Interview:2015/04 The Devil In Disguise
The Devil In Disguise | ||
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Pictures: Jiro Schneider
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Interview with Marilyn Manson | ||
Date | April, 2015 | |
Source | Loaded | |
Interviewer | John Earls |
- THE BOREDOM OF REHAB, GETTING MATCHING TATTOOS WITH JOHNNY DEPP AND BEING ABLE TO SHAG WHOEVER HE WANTS. WELCOME TO THE RESURRECTION OF ‘GOD OF F**K’ MARILYN MANSON.
It’s well-known in the music industry that, to ‘intimidate’ journalists (and/or maintain his vampiric reputation) Marilyn Manson keeps his meeting rooms at freezing point, and in almost total darkness.
Sure enough, when I’m summoned to a suite at Kensington Royal Garden hotel that is Manson’s temporary office while he’s in London, the curtains are drawn, the lights are down to their dimmest setting and there’s an icy chill in the air.
But perhaps the most shocking aspect of a singer famed for owning a child’s skeleton and masks made of human skin is that Manson is actually kinda sweet.
He laughs a lot, does terrible comedy impressions of British accents and cheerfully poses for a photo after our allotted one hour is up – even though the gloom means it takes his PA three attempts to take the snap before the iPhone flash finally goes off.
Such good humour can partially be attributed to the fact that, at 45, Manson has made more friends than he’s ever had in his life. He appeared last year as white supremacist Ron Tully in the final season of FX drama Sons Of Anarchy, becoming pals with several of the cast.
“I never had friends or siblings to stick up for me,” he says in his laid back Ohio drawl. “Sons Of Anarchy is a show about brotherhood, and I’d never known what it’s like to have mates. Maybe I shut it out, as I didn’t understand how to balance chasing romance with having guy friends.”
He took the role partly to impress his father, retired flight engineer Hugh Warner, and says about him, “Dad was beyond elated to meet the cast, and I got him to smoke marijuana with several of them.” Manson grins when he tells that story, his famed pale make-up staying fully in place.
Manson’s dad has also got to hang out with his son’s most famous mate, Johnny Depp.
An odd couple you might think, but maybe it’s Depp’s love of the macabre via working with Tim Burton that make them kindred spirits.
The pair were photographed together last year heading off for an afternoon natter – with Depp carrying a weed pipe in his hand.
Depp has played guitar alongside Manson at his gigs and in 2012 the pair produced a cover version of Carly Simon’s 1972 hit You’re So Vain, with the movie star playing drums and Manson singing.
Manson says about his Hollywood mate, “Johnny’s got my back. Literally – we have matching back tattoos.”
They were inked in 2012 on the inside of their wrists with a skeleton and a tree based on wild-living French poet Charles Baudelaire’s book Flowers Of Evil, along with the words ‘No Reason’.
Why did they do that then?
“Precisely, for no reason,” Manson says. “We plan on getting another tattoo with the words ‘Faded, faithful, fatal’, which is a line from Johnny’s favourite song, The Mephistopheles Of Los Angeles, from my new album.”
Ah yes, Manson’s new album, The Pale Emperor.
The self-styled ‘God of Fuck’ is well aware not many of his 70 million album sales have come from his most recent releases. But he says he’s got his swagger back this time, describing the record as “cocksure”.
Naturally, the devil plays a part in the new release.
“The hell hounds have been on my case,” Manson smiles. “This record is the devil saying, ‘You’ve got to pay up, motherfucker’. It is where I pay my own demons.”
The Bowie-influenced new album is Manson’s tightest and most commercial since 1998’s mega-selling Mechanical Animals. He says it’s cleaner because he’s got back in shape – kind of.
“I stopped drinking absinthe in October,” says Manson, who owns an award-winning absinthe line, Mansinthe. “But only for vanity purposes. It’s got too much sugar in it, so it doesn’t suit the physique. Besides, I never really liked the taste. Absinthe really gets you fucking wasted, but you have to get past the taste first. It’s an acquired taste, but so is dogshit.”
Tapping his glass, which I naively assumed was water, he says, “I’ve switched to vodka.”
In an interview in 2012, Manson said he’d already cut down on boozing, and only drank when he was happy.
But he tuts now, “Yeah, that was the rehab talking.”
Manson had entered rehab at the time he gave the interview, and also had a spell in a Los Angeles mental hospital for his drink addiction.
But he insists when we speak, “Rehab and hospital were both very boring, not as exciting as I thought they were going to be from TV. I thought a mental hospital would be full of drooling people, and it’s not. That was disappointing.”
So much for being on the wagon then – though Manson does reveal his gig with Depp at Hollywood club The Roxy last Halloween was the first time he’d gone on stage sober.
“I still had the same smeared vision of reality as I always have on stage,” he muses. “That was interesting, as I realised that being on stage is a high you cannot recreate with any drug or alcohol you can imagine, and I may have combined all of those in the past.
“I still do – by no means am I advocating sobriety.”
Manson is next on stage in Britain at the Download Festival in June, and says his gigs highlight the insanity of being a rock star.
“As a kid, I went to rock shows to see the girls who wanted to fuck the band,” he chuckles. “Now, I’m in the band that those girls want to fuck. I wanted The Pale Emperor to be for everyone in the audience wanting to fuck, while I get to fuck whoever I choose.”
It’s easy to see the bullied school kid having his revenge on the world by making such boasts. Manson admits his memories of “regular ass-beatings” in his youth feed into songs on the new album such as Slave Only Dreams To Be King, which opens with his Sons Of Anarchy co-star Walton Goggins playing a hellfire preacher.
“I channel the zealous preacher and the woman tied to the bed possessed by demons on the album,” says Manson.
“They’re very similar. My parents weren’t very religious, but they did send me to Christian school, which led to me getting busted up old-fashioned style.
“This wasn’t cyber-bullying. I had my jaw broken by bullies as a 12-year-old, so my jaw doesn’t function properly.
“It’s a good job I don’t give blowjobs, as I wouldn’t be able to do it right! That’s why I don’t want to go to prison.”
Partly for research for his role in Sons Of Anarchy and partly in his determination to stay looking thin, Manson has started to become physically dangerous, to match his reputation for trying to scar the world’s psyche.
“I started fight training before making the album,” he states, glaring at the metal knuckleduster-style tubes that adorn his fingers. “I want to kick people’s asses. I’m tempted to use fight training on a daily basis, to defend what I love and care for. Sometimes, I get a bit macho.”
It’s hard to imagine that, from someone who’s been such a pussycat during our time together.
Manson already did a lot to dispel his reputation as a creep when he appeared in Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary Bowling For Columbine.
In the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, he was blamed by politicians and US conservatives for inspiring cowards Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to violence. Despite the fact the two student shooters were actually fans of Eurotrash metal bands such as Rammstein, Manson was the closest American equivalent and he got it in the neck, as is the norm in the US, where artists instead of the gun policy is blamed for outrages like Columbine.
Moore interviewed Manson on screen and asked him what he would like to say to the people of Columbine.
“I wouldn’t say a single word to them,” Manson calmly replies. “I would listen to what they have to say. And that’s what no-one did.”
Seven years after Bowling For Columbine was released, Justin Doucet, a schoolboy in Louisiana, forced a teacher to say, “Hail Marilyn Manson” before shooting him and then shooting himself - hurling Manson into the same Columbine finger-pointing again.
Despite his peaceful demeanour and protestations he had nothing to do with such killings, there’s no escaping the fact Manson’s musical obsessions are youthful alienation, violence and a dedication to living on the edge of society’s norms.
It probably has a lot to do with the fact he had a fraught relationship with his parents – Barbara Warner and military man Hugh. Born Brian Warner in Ohio in 1969, Manson has been brutally open about his past – telling how he lashed out at his mum and hated the Christian school to which he was sent and how he was battered by other kids who thought he was gay.
Contrary to probably one of the finest showbiz hoaxes ever, Manson did not start out as a child actor as the geeky one out of The Wonder Years.
His first job was as a rock journalist, before he started his first band, Marilyn Manson And The Spooky Kids.
But back to the fact Manson told me he still gets to “fuck whoever I choose”.
He said in February he was “newly single” so it sounds as if he’s enjoying it.
In January, he said in another interview he had a girlfriend, but added he only went out with her “because she is willing to do whatever it takes to be with me”.
God knows what that involved.
Manson is, after all, the man who says he’s a “handful” to date, and whose exes include burlesque artist Dita Von Teese and actress Evan Rachel Wood. His marriage to Von Teese was a gothic dream: they carried with them a heavy hint of a deviant sex life and were the Posh and Becks for goth teens. His other exes have included actress Rose McGowan and a stack of porn stars.
But despite the goth glamour, Britain has struggled to ‘get’ Manson – and he knows it.
He has said about his fight to crack the UK, “This has always been the most cynical and calculating country, and the country I most want to impress. All my heroes are British, whether it’s Aleister Crowley or David Bowie. All the best art has come from your godforsaken island. And it makes me mad.”
Manson – which is how he prefers to be addressed, rather than ‘Marilyn’ – says that after all the boozing and womanising, he is finally back on track musically. He summarises, “I’m doing it how I want and no-one gets in my way. I’ve been given a spot in life that I worked hard for, scarring myself mentally and physically, and I’ve remembered not to walk on stage without my dick being tied to the right so that I can swagger.”
But I reckon the devilish act is basically mostly a disguise, and I think hell would freeze over before Manson would ever be intentionally vindictive.
It seems even his intimidation of journalists via his freezing air conditioning setting is all a front too.
As our interview wraps up, Manson politely asks his PA, “Annette, can you turn the air con off? It’s cold as shit in here.”