Thursday, September 21, 2017

'Columbine destroyed my entire career': Marilyn Manson on the perils of being the lord of darkness

For one thing, I am distracted by my sore

testicles, and, for another, I wasn’t really following his line of argument at the time. First, he took my notepad, wrote “person” on it and added an “a” at the end. “I’m this and I’m this,” he said. “A person and a persona. But I can’t really divide the two. There’s a difference on the stage; people I don’t know I just seduce, in a lot of ways. You go offstage and people … even me and you now, talking …”
His voice trailed off and, while I was trying to work out whether he had just said that he did inhabit a different persona on stage he flicked me in the testicles.


It’s all a bit peculiar, but then the interview has been peculiar from the minute I stepped into the Berlin hotel suite where Manson is receiving the press. He is midway through a European festival tour and promoting his forthcoming eighth album, Heaven Upside Down, a work he describes as “hard, punk rock, Killing Joke, Joy Division, Bauhaus, Scary Monsters”, and which reunites him with Tyler Bates, a guitarist, producer and soundtrack composer best known for his work on Guardians of the Galaxy. Manson seems surprised that Bates agreed to work with him again after 2015’s The Pale Emperor, or rather its ensuing tour, during which relations between the two deteriorated to such an extent that Manson pulled a box-cutter knife on Bates.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/21/columbine-destroyed-my-entire-career-marilyn-manson-on-the-perils-of-being-the-lord-of-darkness