Marilyn Manson sits in semi-darkness and profound air-conditioned chilliness, in a suite in London's otherwise bright and temperate Metropolitan Hotel. He has made his room as tomb-like as he can, for two reasons: 1) It allows Manson to wear head-to-toe leather, even though it's an unseasonably warm week in April (outside, the streets of London are filled with breezy, Cornetto-eating young things who swish around in slips of summer dresses, flashing limbs coated in Johnson's Holiday Skin); and 2) It builds on Manson's undead, crypt-frequenting myth.
He is talking about his new album, which he's in the UK to promote. It's called Eat Me, Drink Me, and it has recurring motifs: death, the devil, mutilation and vampires, mainly. "I've always thought that association, with the romanticism of vampires, was a bit too obvious a fit for me," he's saying. His voice is low, halting and purposely monotonous. It's got so much bass in it that it actually makes your ribcage reverberate. Manson's a wordy, circuitous talker; his sentences are rammed with gothy rhetoric, he's very oblique. He's trying to tell me something, but I'm not quite sure what.
"But a vampire is only something that can be killed by stabbing it through the heart," he says. "And that... I guess, that's my weakness."
Being stabbed through the heart is your weakness?
"Metaphorically."
Do you mean, er, that love can destroy you?
"Yes. No. But also a vampire is a character that's only at night- time, and ultimately... er, preys on young women. And drinks blood. This idea of consuming someone, whether it's literal or a metaphor, is quite romantic..." Right.
"You know?"
Not... really.
Marilyn Manson is not scary. He should be. He wears all the trappings of scariness; scariness is his currency. There's his look — he's a long, thin, crone-like streak of goth, with overdyed black hair, geisha-white foundation and blood-red lipstick; he wears contact lenses that turn his eyes a milky, sinister shade of nothing. His interior-design ethic is similarly informed: he famously filled his Hollywood mansion with knick-knacks of supreme ghoulishness — a jacket made from the skin of conjoined lambs, Nazi uniforms, the foetus of an unborn child (which Manson christened Ludwig Von Manson, because he thinks 'it's a lovely name').
There's his art, his act — his wailing, theatrical paeans to death and obscenity, which are called things like Smells Like Children and Angel With the Scabbed Wings and (UK bonus track and my own particular fave) Baboon Rape Party. His videos, which are crammed with (simulated, I think) dark sex acts, suicide and bleeding; and his stage shows, one of which featured the routine leashing and debasement of a particularly slavish fan. There's his assumed name — a merging of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson — with its overtones of death and victim and blackest, bleakest celebrity. (He's actually called Brian Warner. Only his mother calls him that now.)
And most of all, there's his reputation. Marilyn Manson's spent the past decade or so routinely (effortlessly, even) shocking the socks off conservative, Christian, right-wing America. In the US he's been vilified as a Satan-worshipping, animal-sacrificing, bisexual corrupter of the youth; he's been banned from performing in several states. He's the US's self-styled "god of fuck." It all reached a nadir in 1999, when he was blamed for inspiring the Columbine shootings (this is pertinent — we meet 48 hours after news of the campus shooting at Virginia Tech breaks). Manson plays out differently in the UK, where the campness of goths inspires amused affection in the non-goth faction of the public.
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