There was a lot of discussion around this summer’s Slipknot/Marilyn Manson tour, specifically, how sober Manson was throughout all of it. In an interview with Dazed, he spoke about not only the tour and his behavior on it, but his next album, Say10, due out on Valentine’s Day of next year, and the 20th anniversary of his landmark album, Antichrist Superstar. According to the interview, which starts out by addressing his inconsistent live shows, the singer seems like he’s in control, giving himself credit for not taking the bait when someone tried to fight him in Detroit:
A man in the crowd at tonight’s show in Detroit, he says, wanted to start a fight with him. “I got punched in the face and couldn’t hit back because I have priors,” Manson deadpans. “But that’s not relevant to our story. You can say my fucking face hurts.” Still, he describes the night as “the best one yet this tour. I didn’t get arrested, which I did the last time I was here (in 2001), so that’s a good thing. This is where I got arrested for assaulting a security guard in a sexual manner – but I was exonerated. So, this time I had to behave.”
He also mentions that at that show in Detroit, he was forbidden to break a bottle onstage to cut himself, so he had the bottle broken backstage so he could do it. These are the compromises Manson’s making, so even if he appears incoherent and rambling, the article seems to suggest that that’s the persona he wants to portray.
As far as Say10, Manson says it progressed very quickly and was recorded before his tour started this past summer:
(Producer) Tyler Bates and I did it over the past three months, right before this tour started. It is, I would say, the last thing people would expect after hearing the previous album, The Pale Emperor. And it’s also, coming from the people who I’ve played it to, a combination of Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals in feeling. I generally take the opinion of girls over guys, because you usually make songs to make girls like you. That’s why you start a rock band. It’s inspired by all those things you do to make girls like you, all that passion and melodic pageantry, like Bowie, but also the utter disregard for rules, like Ministry and all the bands that shaped the first album I made. It wasn’t my intent to go backwards. Everything goes in a full circle and it just becomes, without cannibalising work from the past, the same thing, which is ultimately you. I’m a little over-anxious to release it, so it was done very quickly, but it is by far the most thematic and over-complicated thing that I’ve done. In a way, it’s deceptively delightful to strangers. It’s sort of like the old saying that the devil’s greatest secret is that people don’t believe he exists.
2016 also marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Manson’s sophomore album, Antichrist Superstar. He says that there will be a 20th anniversary box set of the album coming out on October 20th, although there’s no release information about it just yet. However, when you pick it up, prepare to be shocked:
We’re putting out a box set on October 20th, and it has a legendary video that I had to put into a safe for the past 15 years, for reasons that will be revealed when you watch it. I had innocently thought that it was acceptable to use it as sort of a bonus feature on my Dead to the World video for the Antichrist Superstar tour. However, the legal department and my management informed me otherwise. But now it is going to be seen by all. I won’t say anything else to spoil it, just that it captured a moment in time, after I had just moved to Los Angeles. I was living with Twiggy (Ramirez, Manson’s longtime guitarist) and I had just come off a tour where I got death threats every day. It’s an interesting portrayal of what was happening at the time, but strangely, it doesn’t seem any different than the way I behave now, except that I’m wearing a cowboy hat. That’s about it.
We’ll bring you more information about the anniversary edition when we have it.
