Interview:2015/01/19 The Interview: Marilyn Manson

The Interview: Marilyn Manson
Interview with Marilyn Manson
Date	January 19, 2015
Source	Hunger TV
Interviewer	Eloise Edgington

For Marilyn Manson, the role of the artist is to provoke; to push people to think. Not just an icon in music, but also a controversial performance artist (as well as a successful actor and a keen painter), he has never ceased to challenge both people and prejudices; rarely failing to incite a reaction.

During the 90s, Marilyn Manson (whose real name is Bryan Warner) was seen as the embodiment of conservative Christian America’s fears. For years he has been made a scapegoat for the prevalence of social problems in the country. He’s been called sick, his theatrics seen as grotesque, and was even blamed for such catastrophic events as the Columbine massacre in 1999. It goes without saying that it must have been wearing and testing at times, yet Manson’s commitment to his art has rarely wavered: “You stand tall, stand by what you believe, and look good while you’re doing it. If someone tries to fuck with it, you fucking knock them down.”

I personally was once terrified of the cultural icon (thanks in large part to his choice of contact lenses). To many, Manson has always been a question mark, strongly believing that one should never try to explain their art: “I think once you start explaining what you do for a living and not let what you do be the explanation for you, that’s when you fail”.

Now, just shy of two decades after the release of such pivotal records as Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals, it will be interesting to see whether he is finally out of the firing line. Will right-wing America have something to say about The Pale Emperor, which is released today? Or are critics now too distracted by Miley and her foam finger, Nicki and her large behind, to worry about lyrics to such songs as “Killing Strangers” and “The Devil Beneath My Feet”? In 2015, has the conversation steered away from music inciting violence, to focus instead on the ways in which it counters feminism?

When I first enter the room I find him stood smiling, holding a pink stuffed animal given to him by a previous journalist. He’s in his full getup, complete with metal grill and lipstick. Before he sits beside me on a small two-seater, he circles the room, switching off each and every lamp in turn, bar one. In response to this slightly odd behaviour, his publicist turns to me and jokes, “Don’t be scared!” before leaving the room.

He sits beside me, takes my hand in both of his, leans in and playfully says, “So… let’s really get to know each other”. His voice is soft and low (so much so that I‘m actually concerned that the dictaphone is not going to pick up any of the interview). His anecdotes are full of references to niche culture and it is often difficult to know whether he is telling the truth or taking the piss. He, as many before have reported, is charming and warm. He’s funny, and even when flitting to topics of conversation which should be menacing (i.e. that time he put a gun in someone’s mouth), his chatter seems more like hyperbole, all part of playing the Marilyn Manson persona which, thanks to his appearances on hit shows like Sons of Anarchy and Eastbound & Down, we are starting to see different sides to.

Known to monopolise conversation, he leaves few pauses to allow journalists to interject. Normally such an interviewee would be a nightmare, however his monologues are so odd, that while they’re not always easy to follow, they’re completely engrossing. For this reason our interview is laid out slightly different to usual – we let Manson hog the microphone, make of it what you will…

I start off asking about the title of the album (which he says isn't a reference to himself, even though it seems like it might be). Manson begins by telling me how it was inspired by a gift from his best friend Johnny Depp, who he addresses by his full name...

I don’t say Johnny, and then you go “Johnny who?” because that’s worse than a name drop. We just go ahead and drop it [makes the sound of an explosion] like a bomb. [The album’s title] was inspired by an Antonin Artaud book that [he] gave me in 2000. It was a biography of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus […] I happened to pick it up while making the record. I played the record for Johnny and he was very touched by “The Mephistopheles of Los Angeles”, which I originally thought was going to be the title of the album. Normally I wouldn’t make a title before I make a record, but it just so happened that the day I was moving into a new home I found that book, and I remembered that it was the first gift he ever gave me. I opened it up and felt that it defined what the record is about.

Right from the off, Manson’s new offering gives the impression of having been inspired by the blues. So what prompted him to go in this new direction?

The record is about the blues in a sense. But it’s more about me. If you take the Faustian theme, [this idea] that I created some sort of square for myself, where in the beginning of my career I sold my soul to the devil in order to become famous, like Robert Johnson in blues history, the mythology of it… I think for the past few years I’ve been hearing [starts slaping his leg to make a knocking sound] on my door, hellhounds on my trail, saying, “It’s time to pay up. You owe us back.” That was maybe me to myself, or my fans to me, or maybe people I didn’t know, or maybe, if there were a devil… This record is my payback, my payment that was due. I had tried to outrun… You can outrun your cliché but you can’t outrun your demons. You have to deal with them eventually, and I think that this record is me saying that I was not, as a person, who I was supposed to be. According to my own set of rules, and I had to take that back. And to take that back, I had to become the pale emperor I suppose. I had to become the person who was the emperor of a kingdom that doesn’t really exist.

So was this album intended as a break from the past?

Well I wanted to change everything about my life. I had to turn it completely upside down. I did most of this record while the sun was up, which is very strange, because it was very difficult to get me in the studio, I wouldn’t be there until like 2am/3am. But if you think about it, who wants to be stuck in some glass cubicle with a notebook trying to sing to some music they just now heard for the first time? So instead, Tyler Bates and I, and I believe that he probably understood me in a way that… he really needled me, egged me on to make this, or to at least do the first song. He was persistent. I remember I was driving from my place to his studio, which is about a 20-minute ride, and I texted him on the phone saying that I’d just watched the film Firewalk with Me and I was remembering the scene where the pink room is very [starts drum beat], The Cramps mixed with some sort of strange, hypnotic Robert Johnson.

It's at this point that Manson moves on to talk about how recent events in his personal life were what prompted him to write a blues album unconsciously.

I didn’t really understand the blues, and it wasn’t like I sat down and read about it. I just finally figured out, having to go home and my mother dying after I had made the record, after I had sang these songs, that it was the blues. My father drove from Ohio to Los Angeles, which is a four or five-day drive. I didn’t know why he didn’t fly. He said that it was because he wanted to scatter my mum’s ashes on Route 66, which is symbolic of the whole deal with the devil and Robert Johnson. He said it was my mum’s favourite place when we went on vacation when I was young. And I didn’t know that, and I thought, “Wow, this is really…” somehow I didn’t realise that I had stepped into something that I didn’t understand that I was doing, because the unconscious part of my mind was really running the show, and the subconscious of the conscious is just me simply going with what felt natural, the rhythm, and the music was interacting with my singing in a way that never happened before, it was odd. I like listening to this record and I love listening to it with different people because when I hear it with my dad it sounds really like it’s about my relationship with him and war and his experience of Vietnam, but if I listen to it with my girl it sounds like… she’s probably going to be super sad because it sounds like an album about someone who’s dissatisfied at times, I think the first review said “equally catching as it is depressing”. But I think that the record for me ultimately is about taking on the world and realising that along the way you can have these ups and downs and you might meet someone finally who wants to be that Bonnie and Clyde, that Mickey and Mallory.

After mentioning the track “Birds of Hell Awaiting”, Manson begins detailing the different encounters he had with birds prior to writing this song...

Before I recorded the first song I hadn’t decided if I was going to buy this house that was previously lived in by the actor who accidentally shot Brandon Lee from The Crow. I had met him and I was actually in a movie with him called Lost Highway, which isn’t my favourite David Lynch movie, which sucks, because… well maybe this proves that I’m not completely egotistical and narcissistic as some might believe… it has two of my songs in it and I’m in it, naked. I was trying to explain to my manager who he was, and I looked him up on IMDB and I said “see it’s this guy, Michael Massee, from Lost Highway” and it said about Brandon Lee. That was odd for me. Then this theme of crows and birds because, besides Edgar Allen Poe, who I’ve always been very obsessed with – I’ve painted him and I have a stuffed raven, there are a lot of ravens outside my house [makes Raven noise] CAW CAW. And then with Sons of Anarchy, there’s SAMCRO. There’s this prevalence of birds, so I wrote “Birds of Hell Are Waiting”. I’m at Tyler’s studio one time and need to take a piss and he has the soundtrack to The Crow 2 that he was involved in on the wall, a gold record. At that point I said, “I’m going to buy the house then, I have to live in it”. But I wasn’t sure if I should let him still stay there or not. But it came together in a really strange way.

Tyler Bates is the prolific Los Angeles-born composer whose recent notable credits include soundtracking hit films Killer Joe, 300 and Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as the video game God Of War: Ascension. I ask about the process of writing together, and how the album evolved...

When we made the record it was not a case of Tyler writing songs and saying “Do you like this?”, it was him sitting right across from me with his guitar and his amp. With “Birds of Hell” for example, I just sang for the first time, I didn’t even know where the music was going. Most of this will probably sound like I’m describing a homosexual pornographic film, but we would just make this together and it would end up becoming something; we had this immediate chemistry, and the songs just happened so organically. “Cupid Carries A Gun” is the first song I wrote lyrically for the album, [however the last one we recorded]. We thought we’d completed the album, it was nine songs, and that was not one of them, and I thought “Well, we’ve sort of left out the most important element, the first one I wrote”. When I read the album lyrics back to myself, I’m looking at my notebook and it’s all past tense, “she had”, “it was”, but then it was present tense with “Cupid Carries A Gun”, it seemed like it was the part of a book or a movie where it rains, something terrible happens, it’s a catalyst of change. And it was the end of the story. And that’s when I realised that we needed to make this song. And then it ended up being part of the TV show Salem [a show about 17th century witch trials]. That’s why I always check whether girls have splinters between their thighs, to make sure they’ve not been riding brooms.

Moving on I ask about his recent acting gigs, roles which have seen him shed the Manson getup and dissolve into characters that are completely unrecognisable. Is he finally comfortable allowing the world to see a new side?

There’s something really immediate and freeing about acting that I hadn’t realised after making seventeen or so music videos where you’re performing to the camera, because you’re performing to people watching. When you’re acting, you’re not conscious of the camera or where it is, so there’s no vanity or anything like that; you can’t think about that. I wanted to be the character I was given whether they looked bad or good or ugly or evil; that’s what my job was and I enjoyed doing something totally different from what I’m used to doing. I think that got rid of any inhibitions and gave me the release on this record to not be afraid to do things that I wouldn’t normally do. I’ve never sung in most of the keys on the record and that’s why it sounds different. I think it made me a better singer. It just happened, like acting, I didn’t know that it would be comfortable to have a goatee, which is like the opposite of lipstick. I enjoy being able to express different parts of my personality. Painting, or acting, or making music. But I love to sing live, that’s what makes me most happy.

Looking back on the younger you, what feelings does that conjure up? What would you say to yourself?

I’d say “I don’t have a rear view mirror in my car”.

Don’t look back?

That’s a good movie Don’t Look Back. Umm, I think that I tend to believe in not having regrets. Everything makes you who you are. Scars, pain, suffering, happiness, joy, experiences: prison, jail. Luckily I’ve never been to prison, I only went to be in prison on TV. I’ve been to jail. Not fun. I would not be… I mean right now, especially, I’d be a hot piece of ass in jail and I don’t want to do that, so, it’s not my call to ever do that. I like to protect the things I love and what I believe in, that’s my only moral code. So if someone wants to fuck with what you believe in, then they’re going to get fucked up. Don’t fuck with other people but if you want a problem, you’ve got one, and I won’t stand down from that. Sometimes I’ve been very unreasonable in the past, and irrational. Putting a gun in someone’s mouth is probably irrational. However if someone was trying to do something to hurt someone that I care about, I wouldn’t flinch for a second to do something, I wouldn’t put a gun in their mouth, I’d just shoot them in the face, stop the anticipation, no foreplay. I don’t ever want to be in that position, I just want to protect what I care about.

You recently appeared on stage with Die Antwoord, as well as making a cameo appearance in their video for “Ugly Boy”. What drew you to working together?

They’re in it like me to be chaos, like the surrealist movement, like Dali, it’s not meant to be explained, it’s meant to be a question mark. I think once you start explaining what you do for a living and not let what you do be the explanation for you that’s when you fail, and I think I wasn’t doing what I felt was what I was supposed to be doing as well as I should be, and when you try and talk your way out of doing something bad, then you sound like an arsehole and you also fuck yourself over. I don’t think that I’ve ever considered myself contemporary in any era – when I was starting, or now. I’ve always felt time to really not be part of my agenda, I don’t have a watch, I don’t believe in calendars, in that sense I don’t think I’m immortal or timeless, I just think that I’m not really good at parties and I also don’t abide by anyone’s schedule, I do like to be prompt because it’s important to have manners. I also like to be great at what I do, that’s my to-do list for the day: be on time, be great, fuck anyone up who fucks with you. The End. And PS. Also, remember to be charming.

The Pale Emperor is out today.