Dissecting Marilyn Manson

When Marilyn Manson announced that his 2004 greatest hits package, Lest We Forget, was to be his ‘farewell record’, some speculated that he simply meant it was the last album he would record with ‘Marilyn Manson’ as a band. It was certainly the last recording to feature keyboardist Madonna Wayne Gacy, the only other member to survive since the band’s debut one decade previously. Now Marilyn was the only one in the line-up with the trademark sex kitten-serial killer moniker. But his pronouncement meant more than that, as the star would go into a lengthy hiatus, marked by deep depression, during which he contemplated abandoning music altogether.

‘I didn’t realise it at the time,’ Manson later revealed, ‘but now that I look back I can say I was having a bad time. I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I thought that I had said everything that I had to say in my past albums, and that being me was not the right thing to do because of the situation I was in. I had stopped enjoying being myself.’ As his musical output slowed to a virtual stop, he began throwing himself into a diverse range of alternative creative outlets, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some were fancifully provocative ideas never destined for fruition, like fronting a children’s TV show. ‘I like the idea of a little me putting across my thoughts and ideas,’ he told Sky News. ‘It will start out as a web extra and, if successful, we plan to turn it into a stand-alone kids’ cartoon. Will they be frightened? Why should they be, it’s only me.’

Other ideas – like launching a line of cosmetics in 2005 – were somewhat less surreal, but also appear to have been stillborn. (At the time, Manson described the cosmetics idea as ‘something I’ve always wanted to [do], purely because I wear makeup every day . . . makeup is just like painting. I have done so many things to my face and to my body with makeup that I feel like it’s something I should be able to allow people to rely on my opinion for.’)

SPLATTER AND SYMBOLISM

Russian-Chilean director/actor Alejandro Jodorowsky is a rare filmmaker, more fascinatingly bizarre than any of his more extreme celluloid creations. Also a reputed comic-book writer, artist, and, some claim, a visionary – he once reflected, ‘Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies’ – his films have split the international critical community into those who regard his work as brilliantly unique, and the greater mass of mainstream opinion which dismisses it as exploitative and incoherent. ‘I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs,’ he once explained of the cult films that have certainly found a ready audience among drug-takers.

El Topo (1969), which many regard as his masterpiece, has been described by Marilyn Manson as his favourite movie of all time. When it hit the USA in 1971, it became a huge success with counterculture audiences – The Los Angeles Free Press called it ‘the greatest film ever made’, an opinion echoed by John Lennon. This is particularly striking as, while the film is filled with strange, trippy scenes conforming to the hippie aesthetic, it is also bathed in intense violence. Described by some critics as a ‘Zen western’, it features the lead character’s (played by Jodorowsky) bloodthirsty and surreal quest for vengeance across a bleak Mexican landscape.

Jodorowsky’s other rare excursions into cinema include The Holy Mountain (1973), described as his ‘mescaline movie’, featuring nine disciples hoping to discover the secret of eternal life. Their guru (played by Jodorowsky) recounts various bizarre and macabre tales which feature such memorable images as giggling children crucifying Christ, and the conquest of Mexico retold with toads playing the Spanish invaders. Short clips from The Holy Mountain were included in Marilyn Manson’s video for ‘The Dope Show’. Santa Sangre (1989) is a serial killer movie given the unmistakable Jodorowsky treatment. A phantasmagoria of carnival freaks, gore, brutality and deranged symbolism, it’s a strange but powerful cinematic brew.

Jodorowsky’s filmmaking techniques – and indeed his personality – are reputedly just as eccentric as his films. He uses handicapped people, hookers and passers-by as often as regular actors, filming in crime-ridden slums, turning the whole filmmaking process into something closer to a spiritual quest than an artistic endeavour. In late 1999 he met with Manson in Dublin, in order for the two iconoclasts to discuss working together. There are powerful, if far from obvious, connections between the two artists’ work (for example, in El Topo Jodorowsky implies that America is the modern counterpart of Hell). But Jodorowsky is a far from prolific filmmaker, and initial plans for Manson to appear in the mooted Son of El Topo proved abortive.

Almost a decade later, following his failed marriage to Dita Von Teese, Manson described a subsequent meeting with Jodorowsky in Paris, where the Chilean is a long-term resident: ‘[he] identifies with cannibal symbolism and he said to me this record [ Eat Me, Drink Me] was me trying to be human. It was the opposite of the Christ metaphor where a man became a symbol that people devoured symbolically. I am a symbol that has no human definition that decided to become human by getting married and had no way to define myself. This record became my ascension instead of my fall. He said angels and devils are the same essentially. He told me that this record was the philosopher’s stone, which I believe to be true.’

Acclaimed as Manson’s major visual aesthetic influence, the filmmaker/visionary/mystic’s presence is sure to be indirectly felt in Marilyn’s directorial debut, Phantasmagoria. Jodorowsky’s own next mooted film project is King Shot, a surrealistic gangster film he describes as ‘set at a casino in the middle of the desert and all the gangsters come to gamble. In the desert they find the skeleton of a giant man as big as King Kong.’ Already showcased in the film’s storyboards is an almost mummified 300-year-old Pope, just about recognisable as Marilyn Manson. If King Shot is made, as Jodorowsky’s first feature film in nearly two decades, and his first creative collaboration with Manson, it is bound to be colourfully compelling and extremely strange.

But Marilyn continued to pursue his career as an artist, opening his own gallery in LA at 667 Melrose Avenue, on Halloween 2006. (When he was first told of the ‘nearly satanic’ address, Manson reportedly exclaimed, ‘You have got to be kidding me!’) One other project that came to fruition was his own brand of absinthe, called Mansinthe. ‘We hope to have it out in time for parents to give it to their children for Christmas,’ he joked in 2006, though it didn’t hit the shelves until the following year.

‘I hadn’t lived up to my capability,’ he later observed of his more eclectic plans. ‘I was trying to put all of these emotions or ideas or just energy into painting and cinema because I felt strangled with music – felt I couldn’t do what I wanted to do . . . This is probably the way everybody starts out writing songs, and of course, I worked backwards. It’s like going from heroin to Diet Coke – neither of which I’m a fan of.’ While expressing the desire to escape music, however, according to the woman closest to him the singer was still in the grip of his personal demons – specifically, chemical (rather than alchemical) demons.

In this light, it now seems apparent that Manson’s description of Lest We Forget as a ‘swansong’ may have hinted at something deeper than just a farewell to his musical career. ‘I can look back on it now like it was a different person, and I refuse to ever get to that place again,’ he later revealed of the traumatic period. ‘But it was mostly because I didn’t feel that I had someone who was going to walk with me through the horrible reality that we live in. Did I want to kill myself? Yes. Did I come close to doing that? More than I’d like to think . . . I didn’t have anything to attach myself to. I didn’t have any emotions or fears – nothing to have hope for.’ Ironically, to the outside world, at the time it looked like Manson’s musical inactivity owed more to domestic bliss.

In December of 2005, Marilyn had married his fiancée of three years, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, in a star-studded ceremony at Gurteen Castle, Ireland. (The couple were actually formally spliced in a low-key private ceremony the previous week.) ‘It’s not going to be a freak show like everyone presumes,’ Dita had explained. ‘It’s going to be elegant and stylish. And it’s going to take place at nightfall. We like the evenings – I just don’t see the point in getting up early to get married.’ Exclusive coverage rights were negotiated with prestigious fashion bible Vogue, the bride resplendent in a purple silk taffeta gown, the groom in a black silk taffeta tuxedo. The non-denominational ceremony was conducted by Marilyn’s friend and visionary mentor, Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, while guests were invited to stay afterwards and enjoy traditional country pursuits like archery, skeet-shooting, and falconry.

In February of the following year, the new Mrs Manson gave a rosy view of home-life with the erstwhile Antichrist. ‘We like nature shows, about baboons or whatever — but they’re really all quite similar,’ she said of the couple’s viewing habits, adding that they also enjoyed reality shows. ‘We watch those people who are so desperate to be famous and we laugh at their behaviour.’ Her husband was, she said, the sweetest man she’d ever met. ‘Manson is my soulmate,’ gushed the burlesque dancer. ‘He gets me completely and I totally understand him. People see him as this scary monster but he’s the most gentle, sweet, honourable man I have ever known — and I have known a few. We make each other happy.’ Sad to say, that happiness did not last and the marriage was on the rocks within a year.

‘I started to feel bad about being me,’ Manson later observed. ‘I started to feel like I had to turn me off somehow . . . I think that I assumed – and it was me projecting my idea of romance onto Dita – that she believed in things the same way I did. I think we got to a point where she was feeling like, “Well, I assumed you would eventually grow out of this.” And I’m saying, “But this is me.”’

While the wedding had brought the couple even further into the public eye, it was as celebrities rather than performers or artists, in front of an audience unfamiliar with a single note of Manson’s music. The marriage’s painful collapse would play out under a similar spotlight of media attention. As Marilyn struggled to find new avenues for his creativity, Dita’s career as a dancer and model flourished as she became the figurehead for a revival in 1940s fashion that touched both catwalk and underground culture. ‘Everything went downhill after we got married,’ she later said. ‘I started working a lot to escape my home life. I left with nothing. I knew that there was an inappropriate relationship going on . . . and I didn’t want any part of it around to remind me. I didn’t want that sofa. I didn’t want that bed.’

By all accounts, the marriage reached crisis on Halloween 2006, and Dita finally left the marital home on Christmas Eve. Marilyn himself later lamented that there were no presents under the Christmas tree, and that he felt unable to leave the house from the middle of November until after his birthday in January. As one source close to the childless ‘ex-couple’ observed, their main fight at this time was over custody of their cats. As Manson said, to him his cats ‘were like children beyond what most would understand. I’m not a person that is able to relate in a lot of ways to any living creature, but my cats were something I was very attached to and maybe the only people that weren’t able to judge me because they can’t speak.’ Heartbreakingly for MM, Dita took custody of the little ‘people’, although he got one of his favourites – named Lily – back.

For her part, Dita would later infer the marital breakdown was provoked by the demons of the absinthe bottle and the coca leaf. ‘I think most people at this point understand what happened and what they’re dealing with when he’s doing interviews drunk and offering journalists cocaine,’ she reflected candidly. ‘It kind of tells you what I might have been up against.’

(While it’s easy to nod pious agreement at Miss Von Teese’s disapproval, it does beg the question of how she didn’t know what she was up against in the first place. All she had to do was read The Long Hard Road out of Hell, her ex-husband’s autobiography – or indeed this very book.)

Another unwelcome snapshot of the couple’s home life was revealed by Madonna Wayne Gacy’s legal action against his erstwhile bandmate, accusing Marilyn of ‘filching millions of dollars the band made over the years’. To supplement his August 2007 action, Gacy listed an inventory of items he claimed Manson had wasted the money on, including a ‘multi-million-dollar home’, his ‘lavish wedding in Ireland’ and ‘an engagement ring to Dita Von Teese’. To further egg the pudding, the ex-keyboardist added a catalogue of ‘sick and disturbing purchases of Nazi memorabilia and taxidermy (including the skeleton of a young Chinese girl)’ to the alleged shopping spree. Besides a stuffed grizzly bear and a brace of baboons, he also claimed the girl’s skeleton had been turned into a chandelier and was later joined by a skeleton in a wheelchair, while the Nazi memorabilia included swastika wall tiles and a matching rug.

EAT ME, DRINK ME

The deceptively sedate cover of Eat Me, Drink Me is belied by the bloodstains on the windowsill.

Marilyn Manson’s 2007 album, Eat Me, Drink Me, was yet another product of personal turmoil – this time the breakdown of his relationship with his wife Dita, combined with a building conviction that music was no longer a valid vehicle for his creativity. ‘I really was on the verge of giving up and I think that starting to make this record I ended up having the first true collaboration musically,’ he said. ‘With Tim [Skold, guitarist], not at any point did I have to tell him, “This is how I want the guitar to go. I don’t want this sound.” He was almost scoring whatever he was seeing me go through.’ The results were, by Marilyn’s own estimation, his most personal recording to date. While its title carried overtones of Alice in Wonderland, the Christian rite of communion, even the crime of notorious German cannibal Armin Meiwes, the grandiose themes of previous albums were conspicuous by their absence. ‘I think I managed to really shock people for the first time – in my opinion – by showing them that I have the emotions they can relate to,’ said Marilyn, ‘so people have been very positive about this record in a time when everybody would like to take the lazy, simple side of Marilyn Manson.’ As ever, the critical response was mixed. Metal Hammer dismissed it as ‘just another Marilyn Manson record . . . a misjudged and flaccid postscript on the golden age of fucking with straight-laced minds. Manson sounds bored.’ By way of comparison, Hammer’s sister magazine, Classic Rock, hailed it as ‘a stunning return to form . . . We can’t wait to see how good he’ll be if Dita ends up getting the house.’

The accused was unsurprisingly unimpressed. ‘The fact that he’s claiming that I’ve treated him unfairly, financially, is really ridiculous,’ said Marilyn. ‘And I would never spend my money on a Chinese girl skeleton. That would be crossing the line. It’s a Chinese boy, for the record.’ The riposte is vintage Manson, and it’s difficult to have much sympathy for the plaintiff ’s attempt to take the moral high ground after being an enthusiastic member of one of the world’s most notorious bands for nearly two decades.

Another of Gacy’s accusations, however, may have hit closer to home. He accused Manson of paying the ‘highest salary ever paid to any actress in any music video in history’; the video in question was ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses’, released to support the 2007 album Eat Me, Drink Me, recorded in the wake of Marilyn’s divorce – which inspired the album’s themes of heartbreak and despair. And the actress was Evan Rachel Wood, who, it became clear, was his partner in the ‘inappropriate relationship’ that contributed to the collapse of his marriage.

Wood first came to prominence in films such as the acclaimed 2003 production Thirteen and the TV show American Gothic. When she struck up a friendship with Manson, he painted two portraits of her and auditioned the actress for his own upcoming film, Phantasmagoria. The final fulfilment of his cinematic ambitions, based upon the life and work of legendary Victorian children’s author Lewis Carroll, Phantasmagoria had grown in scope and scale. Not only did Manson plan to star in the ambitious production, but also to write, produce and take the director’s chair.

While Dita had clearly expected Manson to outgrow his rock’n’roll lifestyle, his new young friend embraced it and their friendship blossomed into romance. The video for ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses’ caused controversy after rumours spread that the lengthy sex scene between Marilyn and Evan hadn’t been simulated (something she later denied). Some saw the video as a parting shot from Manson at his ex-wife, flaunting his new partner in the most public forum possible. Miss Von Teese contented herself by sighing that they had once been ‘so terribly in love . . . I never took him for someone who would exploit our divorce for the sake of records. I don’t think people realise he used our marriage bed in that music video to have sex with that girl.’

The video might have been expected to fuel further scandal, as Evan was still a teenager when their relationship began, while Marilyn – nearing his 40th year – was twice his new partner’s age. ‘The song was written in a simple way,’ he explained, ‘I was reading the book Lolita and it was something inspired by my current girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood who’s obviously much younger than me, but having the sarcasm to make the point of that and showing up to visit me once wearing heart-shaped glasses which is the same as the Kubrick movie poster for the film Lolita and me saying what I say in the chorus of the song.’ Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, about a middle-aged scholar named Humbert who becomes sexually obsessed with the flirtatious twelve-year-old girl of the title. The age gap between Marilyn and Evan is, of course, nowhere near that between Lolita and Humbert, and his highlighting of it in the song is clearly an act of wilful provocation.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

Creation Books’ edition of Alice through the Looking Glass. Controversial artist Trevor Brown’s cover alludes to Lewis Carroll’s supposedly unhealthy interest in children, and the adoption of the Alice books by the drug culture.

Recent years have seen Marilyn revisiting the territory of subversive children’s literature – the toxic candy aesthetic that dominated his early material, and came to full fruition on 1995’s Smells Like Children EP. Specifically, he’s concentrated his attention on the world of Lewis Carroll, as explored in the Victorian author’s two classic children’s books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

‘I identified with him so much because I wanted to write a story about a fractured personality like Jekyll and Hyde which is what I think Alice In Wonderland is about – it’s about someone not knowing who they are or who they’re supposed to be,’ said Manson. ‘It was that and cannibalistic, vampiric ideas that exist in all fiction and religion – if you have nothing to live for you have a different outlook on death.’

Marilyn Manson’s far from the first musician to find subversive subtexts in Lewis Carroll’s work, which seethes beneath the surface with surrealism and sinister ambivalence. From the 1960s onwards, a number of psychedelic songs – most notably from the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane – have made reference to his Alice . . . books. It’s easy to see why this surreal world, full of talking animals and nonsense verse, could be interpreted as the result of recreational drug use – the hookah-smoking caterpillar is particularly suspect. Far darker are claims that mathematics professor the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s real name) had an unhealthy interest in children. It manifested in his photographs of naked young girls, which have strong overtones of paedophilia, something his supporters hotly deny, pointing out that all of his young friends remembered the author with nothing but warm affection. Furthermore, they argue, the pious Carroll was asexual, choosing children as his nude subjects because they had no erotic subtext in his eyes.

Carroll’s Alice books are behind Manson’s latest quest to find a niche in the movie world, originally envisaged as a quartet of short films to be released via his website, entitled Phantasmagoria – the title taken from one of the author’s obscurer anthologies of nonsense verse. ‘It’s the visions of Lewis Carroll – in fact I’m playing Carroll,’ Manson explained. The first focuses on the typically bizarre Carroll creations Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, who, in the original book, are a pair of perpetually feuding twin brothers. His angle was predictably unique and perverse – for one thing, he proposed changing the duo’s sex: ‘the girls playing Tweedle Dee and Dum are twins who get to have real, genuine sex with each other. I like to make dreams come true.’

Manson was also cast as the lead villain in a proposed big screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, entitled Living in Neon Dreams. This too looked unlikely to be an orthodox interpretation, as his character was in fact a villainess, the Queen of Hearts, the playing-card monarch rather too fond of ordering, ‘Off with their heads!’ ‘I’m not just playing a drag queen, I’m playing a woman,’ he explained. ‘There’s a big difference, and there’s more work to do on that. So I’m studying early Joan Crawford, and I’ve been kind of watching the lady at home, picking up some characteristics. She can teach me how to put my stockings on straight, though I think I’ve already mastered that.’

(Hollywood star Crawford has become more posthumously famous for her tyrannical behaviour at home than any screen role, after her adopted daughter Christina wrote a 1978 exposé of her mother’s alcoholism and cruelty entitled Mommie Dearest.)

While this production appears to have been put on ice, Manson’s own project Phantasmagoria (now subtitled The Visions of Lewis Carroll) has blossomed into a fully fledged feature film, a psychological horror movie in the style of directors Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski (maestros of suspense and paranoia respectively) that he boasts will ‘redefine the genre’. Boasting a $42 million budget, it also features Tilda Swinton as Carroll’s dream wife and Lily Cole as Alice, while a number of other names – including Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and Manson’s current girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood – have also been linked to the project. ‘I have a camera that I’ll be the first person to use in cinema, and I‘m very excited about it,’ enthused the star-filmmaker. ‘I’m going to do a lot of things that may end up being illegal. Until they are, I will do them. I think it will change people’s opinion about horror films and they will realise they’re not all about slasher.’

‘Victorian England,’ begins the Phantasmagoria press release. ‘A haunted writer in an isolated castle is tormented by sleepless nights and visions of a girl named Alice. He finds himself becoming a symptom of his own invention. “Now all my nightmares know my name.” He is Lewis Carroll. Terrified of what waits for him each night.’

‘I want to take the children’s story that we all know, and discover the horrifying roots that grow beneath every one of its childish metaphors,’ explains Marilyn. ‘The characters may be absurd and wrapped in puzzles, but, the author himself is the story that I find painfully close to me. Lewis Carroll is far more complex than the world’s narrow perception of him as a quiet deacon, a mathematician and a loner, simply obsessed with photographing young girls. He was possibly one of the most divided souls living in his own hell that the world has overlooked.’

At time of writing the film appears to be finally going into production, with a proposed 2008 release date. ‘I read Lewis Carroll’s diaries, and he’s a very fractured soul. I think I identified with it more than just fascination; I was in the same mental state. So I think, by waiting, I’ll be able to make a better movie,’ said Marilyn, putting a positive spin on the delayed shooting schedule. In the meantime, his Carroll obsession manifested in his 2007 album, Eat Me, Drink Me – its title a reference to the drug-like cake and drink that Alice consumes, making her grow or shrink, in Alice in Wonderland – while its lyrics contain references to characters such as the White Rabbit and Red Queen. Further evidence of Manson’s fascination with the author emerged in the litigation launched in 2007 by ex-band member Madonna Wayne Gacy, who alleged that the singer misused funds by – among other things – employing roadies to carry his rare Lewis Carroll books (surely an extensive collection, if it requires its own road crew).

Yet it’s one that’s as close to the bone as you can get, harking back to the disturbing childhood imagery that dominated Manson’s Smells Like Children EP twelve years earlier. Manson’s increasing fascination with children’s author Lewis Carroll, accused by some critics of paedophile tendencies, seemed to point in a similar direction. The sexual abuse of children is popularly regarded with more abhorrence now than almost any other crime – with the arguable exception of terrorism. Short of declaring his support for Osama bin Laden, it’s difficult to imagine Manson picking a more provocative area to probe. Yet media outrage was muted. Where once you might have expected the world’s tabloids to pillory rock’s public enemy number one, the media lynch mob seemed disinclined to react to Eat Me, Drink Me’s incendiary subtexts.

Marilyn and his girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood (nearly two decades his junior) attend the Led Zeppelin Tribute Concert to Ahmet Ertegun on December 10th, 2007.

Perhaps his increasing celebrity status – being nearly as familiar a presence in gossip columns as rock magazines – had robbed Manson of some of his menace. Familiarity, if not breeding contempt, had reduced the singer’s shock factor in the public eye. ‘No matter what I do, people will always say Marilyn Manson is a shock rocker,’ he maintained defiantly in 2005. ‘I’m a fan of music and icons and people who don’t let you come into their houses and show you their refrigerator. The power and fear lie in mystery, and I’m always willing to be a mystery, because I don’t know who I am – so there’s no chance of anyone else knowing who I am. Finding out who you are is how you make art – the question mark.’

Inevitably, after over a decade at the top of his game, Manson had become something of a fixture in the rock world while a new generation of young bands had emerged. In 2006, he announced that one of the tracks on his upcoming album would be ‘Rebels without Applause’, a sideswipe at these new pretenders to the throne. ‘I’m not the bitter guy that’s jealous of these other bands that are coming up and stealing my thunder,’ he insisted. ‘I invented thunder and rain. I am THE black. And I’m here to vacuum the red carpet.’

Many black-clad teenagers who might previously have joined the ranks of the Spooky Kids were increasingly drawn towards the burgeoning ‘emo’ scene in the twenty-first century, which boasted a similar recipe of anguish and negativity but in a more digestible package. With his raven-dyed hair, weakness for heavy eyeliner and Halloween kitsch, Marilyn could even be seen as its forerunner. True, typical emo bands boasted pin-up cute members and radio-friendly rock, with themes that tended towards adolescent angst rather than the apocalyptic melodrama favoured by Manson. But Eat Me, Drink Me, with its heavy dose of heartache, could be described as Manson’s most ‘emo’ album to date, though Marilyn’s inspiration was divorce, rather than failing to attract the attention of a hot girl at high school.

‘Rebels without Applause’ was re-entitled ‘Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery’ – as well as making Manson’s accusations of plagiarism explicit, it referred to emo’s reputation for self-harm, a stigma once regularly applied to Marilyn and his fans. ‘I’m embarrassed to be me because these people are doing a really sad, pitiful, shallow version of what I’ve done,’ spat Marilyn. ‘If they want to identify with me then here’s a razor blade. Call me when you’re done and we’ll talk.’

‘We’re Marilyn Manson fans,’ responded My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, sounding slightly wounded. ‘I think he’s really cool. The funny thing is that he seems to have lashed out at us about the make-up. That’s weird to me, because I had heard of Alice Cooper before I heard of Marilyn Manson. I don’t know how he could be mad at us. We never came out and said we were going to call ourselves by a girl’s name and then a serial killer’s name.’

Manson himself had long endured accusations of being a mere Alice Cooper copyist, a charge enflamed when Cooper – now an outspoken Christian – felt affronted by his flirtations with Satanism. But by the summer of 2007 the pair seemed to have buried the hatchet, even appearing on stage together in Bucharest, Romania for renditions of Cooper’s hit ‘Eighteen’ and the cover version that made Manson, ‘Sweet Dreams’. ‘We invented the shock on stage,’ said Alice. ‘Manson re-invented it for another generation. Despite all similarities, our music doesn’t have that much in common: he’s more industrial, we’re [rooted] in classic hard rock.’

The same year saw Manson making other unlikely alliances, most notably sharing headline billing on a tour with thrash metal legends Slayer, another band whose satanic overtones have attracted opprobrium over the years. Marilyn described the pairing as ‘natural because the one thing we share in common is this extreme, brutal dedication to saying and doing what we want and not backing down . . . Plus, we’ve put together the most theatrical show we’ve done. Bring some fire and brimstone back into rock’n’roll . . . At least we’re keeping rock’n’roll evil.’

‘I haven’t seen any fistfights or anything yet,’ said Slayer’s outspoken guitarist Kerry King of predicted friction between two notoriously partisan groups of fans. ‘But there’s a lot of grey area between our fans and Marilyn’s. We both mine the same depths. But you can always pick out his fans – they’re the freaky-dressed ones – and you can always tell who our fans are; they’re the simply dressed ones. There was this girl in the middle of the last show that had her fingers in her ears the whole time we were on. I fucking loved it!’

While the tour was a success and the contrasting bill generated a fair amount of press interest, it’s unclear how many (if any) Slayer fans were won over by Manson or vice versa, and there are no plans to repeat the exercise.

Meanwhile, Marilyn turned his attention back to his non-musical ventures. ‘Recently I haven’t painted in a couple months because I’ve been singing. But it’s always been an outlet,’ he said in April of 2007. ‘Specifically, if I’m frustrated instead of just pacing or watching The Real World or something I would learn how to paint. Degenerate art and the Dada era, they were doing it in the punk rock sense. That was the original punk rock. Life risks. In being a writer, if you want to be unique you always have to say something that someone else isn’t saying.’

Marilyn coined the term ‘Celebritarian Corporation’ as an umbrella under which his diverse projects might be realised. ‘We will sell our shadow to those who stand within it’ is the movement’s slogan, and, according to its founder, ‘it represents the only place where art can possibly go after surrealism and Dada. There’s an array of people involved — from Gottfried Helnwein, who is a fine artist, to Steven Klein, who is a fashion photographer, and Anthony Silva, a director and an editor. I’ve collected a group of people, and everyone has a role. I think it’s probably the only valid attempt at an art movement since the surrealists. It’s something that should be feared, but it’s something I can’t imagine not living up to its expectations.’

Manson also dubbed his Los Angeles art gallery the Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art in 2006. ‘I can’t satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be,’ said Marilyn. ‘I’m trying to take this moment in my life where I could relax and be lazy, but instead it’s a full-scale attack. My goal isn’t to make money, it’s to try and survive and make a point. I’m at that level where there’s nothing left living for except doing some damage.’

Just what the future holds for Marilyn Manson is anybody’s guess. Asked by fellow alternative music icon Henry Rollins about his lasting legacy in 2007, he replied, ‘As a writer, whether I’m writing songs or writing books or even saying what I believe in a painting, whatever, I just want to be thought of as someone who took the time and risked what they stand for, risked their lives to put that out into the world. Someone who ultimately was an artist . . . I don’t feel uncomfortable saying that, but I remember growing up, saying you’re an artist sounds pretentious, but now it’s one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.’