Author: fgt

Slipknot’s Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has voiced his desire for the band to play the US Olympics in 2028.

The percussionist made the admission during an exclusive conversation with Metal Hammer, which started with journalist Paul Brannigan asking for Clown’s opinion on Gojira playing the opening ceremony of the French Olympics this summer.

“I got goosebumps,” Clown says of Gojira’s performance of Ah! Ça Ira. “I know this is going to sound stupid, but I’m just so proud of them. I know the word ‘proud’ probably sounds weird coming from me but that band is so incredible, and they’re friends of ours, and Mario [Duplantier] is one of my favourite drummers in hard rock.”

He continues: “When I saw the performance, I was just proud to have them do that. What a huge, huge honour, what a huge performance. And what an enormous metaphor: you have all these wonderful athletes, the best of the best of the best together, and someone involved thought, ‘We should get Gojira to open this up…’ Like, Gojira are the gold medal.”

Brannigan then asks if Slipknot would play at the next Olympics in Los Angeles given the opportunity. “Of course! We’d love to do it,” Clown answers. He later adds that, going forward, “You’re gonna start to see Slipknot do some weird shit.”

“We’ve reached the point where, you know, we want to play the Grammys, we want to play the Olympics. Why not?” he elaborates. “We’ve done the standard circuit already, for 25 years, and in the future we are going to be everywhere. “

Slipknot are currently headlining a tour of the US, celebrating 25 years of their self-titled debut album by performing it in full each night. The band will trek across Europe and the UK in December. They’ll then return to the continent in 2025 to headline Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park. See the full list of their upcoming gigs below.

Slipknot are also due to release a new single called Long May You Die at… some point.

Slipknot 2024 and 2025 tour dates:

Sep 01: Pryor Rocklahoma, OK
Sep 07: Auburn White River Amphitheatre, WA
Sep 08: Ridgefield RV Inn Styles Resorts Amphitheater, WA
Sep 09: Louisville Louder Than Life, KY
Sep 11: Nampa Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater, ID
Sep 13: Inglewood Intuit Dome, CA
Sep 15: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre, AZ
Sep 17: Austin Moody Center, TX
Sep 18: Dallas Dos Equis Pavilion, TX
Sep 21: Des Moines Water Works Park, IA
Oct 11: Sacramento Aftershock Festival, CA
Oct 19: São Paulo Knotfest Brasil, Brazil
Nov 08: Guadalajara Calle 2, Mexico
Nov 09: Mexico City Parque Bicentenario, Mexico

Dec 05: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Dec 06: Dortmund Westfalenhalle, Germany
Dec 08: Stuttgart Schleyerhalle, Germany
Dec 09: Leipzig Quarterback Immobilien Arena, Germany
Dec 11: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Dec 12: Paris Accorhotel Arena, France
Dec 14: Leeds First Direct Arena, UK
Dec 15: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Dec 17: Manchester Co-op Live Arena, UK
Dec 18: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
Dec 20: London O2 Arena, UK
Dec 21: London O2 Arena, UK

Jun 6–8: Nürburg/Nuremberg Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park, Germany

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

The UK and Ireland can be divided into two camps this morning: those who got Oasis tickets and those who didn’t. You can be sure that WhatsApp chats across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are ablaze with back and forths about who got lucky and bagged their pass to witness the return of the Gallagher brothers’ band, and those conversations are likely happening further afield too. There is a high chance that across the pond right now, in between two giant shows at Seattle’s Lumen Field, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich is shaking his fists at the sky and complaining to his bandmates about Ticketmaster’s queuing system.

That’s because the Metallica drummer is a self-confessed Oasis fanboy, as he explained to The Guardian for the 20th anniversary of their classic debut Definitely Maybe. He revealed how he got into the Britpop legends in their early days after reading an interview with the siblings and then stumbling across one of their tunes on the radio. “In 1994 I was browsing through an issue of a magazine called Select, and there was a story about a band from England, with some unusual looking fellows, that I’d never heard of,” he explained. “I skimmed across the article, and was quite amused by the fact that every other word was either “fuck” or “cunt”. There was a pretty detailed description of a conversation between one of the guys in the band, Noel Gallagher, and Paul Weller, that was particularly off-colour and very, very funny. It reeked of attitude and not giving a fuck, which at the time – at the height of the shoegazing-I-can’t-handle-being-a-rockstar attitudes that were becoming mainstream – was very refreshing.”

A few weeks later, Ulrich continued, he was driving around San Francisco listening to local alternative radio station Live 105 when one of their songs popped up on the airwaves. It was, he recalled, “unlike any I had ever heard before.” “The attitude, the aloofness, and the not-giving-a-fuck vibes were pouring out of the speakers, and by the time the first verse/bridge/chorus cycle was done, I was convinced that whatever I was listening to had to be that band that I had read about in Select a few weeks back. And sure enough I was right. It was Oasis and the Supersonic single. Thus began a long and very rewarding relationship with a sound, an approach and a way of looking at the world that has had a huge impact on me and helped shape who I am today … for whatever that’s worth.”

Ulrich ends his Oasis eulogy with an apt precursor to what’s going on around the announcement of their comeback shows this week, a reunion that everyone – both pro and anti – has had an opinion about. “The Oasis phenomenon cut across all shapes , sizes, boundaries and classes,” he said. “Everybody knew Oasis, and in some way were impacted by them. And if they didn’t love them, it was often the polarising opposite. But most importantly, nobody didn’t care. Everyone had an opinion. Everybody had a thought. Nobody ignored them. No one.”

Of course, maybe Ulrich has already snagged his place on what is sure to be a highly-competitive guestlist. He’s become pals with Noel Gallagher over the years, and even ended up as part of their crew at one point. “Doing the lights for them at a club show in the spring of ’95 at some God forsaken hole in the wall in Nowheresville, New Jersey, was a distinct highlight of my early encounters,” he reminisced. “They didn’t have a crew guy to run the light board, and I was the only one in the building that knew the songs.”

We don’t think his lighting skills will be required for next year’s run of shows, though. Judging by the ticket prices, there should be more than enough room in the budget for a pro.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Late Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele was the king of goth metal, but a run of bad luck and personal circumstances in the 2000s nearly brought him down. In 2007, three years before his death, he sat down with Metal Hammer for a candid interview about bereavement, depression and what would turn out to be Type O Negative’s final album, Dead Again.

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In May 13, 2005, the world of heavy music was shaken to its very foundations by rumours that founding Type O Negative frontman and bassist Pete Steele was dead. The only clue as to the news’ veracity was an enigmatic image posted on the official Type O Negative web site: an illustrated tombstone that read read ‘Peter Steele, 1962-2005’.

For anyone who knew anything about Pete Steele or his music, the understated epitaph spoke volumes. It said, simply: ‘Free At Last’. It was a tragically fitting postscript on a famously cheerless existence. Sure, Pete Steele was a musical visionary whose trademark baritone and gallows humour fused a language of love and loss with gothically-tinged, Sabbath-loving sounds to create one of the 90s most successful yet inimitable metal bands. But Pete Steele’s life was also one plagued by personal loss, bouts of severe depression, and an outlook so exuberantly free of any kind of optimism, that all anyone could really do was laugh at it. Not out of ridicule, but in knowing agreement that you haven’t lost everything if you still have your sense of humour.

The news wasn’t without its sepulchral portents. Type O Negative’s autumn 2004 tour had just been cancelled due to a medical exam that revealed certain ‘anomalies’ in Steele’s health according to a statement released by the band’s management. So it was a relief when Type O drummer Johnny Kelley stated in a February, 2005 update that, “there really isn’t much to report other than he’s doing fine and his health is improving daily.” But it suddenly looked as if the sticksman had spoken too soon, and the metal world was left with only Type O’s last album to make sense of the loss, 2003’s aptly-titled Life Is Killing Me. Eerily, it seemed to forecast its creator’s ostensibly gloomy demise with songs like I Don’t Wanna Be Me and indeed, The Dream Is Dead. 

“Nah, that was all bullshit,” laughs Steele in his thick, low-octave Brooklyn drawl. “The tour was cancelled because of internal problems in the band. It would not be correct for me to get into because of my relationship with the guys. That was not my doing but somebody had to come up with some excuse. Of course, being the biggest member of the band I was the biggest target, so I’m getting these emails like ‘I hope you get better’ and then when it got out I was alive it was, ‘I hope you fucking die asshole.’” 

As Steele tells it, the tombstone was meant to be a prank hatched by keyboardist Josh Silver to announce the end of Type O’s relationship with longtime label Roadrunner Records and their subsequent signing to SPV (“They’ve always treated us fairly but friendship doesn’t pay the bills,” he says of the move away from Roadrunner). The hitch? Silver’s original idea was to depict four tombstones – one for each member of the band, aka ‘The Drab Four’. Steele can’t explain why only his tombstone was used, but not everyone was amused. Among them, a judge who Steele is legally bound to see from time to time due to what he describes as ‘legal problems.’   

“He happens to be a Type O Negative fan and he sent the cops to my house to see if I was dead or not,” says Steele, chuckling. “I told Josh, ‘man, you have no idea what you’ve just done – you’ve just upset the New York State Supreme Court! I think it’s fucking funny too but tell me if you’re going to do that sometime!’ And then the judge is like, ‘do you think this is funny?’ I had to plead the fifth,” he laughs.

It’s a rare moment of levity in a conversation that frequently veers toward melancholy, heartbreak, and the tales of loss that have laced Type O’s music ever since the release of their 1991 debut Slow Deep And Hard, an autobiographical account of Steele’s failed romances, first darkened the world with its slinking, funereal dirges. 

As for those legal problems he mentioned, it sounds like Steele’s luck hasn’t changed.

“I had an altercation with someone…” he says, pausing as if waiting for a rimshot, “over a woman of course. As anyone with an IQ will tell you, women are the basis of all wars on fuckin’ Earth. Only men start wars and you know why? Because they want more land and they want more money, because when you get more power you get more pussy. Maybe that sounds sexist but I am a sexist, OK? I hate men. I hate competition. I love women. I come from a family of five aunts, five sisters and five nieces. You know what? I love it. I’m this little piece of testosterone floating in an oestrogen sea.”

It may be that Steele is overstating his case for happiness a bit. As he confesses, even Type O Negative’s sixth offering, their soon-to-be released Dead Again album, still bespeaks his extreme disappointment in, well… pretty much every arena. He’s just celebrated the holidays, not forgetting his 45th birthday on January 4th. Happy birthday, Pete.

“Yeah, thanks,” he says. “The 45th anniversary of getting kicked out of the best place that I have ever lived. I had an indoor pool, free food…”

Sitting in his Brooklyn home – the basement of his parents’ house – into which he famously ‘kicked a mattress down the stairs and never looked back’ when he was 19, Steele’s detachedly watching the news as he says he does every morning, ‘just to find out if any of my family members have been murdered’, he says without a hint of irony. “I sure fucking hope so after these last holidays. I’m having some family problems right now. My mother passed away which is not like a pity-party for me, but this is really the first year where I felt the impact of her being gone.”

It’s the matter-of-fact way that he reveals such a tremendous loss that says everything of the numb detachment with which Steele now accepts such tragedy in his life. His mother died in 2005, but he confesses he was still in a state of shock and supreme devastation by the year’s end and it wasn’t really until 2006 that he first came to grips with his loss. 

“My mother held my family together,” says Steele, his voice cracking slightly and the hurried, New York pace of his words slowing a bit. “I hate to sound positive but I try to concentrate not on the love that’s been lost but the love that’s been gained. All my sisters and nieces… I just try to transfer. Since she’s been gone there’s been some dissension and falling apart. I like to say blood is thicker than water but it’s harder to clean up.”

One of the ways that Steele coped was – in a move that left everyone expecting a 2005 Type O release scratching their head – his decision to reform his pre-Type O 80s thrash-band Carnivore in order to play a handful of dates around the US along with European festival appearances. A far cry from the snarling guitars and mournful, funereal dirges of Type O, Carnivore was a short-lived, animal skin-clad outfit formed from the ruins of Steele’s previous band, Fallout. Its two releases, 1985’s self-titled debut and 1987’s Retaliation were hardly major successes and Carnivore would soon disband, leaving Steele to form Subzero in 1989 after a two-year stint working for the New York City Parks Department. Subzero would soon be renamed Type O Negative.

It wasn’t long before Steele’s new band would release their second album, 1991’s Bloody Kisses. The follow-up to their controversially misanthropic 1990 Slow Deep And Hard album, …Kisses would go platinum, catapult parent-label Roadrunner into the big-time, and make Type O Negative a metal household name by the time their magnum opus, 1996’s October Rust, was released. It’s enough to make you wonder why Steele would invest himself in a Carnivore reformation and not Type O.

“The other guys in Type O are married, they have kids,” explains Steele. “I’m not married and I don’t have kids, at least I think I don’t, so I have a lot more time. I don’t want to do nothing, so I contacted these friends of many years to see if they wanted to do Carnivore for fun and profit, emphasis on fun.”

Why not just rally the troops and press ahead with Type O Negative?

“Look, I’m really pissed off about being 45 years old,” says Steele, leaving no doubt as to his dismay at the development. “I’m like an old man having his last fucking tantrum. It was like being 25 again. It’s a sonic release. I have a type-A personality where I hold things in and then someone steps on my toe and hits them over the head with a fucking cinder block. I’ve always made it known to the guys that Type O comes first. So whenever we have time we play and go home with 20 bucks in our pockets. OK, I lied. 25 bucks.”

But there was a point last year where Steele’s disillusionment with his personal state of affairs lead him to question the very purpose of pressing on with anything. The death of his mother, to him, was the last kick in the teeth following a long period spent in doomed relationships and coping with what he describes as the two great evils in life: having too much time, and having too much money. 

“The death of my mother was probably the worst thing that ever happened to me. That also came into play with making Dead Again. I won’t compliment myself and say I’m creative. But I guess for one year my motto was ‘for what?’ Why should I do this, why should I play, why should I eat, why should I go to rehearsal, for what?”

It was with the help of Carnivore providing the creative vent that Steele was finally able to channel his more refined sensibilities back into Type O Negative – a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde interplay that gave him the balance he needed. It’s an artistic process that he likens to ‘taking a shit into a CD player’, but for Steele it’s apparent it’s about more than that. It’s from the heart.

“I have issues with love and I have issues with loss,” he says. “They’ve been a running theme in my life, whether it’s 1990 or 2007. If I love someone and all of a sudden they meet someone else and they fucking leave without any explanation I feel like a dick. Because I’ve just been with them for 10 fucking years and they wake up one day and say their feelings have changed?” he says, sounding choked up. This is no random anecdote. He clears his throat and continues. “If I had my way I would handle things differently, but there are very few reasons to… live? Or for going to jail. I’ve recently realised that it’s much better to die for something than to live for something. I’m just looking for a reason to die.”

It’s that grim outlook on love that’s inspired much of the lyrical content on ‘Dead Again’, not to mention the picture of Rasputin on the cover, one of Steele’s heroes alongside Madonna (‘she fucked her way to the top but now she’s laughing herself all the way to the sperm bank’) and eccentric AC power inventor Nicola Tesla (‘very hip fucking guy’). 

“Rasputin… they couldn’t kill him,” he says, admiringly. “The guy was a monk. He was an alcoholic. He was a womaniser. He was a brawler. And he had a big fucking dick. I was like, ‘man I’ve got like five out of six here. I don’t have a big dick but I am a big dick.’ So that’s Dead Again.”

It sounded like you were referring to an actual heartbreak just then.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “This is something that actually ended in the year 2000, and like I said I do not deal well with loss. Even though it’s almost seven years later I’m really still not over it. I don’t know who this fucking idiot was who said it was better to love and lose than to not have loved at all? I’d like to kick that guy in the fucking balls. You know what? It’s not worth it, man. It’s not. Fucking. Worth it.”

Are you still taking anti-depressants?

“Actually yeah, I take Prozac,” he says. “I’ve been taking it for over 10 years now. When I do lapse and I stop taking it I definitely feel the difference. I’ve felt severely depressed all my life and I’ve never known why. I can say I’m not the worst looking guy in the world. I’ve got a couple of halfway decent bands. How can I be so fucking depressed? I almost feel like a fucking ingrate.”

Steele’s theory is that he gets it from his mother (“I’m not blaming my parents,” he’s quick to add). He recently learned that just before his mother conceived Steele, Steele’s maternal grandmother passed away in her arms, leaving her shattered and leading to a heavy regimen of what were euphemistically referred to as ‘tranquilisers’ during her pregnancy. This could have possibly had the same effect on Steele’s production of ‘happy chemicals’ – in the same way steroids affect bodybuilders. He hasn’t asked his psychiatrist because, sadly, “who would listen to a fucking maniac?”

But it seems that Steele’s strongest crutch remains his music, and for now at least, it’ll keep him going when everything else in his life remains in its perpetual state of depressed disarray.

“One last thing,” he says. “When people hear that I may have killed myself or something like that, Kurt Cobain is also one of my heroes. I think it takes a lot of courage to jump off a cliff without a parachute. Not that he did that, but metaphorically. There are a couple of reasons that I wouldn’t kill myself. The first one is I’m waiting for the punchline for life. It’s like, you know, everything is just a black joke. That is not a racist statement by the way. And secondly I live to irritate people who fucking hate me.”

Here’s to hoping that people continue to hate Pete Steele for a long time to come.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 163 

Alexander Milas is an erstwhile archaeologist, broadcaster, music journalist and award-winning decade-long ex-editor-in-chief of Metal Hammer magazine. In 2017 he founded Twin V, a creative solutions and production company.  In 2019 he launched the World Metal Congress, a celebration of heavy metal’s global impact and an exploration of the issues affecting its community. His other projects include Space Rocks, a festival space exploration in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Heavy Metal Truants, a charity cycle ride which has raised over a million pounds for four children’s charities which he co-founded with Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood. He is Eddietor of the official Iron Maiden Fan Club, head of the Heavy Metal Cycling Club, and works closely with Earth Percent, a climate action group. He has a cat named Angus.