé Marilyn Manson,he was the USA’s most popular nihilist. This reputation rested largely on his masterpiece, the sprawling black hole of despair that was The Downward Spiral. 

Even today you can listen to The Downward Spiral and still discover things that you had never heard before. It’s almost as if the album has kept on growing and changing, updating itself between plays.

The first Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine, recorded in 1988, was essentially an electronic work heavily influenced by Skinny Puppy, Ministry and Depeche Mode, with Reznor as one man band, creating all the songs and sounds in the studio. The abrasive follow up (of sorts) Broken introduced distorted guitars and a hard rock sensibility. These largely appealed to a cult market, the still-thriving industrial underground. But by the time he made The Downward Spiral in 1994, the ‘mainstream’ of hard rock – under the influence of everyone from Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana to post-‘black album’ Metallica – was moving towards where Trent Reznor had already staked out his territory. 

In 1992 Reznor moved to Los Angeles. He had just signed a deal with Interscope that gave him the artistic freedom that he needed to work on his third album. He wanted a property where he could set up his own recording studio.

The Downward Spiral was one of the first albums to be recorded entirely using state of the art digital technology whereby sounds were recorded and stored on a computer hard drive rather than on magnetic tape. They could then be digitally altered – adding effects, reverb or taking such effects off and cleaning the sound up where necessary – rather than just putting the band in the studio, recording the instruments and mixing it together.

The beauty of digital recording is that it can really be done anywhere. The location Trent wanted had to be sufficiently isolated but large enough to accommodate the gear and any collaborators like producer Flood and his main collaborator/assistant drummer Chris Vrenna, whose job was to sift through hundreds of videos for samples to be used on the album. He found a house to rent in the Hollywood Hills, a ranch style bungalow on Cielo Drive. It’s a beautiful, picturesque location, set in the real super-rich Los Angeles populated by movie executives, actresses and musicians. The house he rented at 10050 Cielo Drive, Beverly Hills had had some famous tenants in the past, most notably maverick Polish film director Roman Polanski his beautiful young wife actress Sharon Tate.

One sultry night in August 1969 while the heavily pregnant Sharon and her friends were turning in for the night, a group of hippies broke in. In the space of an hour Sharon watched as her friends Abagail Folger, Jay Sebring and Voytek Frykowski were slaughtered in front of her. Then they killed Sharon, ripping the unborn baby boy from her womb. She was alive to see this. They wrote in her blood the words ‘Pig’ and ‘Healter Skelter’ (sic) on the walls and on the door.

Trent had moved into the house made famous by the so-called Manson murders.

“It’s a coincidence,” he told Rolling Stone at the time. “When I found out what it was, it was even cooler.”

Later, he admitted that he had in fact deliberately chosen the location for the bad vibes but regretted this after a meeting with Sharon Tate’s sister Doris.

At the time they were recording in the house, Vrenna and Reznor nicknamed the studio ‘le pig’, alluding to the word ‘pig’ scrawled on the wall in Sharon Tate’s blood by killer Susan Atkins. One of the strongest tracks on the album was also March Of The Pigs, though Reznor denied that there  was any connection between this and Charles Manson. 

Reznor had been listening to a lot of David Bowie and the influence of Hunky Dory, the 1971 album where he attempted to redefine the way that pop songs were written, had percolated through. Bowie had tried to break away from the traditional verse/chorus/middle eighth/repeat structure of songwriting on that album, something that greatly appealed to Reznor.

While The Downward Spiral was not planned as a concept album, there are linking themes and recurring motifs in the songs. He had been keeping notes on his inner state since his chaotic booze and chemical fuelled stint on Lolopolooza. This provided the conceptual backbone for the songs: “It is personal experiences, but it’s wrapped up in the highly pretentious idea of a record with some sort of theme or flow to ‘em, and it was meant to be…It’s become a kind of a dated 70s concept, but some of the records that influenced me a lot on this album, like [David Bowie’s] Low and even The Wall – I’m sure I’m ripping off Pink Floyd, in fact, I know I am ripping them off. There’s records, although they may appear dated today, that try to do things that are more exciting to me than, ‘Here’s my video track and here’s my dance song and here’s my power ballad.’ All that kind of disposability. It was just me bored, trying to come up with something that I kind of wanted to set the parameters to work within, to focus more.” 

The expectations for The Downward Spiral were almost crippling. Pretty Hate Machine and Broken had – in a sense – both been produced in secret. But the constant pressure from fans, admirers and other bands asking when the new album was out, how it was going, what it would be like, what the songs would be, what colour the cover would be, started to take their toll.

The album was more of a struggle to make than he realised it would be. The original intention had been to make the album quickly. Reznor cited the example of Nirvana who had gone into the studio and made Nevermind in two weeks. But the process was different for him and soon his new record company Interscope were expressing ‘concern’ at the time that album seemed to be taking to make.

Reznor and Marilyn Manson had started to hang out together, Trent was determined that he would sign Manson to his own Nothing imprint. But aside from the music, the two also shared an interest in LA’s seamier side. As Manson recalled in his book The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, much of their time together was spent hunting groupies, indulging in strange sex and getting wasted. The stories of depravity that emerged from the sessions are legendary and not always repeatable for reasons of legality and taste. Suffice to say that Reznor even looked debauched, like some mildly bloated Byronic figure, or Jim Morrison after the booze and drugs had started to ravage his looks.

But Reznor survived. He later said: “I just wanted to kill myself. I hated music. I was like, ‘I just want to get back on the road because I hate sitting in a room trying to, trying to’ –how do you say this?—‘just scraping my fucking soul.’ Exploring areas of your brain that you don’t want to go to, that’s painful. You write something down and you go, ‘Fuck, I can’t say that. I don’t want people to know that.’ It’s so naked and honest that you’re scared to let it out. You’re giving a part of your soul away, exposing part of yourself. I avoid that. I hate that feeling of sending a tape out to someone: ‘Here’s my new song. I just cut my soul open. Check it out. Criticize it’.”

Reznor wanted to finish the album and get the Hell out of LA and back on the road.

“That’s the stupidest fucking reason for doing an album I’ve ever heard,” American recordings boss Rick Rubin told Trent when they ran into each other. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it until you make music that it’s a crime not to let other people hear.”

Somehow shaken by Rubin’s advice, Reznor knuckled under and – taking time out to work with Manson – delivered the finished album almost a year after he had started work. The flurry of writing and recording produced 16 songs and some leftovers that would crop up on b-sides, or would be reworked as material for remixes for Nine Inch Nails as well as other artists.

The songs were like frontline reports from the battlefield of Trent Reznor’s psyche. That they were classic songs of negativity, angst, despair and hatred would come as no surprise. But Reznor’s voice – previously heard only through a bank of distortion and FX screaming in mute nostril agony – was transformed, seductive and even sweet. From the deceptively quiet intro to Mr Self Destruct, through the piano melody on March Of The Pigs to the grandiose almost-pop of Closer, to the tenderness in the hate-ballad Piggy, it was clear that The Downward Spiral was an album with light and shade, with blended colours rather than just blocks of bold primary hues.  There was enough of the cyber jackbeat on Heresy and the intense title track itself that connected Reznor to his earlier work and still had him filed under ‘Industrial’. But the truth is that he wasn’t so much part of a different genre as an entirely new game altogether.

Attempting to recreate the same sense of ‘masterpiece’ about The Fragile, Reznor succeeded in making a great album that could only be listened to in small doses: in The Downward Spiral he made something magnificent that took you on a journey all the way to the heart of darkness. 

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Industrial music, Interscope, March Of The Pigs, Marilyn Manson, NIN, Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor

Metal movies

This was a piece written for a 2007 Metal Hammer special The Devil’s Music. Despite what is written in the piece, I’ve subsequently discovered that LaVey did not in fact play the devil in the Rosemary’s Baby rape scene, it was in factr actor Clay Tanner.

THEY say that the devil has all the best tunes. He also has a lot of the best movies. If metal is the devil’s music then what are the devil’s films? How do we define what constitutes a heavy metal movie?

There’s a scene in The Terminator when Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) being pursued by the relentless cyborg from the future (Arnold Schwarzenegger) takes refuge in a Los Angeles industrial metal club called Tech Noir. It looks like the best club on the planet: chain link fences inside, where heavy looking pseudo-bikers and urban Vikings grope and grapple with mohicaned cyber-sluts all to a pounding 80s hair metal soundtrack. It’s all filmed through a blue tinted filter and the neon seems to leap out of the screen at you. To those who hate metal, it looks like Hell has opened up a theme bar here on Earth. It is an evil place: you can imagine that even if Arnold doesn’t walk in and start blasting at her, there are a lot of other pretty nasty things that could happen to Sarah at the hands of these depraved drug crazed leather clad barbarians.

The Terminator is a heavy metal movie: literally, since the character of the title is made of titanium with a fleshy outer coating. It’s not a film about heavy metal and the soundtrack is fairly typical 80s pop-techno, but the overall look and feel of the movie, the pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles city of night, Arnold in his stolen leathers, the gleaming skeletal creature revealed at the end, is pure metal. Even the plot could have been lifted from a Judas Priest album.

The relationship between metal and the movies – particularly horror and dark sci fi – has always been a two way street, though in the beginning it was really only the bands who took their inspiration from the big screen.

Flashback to Birmingham in the late 60s when a local blues band called Earth had a gig cancelled on them because they were apparently mistaken for a better known pop combo of the same name. They decided that once and for all the had to come up with a better name. As if in answer to their prayers, a film called Black Sabbath was playing at the cinema across the road from where they were rehearsing. They decided there and then to call themselves Black Sabbath because, according to Geezer Butler, “no other fucker in the world would have a name like that.”

Evidence suggests, however, that they never actually saw the film. A shame, though they have also gone on record as having said that they were so scared after seeing The Exorcist that they all slept together in the same room. Black Sabbath, originally entitled I Tre volti della paura [The Three Faces Of Fear], was a 1963 Italian film by horror supremo Mario Bava that was released in a badly cut and dubbed version in 1969 to cash in on the horror boom sparked off by Britain’s Hammer films. Black Sabbath was a compendium of three horror stories, the most disturbing of which was called The Wurdalak, which starred Boris Karloff as a vampire who feeds off the blood of his own family. It was no classic but it was indicative of the way that the horror movie was going in the 60s, becoming darker and more serious. In fact, the parallels between the new school of horror film and the emergent heavy rock scene were striking. It was a much heavier kind of entertainment. By the 70s, both cinema and hard rock had discovered an unholy interest in Satan and all his works.

In the 50s and early 60s, horror and sci fi movies were almost exclusively done on the cheap and were usually unintentionally hilarious. Screaming women were menaced by men in bad rubber monster suits,crew cut scientists foiled the plots of men from Mars who arrived in flying saucers that looked suspiciously like car hubcaps suspended from thread. But in 1968 Polish director Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby scared the shit out of audiences around the world. The plot involved a conspiracy by modern day Satanists in New York City to bring the son of the devil (played in the film, incidentally, by Church Of Satan founder Anton LaVey) into the world. It was a revolutionary horror film: paranoid, dark, treating its subject matter very seriously. There was a sense that the film was cursed, too, particularly when the Manson family broke into Polanski’s home and slaughtered his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. It was, in the parlance of the time, ‘heavy’. Interest in Satanism boomed. In the late 60s and early 70s there was a spate of Satanic cinematic treats in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby such as Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Race With The Devil, Mephisto Waltz, The Sentinel, The Devil’s Rain, The Devil Rides Out, and, most notably, The Exorcist and The Omen trilogy.

These were not exactly pro-Satanic movies:in the case of The Exorcist and The Omen, they were informed by the worst sort of Christian rabble rousing. The Exorcist involved a case of Satanic possession in modern day Washington DC. The heroes are two Catholic priests, one a Jesuit doubting his faith and the other a veteran exorcist who has no doubts about the reality of the devil despite the fact that the rest of the church regard a personification of Satan as somewhat archaic. William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel and screenplay of The Exorcist, had once considered becoming a Jesuit and entering the priesthood. Despite the shock value that it generated, the film was well received by the Catholic church who had felt themselves to be under attack from the permissive values of the 60s. One priest said that he loved The Exorcist because it would “scare people back to church.”

The Omen draws its source material from the nuttiest Christian fundamentalist interpretations of ‘the last days’ and the Book Of Revelations. The anti-christ is born to a wealthy diplomat. It’s almost like a continuation of Rosemary’s Baby. It spawned three sequels (though the truly dire The Omen IV went straight to video) and has just been the subject of a dreadful remake.

Yet despite the fact that these were in a sense anti-occult films, their success stemmed from the public’s fascination with the supernatural.

Similarly, despite the fact that Black Sabbath were popularly perceived as devil worshippers, very few of their songs have an actual occult theme and those that do – such as After Forever – are actually pro Christian.

As well as Sabbath, though, there were lots of occult-influenced early metal bands in the 70s: Black Widow, who used to perform a fake human sacrifice onstage, Blue Oyster Cult whose upside down ankh logo suggested that they were also a Satanist sect, and Led Zeppelin, who inspired all sorts of underground rumours regarding their involvement in the Left Hand Path of magick. But while the bands may have been inspired by the movies, or were at least riding the wave of interest that they generated, there was little in the way of a metal influence in the films themselves. The characters were usually straight and suburban, the locations were often very square American small towns and the soundtracks were traditional mock-classical ominous music. Maybe the high school kids in Brian DePalma’s teen-horror classic Carrie or John Carpenter’s gory splatterfest Halloween were into mid 70s proto-metal, but they mostly looked and acted like characters from the 50s.

In the 80s, however, a new wave of horror and sci fi started to take its cues from the look and feel of punk and metal. With the rise of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, thrash and MTV and the video culture, there was a more identifiable metal look as well as a sound. The occult and Satanist influence was more overt: while Sabbath always did their best to deny any involvement in the dark arts, new bands like Venom and Slayer revelled in their notoriety.

Early attempts to put metal bands on the screen, such as 1987’s KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, were pretty poor: it owed more to the high campness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Phantom Of The Paradise than anything else. Alice Cooper’s big screen acting debut Monster Dog, a spectacularly dire Spanish/Puerto Rican film is one of the most awful films ever made. One neglected gem, however, is The Incubus, a trashy Canadian film that features a cameo appearance from Bruce Dickinson, then lead singer with cult NWOBHM band Samson. 

A new type of low-budget horror movie was emerging in the 80s: so called video-nasties like Return Of The Living Dead had killer soundtracks that included the likes of TSOL and The Cramps. They also looked like the album covers of some of these new school metal bands come to life. It seemed that film-makers had at last found out who their target audiences were.

Films like the Mad Max trilogy – particularly the second and third films in the trilogy The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome – were set after a nuclear war and it looked as though the only survivors had been at a Motley Crue show when the bomb dropped. Mohicans, leather, studs and biker boots became the favoured look of these post-apocalyptic anti-heroes and villains. In the wake of the aforementioned scene in Terminator, this whole genre of films – Bronx Warriors, Robocop, Escape From New York – began to be dubbed Tech Noir.

By the 90s, this Tech Noir look and feel had crossed over to the more traditional gothic horror film. The Lost Boys, Hellraiser and, especially, The Crow mixed up characters with punk rock haircuts dressed in fetishistic leather gear with fairly traditional horror movie themes of vampires, demons and vengeful spirits. The Crow is one of the first films to explicitly recognise that large numbers of goths, punks and metal fans are also big horror fans. The Crow of the title Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) in his leather and corpse paint looked like he had just come from an audition with Emperor. The movie’s soundtrack covered the goth spectrum from The Cure to Nine Inch Nails. It was the forerunner for a whole sub-genre of goth movies that also includes director Alex Proyas’s next film Dark City as well as such direct descendants as Underworld, Van Helsing and of course The Matrix.

The big fear at the centre of horror films in the 70s seemed to be that the boogeyman would come and mess up the cosiness of America’s white-bread suburbia, the new school of metal horror was set in a goth neverland, part Blade Runner urban sprawl, part supernatural necropolis. They became less about scaring people and closer in spirit to the action adventure genre, albeit involving vampires,werewolves and similar children of the night. Today’s vampire hunter isn’t a doddering old guy with a stake and a small glass of holy water. He’s going to dress in Rob Halford-like leathers, will carry a machine gun that fires wooden bullets and will shoot holy water out of a high pressure hose. 

The Matrix has been the most important recent film in terms of a metal cinema crossover. Again, it is the look and feel and soul of the film that is heavy metal rather than anything specific about the plot or soundtrack. For no apparent reason, the good guys in The Matrix favour black leather and PVC clothes while the bad guys go for straight two piece suits. Keanu Reeves looks vaguely like Trent Reznor, his long duster coat and shades look was reputedly the real inspiration behind the misfits who went on a rampage at Columbine.

It’s a case of trying to figure out who is imitating who because The Matrix so quickly established itself as a cult that the look, the themes and ideas all started to filter back into metal videos, album art and lyrics. 

But for all the crossover that there is, it’s maybe remarkable how little there has been in other areas. Given their overwhelming influence on heavy rock from day one, you might have expected that the soundtracks of Conan The Barbarian and Lord Of The Rings might have had some input. They are both pretty metal-looking films but the soundtracks are pretty anodyne. Imagine how much better it would have been to have had the battle of Minas Tirith set to something by Slayer rather than the pseudo-classical orchestral pomp that they settled for. Of course, that would really have upset the Tolkein purists. There’s never really been a great metal sword and sorcery film, though many of those movies – Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Lord Of The Rings – have been hugely influential. We hope in future to see one of the members of Turisas sitting on the director’s chair to make the long awaited film of The Mighty Thor. We can but dream… 

Metal had always been one step ahead of cinema in terms of how shocking it could be. Films like Se7en may have been pretty grim stuff for mainstream audiences but they could hardly compare to the deluge viscera contained on a single Cannibal Corpse song or album cover. But as film-making special-effects got more sophisticated, it became possible to show almost anything on screen. And as public tastes became hardened – films like The Exorcist that were pretty shocking in the 70s looked tame 30 years on – so film became more extreme.

There were, perhaps very sound commercial reasons for making the crossover between metal and movies a more solid thing. When director David Lynch cast Marilyn Manson in a cameo as a porn star in Lost Highway and included a few of his songs on the soundtrack – against the express wishes of his one time mentor turned embittered rival Trent Reznor who was supposedly responsible for compiling the music in the film – he caught the wave of his ascent. The soundtrack album became an artefact that even people who didn’t go to see the film would want to own. And when Korn’s Jonathan Davis compiled the soundtrack for Queen Of The Damned, he made an album that was infinitely superior to that prize turkey of a film.

It was inevitable that the lines between cinema and music would blur further when rock stars began to write and direct as well as act and compose soundtracks for films. To be charitable, though, these haven’t always been wildly successful.

Despite the fabulous title, House Of 1000 Corpses never really lived up to all that director Rob Zombie seemed to promise. It’s a slick, rather too-knowing homage to classic slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it was played for laughs and hence singularly failed to cut it as a great horror movie. The follow up The Devil’s Rejects was better,a grindhouse tribute to 70s exploitation cinema, with fewer laughs and more gore.

Glenn Danzig is currently filming Ge Rouge, based upon his voodoo-inspired comic book of the same name. “It’s gonna be a horror movie like you’ve never seen before. There will be a lot of zombies, all kinds of rituals, snake worship, too much to mention,” Danzig told Hammer before the film went into pre—production.

And Marilyn Manson is currently filming Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, a movie based on the creator of Alice In Wonderland that Manson assures us will “redefine the horror genre”. Manson will also appear in the film as Lewis Carroll alongside teen model Lily Cole as Alice and – reportedly – Angelina Jolie as the Red Queen.

And in the darker realms of the metal and cinema underground, we look forward to Harvest Ritual from cult US death metallers Necrophagia’s frontman Killjoy. It will go straight to DVD and will be the most extreme film that you can imagine, he claims.”There will be things in this film that have never been seen on the screen before,” he says.

We await them all with baited breath. 
 
 

TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL METAL FILMS 

THE WICKER MAN [1973] 

Cult Brit horror about pagan human sacrifices on a remote Scottish island. Inspired Iron Maiden’s song of the same name, and Edward Woodward’s cries as he is led away to be burned is much–sampled by death metallers. 

WITCHFINDER GENERAL [1968] 

Fantastic under-rated British movie set during the English Revolution. Puritan fanatic Matthew Hopkins, played by Vincent Price in one of his best ever roles, hunts for heretics. A very big film for doom metallers like Cathedral and Reverend Bizarre 

THE OMEN [1976] 

How many times have you seen a band come onstage to Jerry Goldsmith’s marvellous soundtrack to this li’l devil? The movie itself isn’t really much cop but without it there’s probably the odd band who wouldn’t know what the number of the beast was. 

THE EXORCIST [1973] 

Several death metal grunters have confessed that they really tried to sing like the voice of the demon Pazzuzzu in The Exorcist. The voice, incidentally, belonged to veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge whose fag consumption gave her the sort of growl that would have got her a gig with Deicide. 

ROSEMARY’S BABY [1968] 

Unfortunately you never get to see the baby, though the scene when she looks in horror in the cradle and somebody says: “He has his father’s eyes,” is priceless. Anton LaVey loved this film as it portrayed Satanists as smart, strong and ruthless. 

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE [1974] 

The first proper video nasty, the title basically tells you everything you need to know. Avoid the smug remake; the original will make you puke with fear. 

DRILLER KILLER [1979] 

The film that launched a million grindcore bands, a completely immoral and horrible piece about mindless slaughter for its own sake. How can you not love it? 

DRACULA [1958] 

The first outing for Christopher Lee in the count’s cape, would there be any goths in the world had he not done so? Blood and big bosoms abound. 

THE DEVIL’S RAIN [1975] 

A group of backwoods devil worshippers led by Ernest Borgnine has the power to melt their victims. Quite why they would need to do this is never explained; some great – and again much sampled – black mass scenes. 

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT [1972] 

Two girls go to the big city to see their favourite band BloodLust. Along the way they meet up with the Charlie Manson-like Krug and his gang and end up raped and murdered. Then a bloody path of revenge follows…really nasty.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism

Black Widow – Sabbat bloody Sabbat

This was a Vault piece from Metal Hammer about the pioneering heavy prog band Black Widow. When I was 10 I heard Come To The Sabbat on my uncle Ian’s copy of Fill Your Head With Rock and it made a huge impression upon me. It was to be about another 30 years before I heard it again. I’d love to travel to the parallel universe where the Broadway show actually happened.

ALTHOUGH Black Sabbath are usually credited as being the first band to forge the link between heavy music and ‘satanism’, there are several other more obscure claimants to the title. In fact, in their early days, Sabbath were often confused with a Leicester band called Black Widow. Shock-horror reports in the Sunday papers about ‘LSD-crazed devil worshipping rockers’ used sometimes accused Sabbath of having performed mock human-sacrifices onstage, something that they never did. Black Widow, on the other hand, built their whose stage show around plunging a knife into a naked virgin.

By 1969, the hippy dippy nursery rhyme psychedelic whimsy of Donovan, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and early Pink Floyd was dead. The dying days of hippiedom coincided with a massive revival of interest in the occult. The new face of the hippie dream was the thousand yard stare of Charlie Manson, who declared himself to be Jesuis and the devil, on the cover of Life magazine.From Hammer films and the novels of Dennis Wheatley to the scary black-robed Process Church cult who used to walk around West London, there seemed to be satanists everywhere. Like Sabbath, Black Widow emerged from a moderately successful local pop act called Pesky Gee who wanted to jump onto the ‘underground’ gravy train and were astute enough to latch onto the imagery of the ‘dark side’.

The stage show (choreographed by members of Leicester’s Phoenix Theatre Company) featured the mock sacrifice of a nude woman, which predictably had the tabloid hacks queueing around the block in search of a story. The band were also reputedly taking advice from self styled “king of the witches” Alex Sanders.

The band were snapped up by CBS and their debut album ‘Sacrifice’ was rushed out in 1970.

“We had a lot of bad luck,” says flautist/sax player Clive Jones who now runs a management company. “CBS released it on the same day as Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ [one of the biggest and fastest selling albums of the 70s].”

The pressing plants were working overtime on the soft rock classic and consequently very few copies of ‘Sacrifice’ actually made the shops.

Despite all the tabloid notoriety, it barely scraped the lower reaches of the album chart – though the inclusion of ‘Come To The Sabbat’ on the budget double compilation ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’ helped to spread its unholy word.

The Sabbath/Widow confusion was exacerbated by the fact that both bands shared the same management. But anyone who was looking for a Sabbath knock-off would either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised. 

Although the name Black Widow is such a quintessentially perfect heavy metal name, the actual sound was more in keeping with the emergent progressive rock. Heavy organ-led songs full of jazz structures, folky melodies and unconventional instrumentation – violins, flutes, ‘primitive’ drums – gave it a flavour that was closer to bands like Jethro Tull than to Sabbath.

One track, however, stood out: ‘Come To The Sabbat’ started with ritualistic drumming and chants, launched into a song about a quest for knowledge, before hitting us with one of the most chilling ‘choruses’ of all time. “Come, come, come to the sabbat/come to the sabbat/satan’s there” is intoned over a stark drum, building up into a frenzy. Tame stuff these days, but back in 1969 it must have been enough to have the priests round to exorcise the place.

The band made two more albums but dropped the occult theme in an attempt to reach a wider audience.

According to Clive Jones, this was a central split in the band with two of the members wanting to go ‘mainstream’ and the others wanting to stick to the occult themed show.

Various projects – such as an attempt to take their stage act to Broadway – failed to materialise and the band split up after recording a fourth album – never released at the time – without anyone really noticing.

That might have been the end of the story were it not for the fact that there has been a constant interest in the band bubbling under thanks to the efforts of bands like Witchfinder General and Cathedral who were inspired by Black Widow throughout the 80s, 90s and beyond.

And now a film of the band’s entire ‘Sacrifice’ stage show has been unearthed and will be released next year on DVD.

Furthermore, Clive Jones is working on new Black Widow material 30 years after the original band split. The devil will have his revenge.

 

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

The Damned – Phantasmagoria

This is a review of two Damned reissues published a few months ago in Classic Rock magazine. The Damned are criminally overlooked, perhaps because a lot of people of a certain age see them as a comedy band, or they bring out the knee-jerk anti-goth prejudices of the Uncut set. My favourite Damned album is still Music For Pleasure, the second album that everyone still seems to think was some kind of a monumental disaster. But Phantasmagoria is a fantastic album too: hugely important in the narrative of post-60s psychedelic rock.

The Damned
Phantasmagoria
Anything
Universal

When Captain Sensible quit The Damned in the mid 80s, it took the brakes from frontman Dave Vanian’s ambitions for the band, allowing them to shed the last vestiges of their comedy pop-punk past and mutate into something darker. The Damned arguably started the perennial youth subculture known as goth (no Damned, no My Chemical Romance) and by God they weren’t about to allow upstarts like Sisters Of Mercy snap up all those cadaverous Hammer horror scream queen girlies in purple velvet and PVC.

It was a new beginning: after a long stint with indie Chiswick and a brief tenure with Bronze, they were snapped up by MCA who had the money and muscle to push them to the stadium level, maybe even to break them in the US.

Phantasmagoria was heralded by the eerie non-album single Eloise, a surprise hit that set the tone for the new era of The Damned. This carried over into the bloody Morricone-like Shadow Of Love on the album and the lo fi Doors-like psychedelia of Grimly Fiendish. This appeared at the start of a small scale 80s psychedelic revival that at one extreme produced novelty acts like Doctor & The Medics and at the other a lost Paisley underground, bands like the Mood 6 and the Prisoners. After a comparatively long stretch in the wilderness, The Damned seemed to be back on form again. On the subsequent album Anything, The Damned took this gothic psychedelia a step further, covering Love’s Alone Again Or, which along with Gigolo and the album’s title track were released as singles though barely got anywhere near bothering the Top 30. But whatever momentum they had built up with Phantasmagoria was lost with the follow up which was poorly received by press and punters alike and saw an end to their stint with major label MCA. In fact it was to be their last album for a decade. Not that Anything is a bad album; the Love cover and the closing track Psychomania are classic Damned. It simply isn’t their finest hour.

Still, you hang on long enough and your former corporate masters will dust off your turds, polish them up and unleash them all over again, lovingly repackaged with loads of bonus tracks and the magazines that ignored you back in the day will wail about how under-rated you always were. These, sadly, are the breaks.

Tommy Udo

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Music journalism, Psychedelia

A cosy confab with Marilyn Manson

This originally appeared in Metal Hammer two years ago.

THE air conditioned elevator takes us up to the heart of darkness. The curtains in the tastefully anonymous room are drawn and the lights are dimmed. Manson sits curled up in a chair, sunglasses on, sipping a glass of sickly green absinthe that actually looks a lot like that horrible chalky indigestion medicine. He has just recently risen. From bed, not the grave. Manson is nocturnal but because of the jet lag he has to create his own night in the hotel room. It is only mid-day.

Good absinthe? Hammer asks.

“Grrr, yeah, it’s a great start to the day,” sniggers the 21st century’s greatest goth icon.

Absinthe for breakfast. Well of all things…

Of course it’s all theatre, a personal performance to be reported faithfully to you folks out there in record-buyer land. And reader, even if it was the case, you don’t really want to hear that he was wearing old Adidas trackies and a stained t-shirt and didn’t have a lick of make-up on his face? If you were ever in any doubt, Marilyn Manson is now Marilyn Manson 24 hours a day every day.

During a previous stint – almost in a previous life – when Hammer met Manson while he was struggling to promote ‘Portrait Of An American Family’ there were a few people in the band and the entourage who referred to him as ‘Brian’. Today there are none who would dare to address him as such. But given that his activities now encompass painting, film-making and writing, is there any possibility that some of this work may come with a Brian Warner signature rather than a Marilyn Manson one?

“I think that is all just a matter of semantics,” he says thoughtfully. “For a while there I had no sense of my own identity, or rather I felt that I had lost sight of who I actually was. That was a struggle but now I feel that I have a very clear idea of who I am and what I do.”

He sips the absinthe.

Brian Warner exists in the same way that our appendix still exists: as an unused and forgotten vestige of a less evolved past. Manson’s transformation is total.

We meet on the day after that Korean nut-job Cho has massacred a whole bunch of his fellow students at Virginia Tech. Maybe the Manson fan-base is now a bit older and goes to college and university rather than high school. We ask Manson how long he reckons it will be before the media hang the blame upon him.

“When I was watching the coverage of it I kept asking myself ‘Well what is the agenda here?’ It’s always interesting to look at what else is happening in the world at the moment: a lot of people killed in Iraq today, a lot in Afghanistan, that hasn’t really made the news,” he muses. “I also kept thinking about that film – which I haven’t seen yet but friends of mine are talking about a lot – 23. Y’know, he killed 32 people, he was 23 years old…”

Are you still regarded as a figure of fear in the US though?

“I don’t know,” he sighs. ”It’s not something that I can spend a whole lot of time thinking about one way or another and even if it’s a good thing or not.”

Alas poor Manson. One minute you are being blamed for high school massacres, the Satanic moral degeneracy of ‘generation x’ (remember them?) and the rising tide of black nail polish on the hands of lardy high school jocks. The next you are just another B-list tabloid horrorshow like Britney or Lindsey or Jade Goody. Over the past year Manson has been all over the pages of Hello and Grazia and all those other dumb ‘sleb’ mags that are read by people who move their lips while they read and that have never knowingly heard a note of his music. Manson almost slipped into that niche of being famous for being famous. There was his celeb marriage to burlesque queen and fashion designer Dita Von Teese followed by their high profile break-up and his current relationship with 19 year old actress Evan Rachel Wood, star of the underrated ‘weird’ 90s TV show American Gothic as well as recent independent hits like the disturbing Thirteen.

Manson’s creative energies seemed to be going into his paintings and into a film project called Phantasmagoria that he was planning to direct, a look at the dark side of author Lewis Carrol and his Victorian bestseller Alice In Wonderland. There were hints and rumours that he was planning to quit music altogether, rumours that he now says were not without foundation.

Manson told Rolling Stone magazine that he was moving from music to filmmaking: “I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people – particularly record companies – are turning into a product.”

“I was very serious because as I’ve said I had lost sight of who I was,” he says languidly. “As an artist or a performer I’m supposed to be able to make a lot of people feel a certain way. But the one person who was closest to me was the person I couldn’t seem to reach at all and it made me wonder what I was doing it all for.”

The split was acrimonious. They aren’t ‘just good friends’ or any of that crap. He seems at once eager to put it behind him and to rake over the sordid details at the same time. After a period of reassessment and – frankly – some heavy drinking and partying, Manson reached some moment of clarity around the end of last year and started work on a new album. The resulting ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ may not be his best work ever, but the fact that it exists at all is some cause for celebration.

“It’s the most straightforward album I’ve ever done,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of agonising over the concepts because this time the songs were being written about me. When it starts off ‘Christmas morning 6.30…’ that’s actually when the song was written.”

The title and some of the songs on the album allude to Alice In Wonderland (when Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she finds a cake labelled Eat Me that makes her grow and a bottle labelled Drink Me that makes her shrink). Hammer asks him if this is in some way connected to the film project.

“No that wasn’t in any way intentional. It’s just that these were things that I was thinking about a lot at the time that I wrote the songs and they had some resonances with my own life,” he says. “We’re going to start shooting the film in October but it is entirely unconnected to the album.”

He has also just made a video for ‘Heart Shaped Glasses’ using Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron’s 3D software. It is an extract from a 3D horror movie which apparently Manson will continue filming with Cameron.

“It looks totally amazing. It was a lot of hard work but I can honestly say that I have never seen anything quite like it. It’s also I believe one of the most expensive promo ever made. Evan is in it and she got the highest fee ever for a promo.”

How much was it?

“Ah, I’m not allowed to say.”

Was it….one million dollars?

Manson laughs: “Yeah but I see that the dollar is way down against the pound so maybe that isn’t too impressive.”

Manson has also just had a meeting with the great Russian/French/Mexican cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

“We’ve already been talking about one script (King Shot)that he has that he wants me to appear in as a 300 year old pope,” says Manson, becoming animated, almost excited for the first time. “But he’s also written another script, a sequel to El Topo, that he wants me to star in.”

Manson seems to practically vibrate with glee.

“I mean I have //got// to make this happen, we have //got// to get the money to do this” he says shaking his head. “For somebody like Jodorowsky who has meant so much to me and to find that he is enthusiastic about me…it’s really mind-blowing.”

If the album is a lot more basic and straightforward does this mean that the stage shows will be toned down.

“No, the opposite,” he says. “We’re got the guy who designed the Diamond Dogs show for Bowie in the 70s doing the sets. It’s going to be spectacular. When I wrote the album I really had this stage show in mind. I had already decided that ‘If I Was Your Vampire’ would be the opening song in the set.”

Interesting that Manson has written his first vampire song: that was one aspect of the whole goth package that he consciously seemed to steer clear of.

“I think I agonised too much over that and yes I very much avoided that in the past,” he says.

He’s on record as saying that it’s the new ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ which may come as good news for the undemanding but bad news for those who see Manson as something more than just another goth cliché. It’s easily the strongest song on the album.

As much as ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ was inspired by his break-up with Dita, it’s also about his relationship with Evan.

“I used to wonder why my life couldn’t turn into one of those movies like True Romance or Bonnie And Clyde that I loved so much, why there wasn’t that massively romantic ending for me,” he says.

“I think what amazes me about her is the fact that she finds so many of the things that I do so cool. Like, we went to the London Dungeon last night. And for the cover shoot I covered a room in my house in blood and she loved it so I’ve just kept the room that way.”

Real blood?

“Yeah.”

Your own?

“No. If I used that much of my own blood I’d be dead,” he cracks a smile. “I’m looking forward to seeing headlines about me spraying my room with blood.”

Doesn’t it smell?

“No, but the one thing that gets me…it’s all over the windows and you can see right in, yet none of the neighbours has actually sad anything,” he says. “If I saw that in one of their houses, I would definitely have called the cops by now.”

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism