When Bloodsongs magazine released Issue #9 in the late 1990s, its pages captured a moment when horror’s underground was mutating into something stranger, more volatile, and more psychologically unrestrained. Nestled among interviews with figures from the extreme‑music world, the issue featured Alex S. Johnson’s conversation with Charlee Jacob—an interview conducted at the exact moment her debut novel This Symbiotic Fascination (Necro Publications, 1997) was beginning to circulate through the small‑press horror scene. The issue also contained Jacob’s short story “Fire,” a piece that remained uncollected for more than twenty‑five years until its recent republication on The Smol Bear Review, where its molten, surreal intensity feels newly resonant.

Jacob, born Nell Anne Jacob on June 2, 1952 in Texas, began her writing life as a poet under the name Charlee Carter Broach before adopting the name that would define her career. Her early work fused bodily extremity with metaphysical dread, drawing on childhood fascinations with dinosaur bones and desert landscapes, the sensory shock of heat and Tabasco, and a lifelong engagement with psychic and spiritual imagery. By the time of the Bloodsongs interview, she had stepped fully into the realm of hardcore horror, shaping a voice that was both brutal and lyrical, surreal and emotionally charged. This Symbiotic Fascination—soon nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel—announced her as a major force in transgressive horror.

Her career expanded rapidly. Jacob published novels including Haunter (2003), Soma (2004), Vestal (2005), and Dread in the Beast (2005), the last earning her the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel in a tie with David Morrell’s Creepers. Her poetry collections—Sineater (2005), The Desert (2004), Flowers from a Dark Star (2000)—established her as one of the most decorated poets in horror literature, earning her two Bram Stoker Awards for Best Poetry Collection, first for Sineater and later for Vectors (2008), a collaboration with Marge Simon. Her long poem “Hugo Schizophrenica” placed third in the Rhysling Awards in 2004, marking her recognition within the speculative poetry community. Across fiction and poetry, she received multiple Stoker nominations from 1997 through 2014, reflecting sustained critical acclaim. Editors of major anthologies recognized her work as among the best of its era: Stephen Jones selected her story “Flesh of Leaves, Bones of Desire” for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: Volume Twelve, and Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included her narrative poem “Skin” in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection, positioning her firmly within the canon of late‑20th‑century dark literature.

Her peers praised her with a fervor reserved for the rare writer who expands the boundaries of a genre. Edward Lee wrote of her: “Charlee Jacob is one of the most powerful, original voices in horror today. Her work is a fever dream of beauty and brutality.” Brian Hodge described her prose as “hallucinatory, visceral, and unforgettable—language pushed to its breaking point and then made to sing.” Tom Piccirilli called her “a visionary of the grotesque, a poet of the damned, and one of the most fearless writers working today.” Brian Keene praised her as “raw, uncompromising, and utterly unique—nobody writes like Charlee Jacob.” These blurbs, drawn from published introductions, reviews, and promotional materials surrounding her major releases, form a chorus of admiration from some of the most influential voices in contemporary horror.

Jacob died on July 14, 2019 at the age of 67, leaving behind a body of work that continues to resonate with readers drawn to the outer edges of horror. The republication of “Fire” on The Smol Bear Review and the renewed interest in her early interviews—including the Bloodsongs #9 conversation—mark a return to the moment when her voice was first crystallizing, when she was growing, as Johnson’s title suggests, from a world of dinosaur bones, Tabasco, and psychic energy into one of the most distinctive and decorated authors the genre has produced.

At 41, Charlee Jacob (with a hard “g”) has cut a bloody swathe through the world of small-press horror, publishing a massive 326 poems and 134 short stories over the past four years.

Her work has appeared in the anthologies Bending the Landscape (White Wolf), Bizarre Dreams (BadBoy), and Women Who Run with the Werewolves as well as in such publications as Wicked Mystic, Into the Darkness and Palace Corbie. Not to mention a whole laundry list of zines too long to list here.

Born in Wichita Falls, Kansas, she now lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex with her husband Jim and four cats. Like fellow Texan Joe R. Lansdale, not to mention such Southern-fried comrades-in-darkness as Poppy Z Brite and Lucy Taylor, Jacob has the alchemist’s touch, morphing fear into fascination and dread into a dark, delicious poetry.

Her fiction stirs the hot metallic taste of blood and the zip of Southwestern cuisine into a dish that’s both savory and laden with taboo—with plenty of bones for seasoning.

While trading in such archetypal forms as werewolves and vampires, Jacob incorporates elements of her own native American heritage, pansexual gender-bending, Asian exoticism and the dark caress of S&M role-play into fiction that stretches these traditional figures to the furthest limit.

Jacob’s debut novel, This Symbiotic Fascination (Necro Publications), introduces a bizarre menagerie of ghouls—shapeshifters and zaftig vampires—that are definitely not Cosmo ready. This is definitely not Transylvania 90210.

Can a serial-rapist werewolf find true happiness with a full-figured bloodsucker? Can violent acts be expiated through further violence? What is the true nature of evil, and does intention count? These are just some of the questions raised by the novel. It’s disturbing, intense and ultra-graphic, a study in extremes. It’s also one of the outstanding debut novels of the year, and merits a large readership.

To prepare for my recent interview with Ms Jacob, I had to pretty much start from scratch. Not much has been written about her, and she’d never done a “live” interview (conducted by phone) before this. My only clue involved her taste for Tabasco sauce and chocolate, an intriguing tidbit from her Wicked Mystic bio. So I decided to start there.

“Not together though,” Jacob explains. “I think when I mentioned my taste for Tabasco and chocolate, it had to do with the fact that I have an addictive personality. Since my mother and brother were both alcoholics, I tend to steer away from that. So I eat things like chocolate, which is a harmless addiction—except where your hips are concerned—and extremely spicy foods, which I crave. But that’s some suffering I can put up with.

“I like things that tend to go beyond the edge, because my life has always been very strange, or very tame, depending on how I was living at the time. Now it’s very tame, but it wasn’t always.”

Speaking of things beyond the edge, I ask her about the violent shape-shifter Arcan, a lead character in This Symbiotic Fascination. Arcan roams about with a triad of animals inside him—a cat, a wolf and a ghoul—fueling his unnatural hungers and jostling for dominance with his ego.

“Don’t ask me why I chose those three. I just didn’t want to go with the standard werewolf. I wanted somebody who had entities within him, which I could sort of understand, having had a mother who was not that sane anyway.

“His [Arcan’s] mother was a shifter. At least a partial shifter. And she couldn’t deal with it. She put it in him, and he’s actually trying to get ahold of it so he can take some responsibility. And even though these animals, these creatures, create his crimes, he still feels he has to take responsibility for his actions. Tawne, the vampire in the story, even has to take responsibility for her actions at the end of it. A lot of my work has to do with taking responsibility.”

While Arcan does take responsibility for his crimes of rape and mutilation, he goes about it in a very problematic way, attacking members of a woman’s group that have banded together due to their shared victimization.

“He knows he has their souls,” Jacob says. “He’s trying to find a way they can get their souls back, and the only way they can do that is to take them. But he is demented. And he can’t act beyond an animalistic way. That animal is part of him. He is a born killer in this respect.

She explains that Arcan, while capable of evil acts, is not evil by choice. “He doesn’t really intend to do evil. He really can’t help himself. Whereas the cop in the book, Denise Cross, is intentionally evil. You wouldn’t see her looking for salvation.”

Arcan’s lover Tawne is a vampire with heft—at one point in the novel she’s booted from a Goth club by its pale, scrawny denizens. It’s Jacob’s sly revenge on the “parade of gorgeous flesh” that winds through hip, post-punk inflected vampire texts like Nancy Collin’s Sunglasses After Dark.

“I couldn’t understand why you had to be a Spandex model to rise from the dead,” Jacob snarks. “I get this view of the Reaper, standing there with this list of prerequisites. The vampires in Nancy Collins’ novels, which I parody in the book, are pushing the same emblem of a physical criteria that I find grossly unacceptable. I ran into the same mentality in high school. If you weren’t slender and wearing the latest fashions, you couldn’t hang with the ‘in’ crowd. I was never in the ‘in’ crowd. It’s not a beauty contest.”

A self-described “unpopular kid,” Jacob says her childhood encompassed elements of life that few have seen outside of the movies. Her parents were paleontologists, and dinosaur digs formed a routine part of her growing up. However, while flicks like Jurassic Park foster romantic notions of the profession, Jacob finds it boring.

“My parents pushed me so hard in the direction of science; they had my whole life planned out for me. I was supposed to get my doctorate by the time I was 22, and nonsense of this nature.”

While excavating ancient bones was hardly Jacob’s notion of a good time, she enjoyed time away from the city and wandered away from digs to explore on her own.

“I could be in a wooded copse where nobody had ever been, except maybe Indians a long time ago. I would find areas that might have been their spiritual places. You would swear you could hear ghosts in the trees. We would be in places that were desert plateaus, very sere areas, and they were either so hot you had an epiphany of hell or so cold, the winds were sideways.”

On her forays, Jacob was nearly bitten by rattlers and narrowly avoided being mauled by a marauding cougar. “My parents didn’t know most of this,” she says. “They would probably have gone berserk if they’d known I was there. But they were so intent on digging up their dinosaur bones. You had to be unbelievably careful. You’d sit in the same spot for weeks. They wouldn’t even know I was gone.”

Jacob formed her taste for weird literature early, latching onto Homer and the zoo of mythical beasts and monsters found in The Iliad and The Odyssey. She soon discovered Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant. Later, when her family moved to Oklahoma, she gleaned Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft from the slim pickings at local bookstores.

At 16, Jacob came across an author whose philosophy of personal freedom and sexual abandon would strongly impact her artistic sensibility. “That was Marquis de Sade. I got into that. Not because of the sexuality, but because they were so bizarre.”

Given her family life, Jacob’s choice of subject matter might seem pre-ordained. “My mother was intensely psychic…she was not what I would refer to as sane. She had nightmares so intense she later turned to alcoholism just to knock herself out, to go to sleep. She was a very strange lady. And I guess I’m strange too. I guess I inherited that, but I try to lean toward living a somewhat saner life.”

At times Jacob believes she’s also inherited her mother’s psychic gifts. “I sound like a kook talking about this. I have on occasion been able to tell when people were going to die. I remember an incident when I was about 20, living in Norman, Oklahoma. I walked to work one morning and there was a kitten in a tree. I was trying to find the kitten’s owner so I went up and knocked on the door. A very nice older lady came to the door and said it wasn’t her kitten. I got a sudden flash that this woman was going to die, and very soon. And very violently. I’m walking away thinking, “You should have told her that.”

A week later, Jacob was suddenly stricken ill while at work. Walking home, she saw the same nice old woman face-down on the lawn and next to her husband’s body. “He had been threatening her for many months,” she says. “And he had shotgunned her to death, then turned it on himself. The police were all over the place. I got the impression I had gotten sick at work just so I could be forced to see this. Which is ridiculous, but, nevertheless, maybe it’s not.”

It was this kind of heritage—an upbringing straight out of a Southern Gothic novel, with attendant night terrors and sudden death visions—that pushed her toward writing.
End of Part One

The historical context deepens when viewed from the present. Gossow’s retirement from performing—her decision to step away from the physical toll and constant travel—has become one of the most significant pivots in modern metal. She addressed it with the same directness that marked her years onstage, saying, “It’s not ME! … I am really excited to be involved in this new chapter as the manager.” Her shift into management didn’t diminish her influence; it redirected it. She remains a decisive force behind Arch Enemy’s evolution, shaping the band’s future with the same intensity she once brought to the microphone.

Since replacing Arch Enemy’s original frontman, Johan Liiva, in 2001, Angela Gossow’s teutonic good looks and ferocious pipes have given Michael Amott’s post-Carcass death metal machine an eye-catching, charismatic focus, as Arch Enemy hurl their arc of sonic demolition into an unknown future. Angela takes a moment from her busy schedule to talk with me about the new EP, Dead Eyes See No Future, and metal past, passing and to come.

Titled after a song from the Anthems of Rebellion slab, the EP contains three live originals from a Paris concert and three covers: “Symphony of Destruction” by Megadeth, “Kill With Power” by Manowar, and “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” (if you guessed Carcass, you would be correct).

Angela says “Well, this choice is a bit obvious because Michael Amott [Arch Enemy founder/guitarist] was in Carcass, and he actually wrote that song-so it’s almost an Arch Enemy song. And it was very easy for us to play, because it’s kind of the way we write. They have all these weird melodies going on, the way they put the riffs together. It’s extreme, but catchy at the same time.

“For me it’s basically a Carcass tribute because I think they’re a fantastic band and it’s a shame they split up, and all hope’s lost that they’re ever going to reform. I think it’s kind of beautiful to pay tribute to just a great band that has influenced a lot of death metal bands. This is a big name on the scene even after ten or 15 years of absence.

“Megadeth is obviously an all-time favorite of anybody who loves metal, I think, because Dave Mustaine is a must-have guitar player in your record collection. They have written wonderful tunes, basically influenced the whole thrash metal scene, and set the standard for guitar playing very high.”

“In Arch Enemy,” Gossow continues, “I think that Michael and Chris [Amott, guitarist] have a bit of the same guitar style as well. They’ve always been big Dave Mustaine fans, and this is why they wanted to do a Megadeth song.”

Angela praised Mustaine’s “courage,” exemplified by the [then-current] Megadeth album, The System Has Failes.

“He’s obviously abandoned the mainstream thing he’s been on for a couple of years, and basically going back to who he is. I think it’s very encouraging for bands as well to turn around and do something more extreme after twenty years than you have done for the last couple of albums.”

The Manowar cover can be credited to Archers skinsman Daniel Erlandson. “He loves their early stuff. Back then, they were a bit more raw and grinding. Obviously, what they did on the original album wasn’t so tight, really, and they didn’t have the production standards. Basically, we took that song and made it tight and it almost sounds like an Arch Enemy song. It’s brutal, and I was very surprised that it turned out like this.”

So there you have it—some of the essential ingredients slopping it up in Arch Enemy’s metal alembic. “You could say we’re carrying the flame of metal,” Angela says. “We try to keep it pretty pure. At least that’s how we want to be seen. There’s not going to be much synthesizer in Arch Enemy songs. We try to keep it very metal. The dominant factor has to be guitar melodies, crazy solos and chunky riffs.”

When Metal Hammer first ran this vintage Lemmy interview, Motörhead were in one of their most ferocious periods. The band had just released their double live album Everything Louder than Everything Else, captured on the 1991–92 tour and issued at a moment when Motörhead were still proving, night after night, that volume and velocity were non‑negotiable. They were gearing up for another run of shows, still living on the road, still operating on the principle that the next gig mattered more than anything behind them.

That’s the atmosphere this interview comes from: Lemmy in full stride, sharp, funny, unsentimental, and completely focused on keeping the band moving. He wasn’t interested in mythmaking; he was interested in playing. The conversation you’re about to revisit catches him exactly there — grounded, blunt, and fully committed to the work.

In the years since, the story has taken on a different weight. Lemmy died on December 28, 2015, just two days after learning he had an extremely aggressive cancer. He passed at home in Los Angeles, with his favorite Rainbow Bar & Grill arcade machine brought to his side. Motörhead manager Todd Singerman described those final moments with the kind of clarity Lemmy himself always used: when the doctor delivered the diagnosis, he broke down crying, while Lemmy stayed steady and told him it was alright. Singerman later said, “How did he face death? Like a champ.”

Phil Campbell, who had stood beside Lemmy for more than thirty years, said that if Lemmy were still alive, nothing would have changed: “We’d be playing in Motörhead… We never talked about the end, we always talked about the next album, the next tour, the next gig.” Mikkey Dee echoed him, refusing to frame Lemmy’s death as tragic: “Lemmy lived 70 years on his premise, his way.” And Saxon’s Biff Byford — one of Lemmy’s oldest comrades — noted that while Lemmy probably would have preferred to die on the road, going quickly at home, playing a videogame, was “exactly the way he lived.”

Even after death, Lemmy remained unmistakably himself. He had arranged for portions of his ashes to be placed inside bullets and given to his closest friends — a gesture so perfectly in character that it felt like one last joke, one last nod, one last piece of him handed over. Riki Rachtman shared his bullet publicly, saying he was “literally brought to tears.” Tennis legend Pat Cash posted another, gifted to Ugly Kid Joe’s Whitfield Crane. Each bullet came with a letter explaining that Lemmy had many acquaintances but very few he considered family — and that receiving a bullet meant you were one of them.

Other portions of his ashes have been placed at spots he loved: the Rainbow Bar & Grill in West Hollywood, Stringfellows in London, Hellfest, Wacken, Bloodstock, and his hometown of Burslem. At Stringfellows, Phil Campbell remembered how Lemmy would finish rehearsal, jump in a cab, and head straight there — “Lem’ loved it here.” These ongoing “Lemmy Forever” ceremonies continue to place his ashes in venues and festivals around the world, keeping him permanently among fans, friends, and noise.

A decade on, Lemmy’s legacy stands untouched. Tribute albums, anniversary issues of Metal Hammer, and global memorials all circle back to the same truth: Lemmy didn’t just play rock’n’roll — he was rock’n’roll. His influence still bridges punk and metal, still shapes new bands, still reminds musicians that authenticity hits harder than any amplifier.

This interview, recovered from the era when Motörhead were tearing across continents with Everything Louder than Everything Else as their rallying cry, is a snapshot of Lemmy before the legend fully hardened — when he was still flesh and blood, still laughing, still touring, still raising hell. It returns now under the title No Sleep Till Ash‑Bullets, in honor of the man who lived loudly, died quickly, and left pieces of himself — literally — in the hands of those he loved.

Alex S Johnson: Do you think your fascination with the Nazi era has been misunderstood by fans or writers?

Lemmy Kilmister: It’s been misunderstood by a few people. But then again, whatever you do will also be understood by a couple of people. I mean my lifestyle is just so fucking un-Nazi-esque, I must be the worst Nazi anybody’s ever seen! ‘He’s got black girlfriends,’ know what I mean? I’m a rotten Nazi, me. So they can all like relax. I’m not going after them with a black suit on.

ASJ: You wrote a song as a counter-move to the charge that you’re always writing pro-war songs—”Dogs of War.” I never thought of your songs as being pro-war, honestly. What was the reception to the song?

LK: It didn’t work. And “Assassin” was quite vicious, really, but I mean it depends on whether you read the words…which I’m sure nobody reads the fucking words. I don’t know why we keep them on the albums.

ASJ: I read the words.

LK: I’m sure you’re a minority. I mean on CD’s the fucking print’s too small, it’ll drive you out of your mind trying to read it. I don’t like CD’s, and they’re starting to fuck up badly, aren’t they, these magic inventions that we’re never going to wear out and all that…run a car over it but it’s still going to play…

ASJ: Vinyl versus CD’s?

LK: I think vinyl sounds better. Yeah, when it went ‘ka-chee’ into the beginning…that was kind of exciting all by itself! Also you could put a great sleeve on one of those. What can you do with a CD? The sleeve’s only six inches square…

ASJ: You really had a slot for commercial success with that Ozzy duet on March or Die…

LK: I was just writing songs for him, you know. That was like more money than I made on Motörhead in 15 years. You gotta take it.

ASJ: It was stupid for Sony not to push your Ozzy duet (“I Ain’t No Nice Guy”)

LK: I know, fucking hopeless.

ASJ: On your new live album the intent was to get down the live lineup and to capture your last couple of albums for CMC,

LK: I think it’s the best one yet. And also let’s just say the CMC albums needed some representation and the like. We have to include the old stuff too, because that’s what people want

ASJ: Any songs you plan to strike from the list?

LK: “Metropolis” and “Stay Clean” I think have seen enough time.

ASJ: So where are you with songs like “Iron Fist”?

LK: I’m all right with it. I went through a period where I really got sick of them, but then I came around again, so they were all right again.

ASJ: What are the cycles for songs? How long does it take to get sick of something and then go back to loving it again?

LK: Some songs you play them for half a tour, and then you have to get rid of them because it’s too awful. I don’t know what it is. The most unlikely songs turn out to be good onstage; for example, “Bad Woman” from Bastards would have been a great stage song, and we really wanted to do it, and it just didn’t work out. I think it was like the piano actually, on stage…

ASJ: When I saw you on the 1996 Sacrifice tour, Rickenbacker had just put out the Lemmy signature bass. How did you feel about that at the time? I know you really felt it was overdue…

LK: Well yeah, but it’s ok. It’s nice of them, anyway. They haven’t got it actually on the fucking market yet. How long ago was that one, three years ago? They’re slow. Rickenbacker is. It’s like trotting a dinosaur with a lolly stick.

ASJ: I read that you aren’t very hot on the new Marshalls…

LK: I like the old ones. They were better, I think. It’s like the old joke about how many elderly folk singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

ASJ: How many?

LK: Six. One to do it and five to sing about how much better the old one was!

ASJ: Do you own a vacuum amp?

LK: No. I never used the low end much anyway. I’ve always been more of a guitarist, really.

ASJ: Your bass style is unique…

LK: I play on account of it will just go “blur” over everything…it just sounds like a mass.

ASJ: On the last few albums you’ve actually tightened up the sound, the production is better, the songs are exceptionally well-constructed even by Motörhead standards, and it’s funny, because most bands hit a peak and then either die or retread, but you continue to improve.

LK: In a way they do us a favor by not buying our albums, because they make us hungry and pissed off, which is very good for a band! I think that’s probably saved our fucking life, paradoxically! I just wish they’d saved it with more luxury involved…

ASJ: How do you feel you’ve developed as musicians?

LK: Beyond all recognition, really. Our lyrics are better mostly anyway, and I don’t even think about playing the bass anymore…it’s so natural to me…almost automatic. Having said that, though, it’s occasionally interesting to do a song like “Sacrifice” or “Assassin”

ASJ: How so?

LK: Well, if we let our drummer, Mikkey Dee, write the time signature, we’re all in trouble…’cause drummers are not as other men, know what I mean?

ASJ: A strange breed…

LK: All you do to earn your living as a drummer is sit on a stool and whack your hands downward…

ASJ: Would you compare Mikkey to Philthy Phil, your on and off drummer from between 75 and 92?

LK: I don’t know. I think this is a classic lineup. I just think it hasn’t had fifteen years to grow on you yet…

ASJ: You’re 53. What does it feel like to be a standard-bearer of rock and roll?

LK: It feels all right. It suits me. I didn’t realize it would change from being a young hopeful to standard bearer at the time, but I mean that’s what you are, even if you’re a young hopeful, if you believe in what you do.

ASJ: What do you want to be remembered for?

LK: My not-giving-upness. Honesty, or something. Integrity, at least. Not selling out, even if we die in poverty…I’m sure we’re going to do a Vincent Van Gogh…we’ll die in fucking abject poverty, and then in 20 years we’ll become objects d’art and worth fucking millions!

ASJ: No doubt.

LK: I did a film in 1987 called Eat the Rich. The entire soundtrack was Motörhead songs. Needless to say, it failed miserably.

ASJ: How do you feel about your cameo in Richard Stanley’s dystopian future horror film Hardware?

LK: Very bad overdubbing for the vocals, and I just couldn’t get into it, and they didn’t have much time, so it looks like I’ve got a speech impediment! It was a rush job, and they made the total mistake of giving me whiskey before I did the thing..give somebody a bottle of whiskey at 7:00 in the morning, you’ll be crawling till 2:00 in the afternoon!

ASJ: Has your lifestyle changed at all over the years?

LK: Not much. As far as you’d notice.

ASJ: How do you account for your incredible longevity as a human man, considering what you’ve subjected your body to?

LK: Pure luck. Just luck. I’ve seen people jump into my lifestyle, coast on for a couple of years, and then go out, like Raven.

ASJ: It works for you.

LK: Yeah, I mean whatever you do every day is normal for you. Whereas it might not be normal for Mr and Mrs Stay at Home Housewife. It’s fine with me, but I’m sure I couldn’t live their lives either!

ASJ: Over the last four years you’ve had a real renaissance. You hit a slump and then you came right back.

LK: It’s really odd in America, because we can’t get radio time, we’re never gonna get it. And we’re never going to get a lot of play on fucking MTV, you know. Moron TV as I call it. So we get a short tour every year…maybe. And the year before we didn’t really tour in the U.S…it’s really odd to tour as well, so we don’t get any coverage at all. All we get is a sort of ‘nice personality’ thing. I do want to get the band across as contenders, instead of those guys who were so great then…

ASJ: You’ve stuck around…and the albums just keep getting better.

LK: And nobody gives a fuck…so we’ll just keep making them until they do give a fuck!

ASJ: What would be a sign of success for you?

LK: I would really just like to piss everybody off by going up the American charts…We did it in England all those years ago..we went straight to Number One, the band that was going to fail in three months, and we really shoved it up their ass and snapped it off. I’d just like to do that in America too, ‘cause I’ve got a few people I’d like to refuse entrance to my after show, know what I mean?

ASJ: Thanks for the interview, Lemmy. It was a real pleasure.

LK: I’ll tell you one thing…you don’t have any competition!

Please enjoy “Can’t Catch Me,” a song by Lemmy Kilmister, performed by Lita Ford (THE RUNAWAYS)

That context matters even more now, with the benefit of nearly two decades of hindsight. Deva’s departure from Cradle of Filth in 2009 marked the end of a 14‑year tenure that helped define the band’s signature blend of gothic excess and operatic grandeur. Her work across Dusk and Her Embrace, Cruelty and the Beast, Midian, Nymphetamine, and Thornography remains foundational to the group’s sound, and her contributions—often uncredited in the broader metal discourse—were instrumental in shaping the genre’s acceptance of classical and choral elements.

But God Has a Plan for Us All was the first time listeners heard Deva’s voice as the emotional center rather than the atmospheric frame. Angtoria’s orchestral sweep, co-written with Chris Rehn, gave her a platform for narrative vulnerability and thematic intensity that Cradle’s universe never quite allowed. The interview captured her at a moment of artistic self-definition: candid, sharp, and newly empowered.

Since then, her career has unfolded in distinct, compelling phases. After leaving Cradle, she launched her self-titled solo project, releasing A Sign of Sublime (2010) and The Corruption of Mercy (2011), both of which expanded her symphonic palette while foregrounding her lyrical voice. She continued to collaborate widely—Therion, Mortiis, Nader Sadek, Lindsay Schoolcraft, and others—reinforcing her status as one of metal’s most versatile vocalists. dev.metal-archives.comdev.metal-archives.com. Sarah Jezebel Deva - Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives

In 2020, Deva reunited creatively with Rehn to form Torn Between Two Worlds, a project explicitly positioned as a spiritual successor to Angtoria. Their singles “The Beauty of Deception,” “Transparent,” and “The Woman That Never Was,” along with the 2022 EP As If We Never Existed, reaffirmed the emotional and orchestral intensity that made Angtoria resonate so deeply.

Most recently, Deva has returned to the stage with renewed clarity and purpose, joining The Kovenant for their 2024 reunion shows—a move she initially resisted due to family commitments but ultimately embraced with joy and gratitude. Her reflections on this period reveal an artist who has grown not only musically but personally, balancing legacy, motherhood, and creative ambition with striking honesty.

Revisiting our original conversation now, The Principle of Deva Made Flesh reads as both a snapshot and a prophecy. It captures the moment Sarah Jezebel Deva stepped into her own mythos—and foreshadows the long, evolving arc of a career defined by resilience, reinvention, and an unwavering devotion to the transformative power of voice.

Angtoria’s first album is titled God Has a diffPlan For Us All. The sardonic title refers to a song (and video) of the same name which references such cheery topics as suicide and the clerical abuse of children. Originally planned as an orchestral project, Angtoria shifted forms and by the second demo had acquired a metal edge, though nothing so extreme as her best-known work on the Cradle of Filth albums.

Sarah explains the unusual band name: “I was sitting around trying to come up with lots of ideas for a name, and nothing was really good enough. There’s so many band names out there, and once you pick one, it’s got to be something good; it can’t be stupid. We were kind of stuck, because once you pick a name, you’re with it for life. So Chris and Tommy (the brothers Rehn) came up with the name Angtoria, which is a combination of the first part of their mother’s name and the last part of their sister’s name, but it’s also the title of a song from Tommy’s old band, Moahni Moahna.”

“To be honest, I wasn’t overly keen in the beginning, but Chris was like, if you look for the name Angtoria on the internet, you’re only going to pull us up, whereas with, say, Cradle of Filth, you’re going to pull up ‘Cradle’ and you’re going to pull up ‘Filth’; you’re going to pull up so many different sites—whereas with Angtoria, because the name is totally made-up and unique, you’re only going to pull us up, which I guess is good, it’s better than what I could come up with, because I’ve come up with some dark names. I can’t remember them, but they were all quite dark, something to do with hate and chaos and so forth.” She laughs. “They weren’t the best names, nothing very positive on my part!”

I strive to avoid such obvious fannish questions as “Do you live in a coffin?” but when I raise the topic, Sarah quickly defends the practice. “Don’t be coffinist! Actually, at one stage I was so very goth, my uncle was going to make me a coffin bed! I think most kids go through that, like it’s really cool to sleep in an awkwardly shaped box, like you find it so cool, that you can tell all your friends that you sleep in a coffin, and really it is the gayest idea one could ever come up with. But I had thought about it at one stage. And I wanted a lid as well, I was just a bit paranoid that someone would nail it down. I was a bit claustrophobic as well. And I couldn’t work out how I was going to get all my teddy bears in the corner. Not really!”

They do have scary teddy bears out now. Sarah is not impressed. “They’re going to have scary gothic milk bottles soon. They’ve done dolls, they’ve done bears, they’ve done horses and whatever. It has to be something completely original, like milk bottles. With fangs.”

Sarah says that her cruel female persona arrived courtesy of working with Cradle of Filth.

“I started with Cradle at such a young age; kids, whether you agree or not, and whether a 17-year-old is going to agree with this, you’re still a kid at that age, and you’re very, very impressionable. To be honest, when I first started with Cradle I was a goth; I used to walk around completely in black; I had a nose chain, I used to use baby powder on my face just to make sure it was really white; I was very creative in the way I dressed. But on the musical side, although I suppose I brought some creativity to that as well, it was mostly Dani [Filth] who brought that out of me.

“I suppose at that age no kid really knows how to express themselves, and so, for instance, when I started recording with Cradle, I really hated opera, yet my voice was maturing, and I was singing more and more opera with Cradle of Filth. I just remember when I was young having to listen to my uncle listen to that stuff, and I used to hate it, I thought it was horrible music, and it’s bizarre, because so many years later I find myself singing what I hated.

“But I never really found a way to explore the creative side of myself, because of the way I was raised. I was raised in an extremely harsh and restrictive environment in which I was never allowed to express myself at all. So obviously as I was getting older and older, and when I met Dani, it opened up a completely different door for me.

“I wouldn’t say I was influenced by Dan, but I would say that being with Dani and the whole Cradle of Filth experience is something completely new for me, and it was almost like saying it’s ok to do different things and not have to be like everybody else, if that makes sense. So because I grew up with Cradle of Filth, literally, it was like having a role model, in a way. Kids need something they can connect to, and for me it was Cradle of Filth. Allowing that part of me that might want to make a complete ass of myself, or do something completely different.”

Sarah’s official website explores aspects of her upbringing that many would shun to divulge.

“I talk about my childhood, and it’s not because I want people to say ‘aw, poor Sarah’; it’s because I have so many kids coming to me who are like ‘Oh, you have this wonderful life, you’ve got it so good’; and I’m like whoa, slow down. You’re very blind if you think that if a person is in the limelight she’s had an amazing life. I see so many profiles of people where they say ‘I do this,’ or ‘I do that,’ and I thought, should I not be honest, should I not just tell how it is? I don’t want people to think that just because I’m with Cradle I’m a millionaire; that I’ve got ten cars and live in a castle. That’s not it at all. I have a job. I have a very normal life. To a degree.”

The years after our original conversation with Sarah Jezebel Deva have cast a long retrospective shadow over the internal workings of Cradle of Filth, illuminating dynamics that were once only hinted at in private exchanges and backstage whispers. When the lawsuit against Dani Filth and Cradle of Filth LLP surfaced in 2025–2026, it reframed the band’s history through the voices of those who had lived inside its machinery. Six former members—Zoë Marie Federoff, Marek “Ashok” Šmerda, Paul Allender, Richard Shaw, Lindsay Schoolcraft, and model Sasha Baxter—brought forward allegations of unpaid royalties, unauthorized use of likenesses, defamation, and exploitative working conditions. Their statements were stark, unvarnished, and painfully familiar to anyone who had listened closely to Deva’s own reflections over the years.

Federoff’s account was particularly harrowing. She described the contract she was offered as “the most psychopathic contract a session musician could ever be handed,” a document her lawyer reportedly reacted to with disbelief. She alleged that when she asked about missing funds, management called her “a cancer” and “a dead horse.” Šmerda, who left the band alongside her mid‑tour, spoke with equal bluntness, saying, “It is a lot of work for relatively low pay, the stress is quite high, and we haven’t felt for a while like this band actually prioritising/caring about members. It has been years of unprofessional behaviour from people above us that led to our decision.” Their departure, abrupt and public, cracked open a door that had long been sealed.

Dani Filth’s response attempted to strike a balance between denial and diplomacy. He insisted, “These allegations are false and damaging. We maintain clear records that show otherwise, and any dispute will be dealt with properly — not through trial by social media.” He also extended a measured olive branch to Federoff and Šmerda, saying, “Despite everything, I do wish you well. We shared great times together, and I’ll always be grateful for those memories.” Yet this conciliatory tone was undercut by his earlier accusation that Šmerda had engaged in “attempts to illegally defame and derail the band,” a statement issued when announcing the guitarist’s firing mid‑tour.

Threaded together, these accounts form a portrait of a band whose internal tensions were not isolated incidents but part of a long‑running pattern—one that artists like Sarah Jezebel Deva had navigated years before the lawsuit made such struggles public. Deva’s departure in 2009, and her subsequent insistence on forging her own creative identity through Angtoria, her solo work, and later Torn Between Two Worlds, reads differently in light of these revelations. What once seemed like a personal artistic evolution now appears, in part, as an escape from a system that would later be challenged in court by multiple former members.

This afterword, woven into the fabric of The Principle of Deva Made Flesh, reframes the original interview as a document of transition—not only for Deva, but for the broader constellation of artists who contributed to Cradle of Filth’s mythos. It underscores the prescience of her decision to step away, the clarity of her voice when speaking about creative autonomy, and the importance of listening when musicians describe the conditions under which their art is made. In hindsight, her story becomes part of a larger narrative about legacy, labor, and the cost of maintaining a gothic empire whose foundations were not always as stable as the theatrics suggested.

Kissing Davey was warm—actually hot. Delia felt her lips steam briefly. It was like taking the first puff ever off a cigarette as an adolescent. It was like bending to inhale the smoke of a joss stick of sandalwood and having the fragrance lilt up the nostrils to stay all night.

Of course, he wasn’t soft at all. He didn’t have the yielding flesh of a responsive lover. His was hard, practically concrete. It was crunchy, leaving a silt of ashen skin against her mouth. It crackled until Delia imagined static electricity having passed between them.

Delia wished she had a mirror with her. Had her shiny red lipstick taken on a blackened hue? Did minute pieces of him adhere to her? She could taste it, pressed against her face…burnt meat.

I could never be a vegetarian, she thought. There is a sensuality in meat. It might be the texture—never celery crisp, lettuce flaccid or carrot grainy. It fights back against the teeth, insisting on its right to make the eater aware that, Yes! I was once alive with a face! It might be the passion in the flavor, the tempting taboo of cannibalism as the tongue recognizes a substance so near its own composition.

It might just be a kind of love. As the love she felt for Davey.

Delia had always loved Davey, strong and athletic Davey. Able to-leap-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound Davey. Fast-car driver, adventure-seeking, fabulously hung lover. She’d started to weep seeing what the fire had done to him.

She’d returned home from work only moments after the fiery creature fell to the driveway, having tried to clean a mess with gasoline. Davey—not always bright, even if gorgeous and masculine. She’d slammed on the brakes at the curb, leaping from the car, running over to him as he faintly ceased twitching, telling herself, No, that isn’t him, can’t be him, say it isn’t…

The tears had begun to fill her eyes. Sorrow. Or the damned smoke of flesh and hair oily in the air.

It might not be Davey, Delia told herself with all the denial she could muster. It didn’t even look like him really. There wasn’t a square inch of recognizable feature left. No hair, no shape to the face.

I will always know my lover by embrace, she thought. How well I have known that mouth—no matter how twisted and curled it is now.

A kiss. A sticky momentary fusion. Not quite hard, no. Still soft, spongy. Taffy that could be pulled out for yards.

A flavor of iron chains and greasy hot dogs. The fumes of charcoal lighter fluid like what hung in the atmosphere when some neighbor was trying to barbecue in his back yard but didn’t have a clue as to how to build a fire. So thick you could taste the combustible, so thick you could choke on it.

Delia didn’t choke on this. It was practically an after-shave, alluring and volcanic in what it inspired in her.

She flicked her tongue tentatively and tasted that slick, molten head.

She had never loved Davey more than at this tragic time. Isn’t that when most people feel the bulk of their adoration of someone? When an evil befalls them and their beloved is taken away?

But Davey was still there. He hadn’t been taken away yet. He would be taken away though. And soon. An ambulance would come. The shell would be placed upon a stretcher. in a bag, in a lightweight sack to transport him to where Delia would never see or touch him again.

She had always been so on fire in bed with him, scratching, biting. She bit now. Just a tiny piece. A memento of blistering sex. She didn’t really intend for it to come on off in her mouth, to slide across her gums in ruined butter and blood-brittle candy. But it did and what was she to do, spit it out?

Treasure what you have of him. Before they take him away. You always wanted him inside you, thinking the only way was to have his erection between your thighs, between your cheeks. To swallow his sperm had seemed the ultimate merging. Now, are there restrictions?

Can you not have him inside you for a last time that is somehow more fulfilling? More inflammable of your love?

Delia savored, then swallowed. If she almost choked on it, it was with the fullness of her emotion, her grief. She took another bite and felt it split moistly, pop with the blistering of pizza cheese on the roof of her mouth. The third bite was larger and hissed. Fat ran down her chin, spattering her dress.

I’ll never wash this garment again. I’ll hang it, surrounded by photographs of Davey. I’ll create a proper shrine out of it.

And when she would eventually shit these fragments of him out again, could she keep them in a jar of rose water? Keep candles burning to either side of it with prayers said daily?

Another bite and the feelings swept over her until Delia had to touch herself. On the driveway, in full daylight with—who knew what nosy people might be spying through their windows? She didn’t care. These were her last moments with Davey. Maybe those voyeurs would never be so courageous as she was, insisting on a rite of farewell such as only the ancients might have practiced. As ancestors had done, eating their dead with devotion. holding on to them a bit longer…

And was Delia mistaken, or were her genitals hotter than they had ever been? Was she roasting with desire? She was as wet as if she’d been basted. She gathered this stew upon her fingers.

“Take my scent with you, darling,” she said to the husk as she caressed where she guessed the nose to have been, the ridge of tinder jawline. Her fingertips smashed through the seared skin to land in squelching fricassee beneath.

Delia pulled back in horror. Then understood that she was being given access to the inner workings of poor Davey. This was a gift, wasn’t it? To be accepted with reverence? She licked those fingers and felt aphrodisia go up in Fahrenheit.

Delia began to eat with lust, waves of orgasms rolling over her just as the flames must have overcome Davey. She stuffed her pockets with his teeth and put the sultry hinge of his destroyed tongue between her breasts. His penis had shriveled to a blackened thumb but to her it was a branding iron. Was it perversion to put this between her legs, pushed gently into the place where Davey had often put it and himself when it and he were whole?

Here was the erotic blowtorch. The potent salamander.

This was the reason humanity gave up digging for roots and picking mushy grains. For the lascivious meat! Carnivores are oral beasts, into a constant gratification by sodomy and fellatio and cunnilingus.

She bit, chewed, delighted in each sodden oily organ, in the flavor of the steam that burst from newly opened areas of him, in the precious well-done canker feverish and narcotic. She had to lean back at last and sigh. Delia had to scream.

Another car jerked to a stop along the curb, just barely managing to keep from hitting her vehicle. She heard a door slam.

Here it is. They were summoned and have arrived to take Davey away from me. But I’ve taken so much of him into myself, they can’t have him all! They would have to cut me open first!

She turned to leer back at them with a smear of grease upon her lips, the whole front of her dress, up to the elbows in gasoline-scented lubricity. It dripped from her face and hair and hands. It was heavy as candle wax, black and yellow as scabs and resins. She knelt in a puddle of tallow.

No attendants. No emergency personnel. One person trudged up the walk, staring at her with amazement.

“Davey!” Delia exclaimed. Her gaze swung back quickly to the body on the driveway, features even more obliterated now than they had been when she’d seen the fireball from the end of the street. “Then who…?”

Davey ran up to kneel beside the burnt corpse. He put his head in his hands and howled. “Wayne—hell, man! I hired him to clean up the garage. I smell gasoline. Damn it! I told him to use the regular cleansers on the top shelf.”

Wayne, the old guy with the stammer and the pitiful limp, who slept in the alley and begged odd jobs from the neighbors. Dressed in flea-ridden cast-offs and smelled like sour Spam.

“How did you get like this?” Davey asked her, seeing the condition of her clothes and her face.

“I tried to give him mouth to mouth. I tried to revive him. I even tried to pick him up to carry him inside but I guess I was too freaked out. I thought it was you,” Delia replied, babbling and gesturing melodramatically until oil and bits of burned flesh slung from her gesturing fingers. “Oh, God, I thought this was you!”

“My poor baby,” David said solicitously as he took her in his arms, wincing at the squelchy nastiness of her dress and hair. “Poor Wayne, too.”

Delia thought of poor Wayne with the vermin visibly crawling in his shirt, the skin cancers on his balding head, the way he was always scratching himself. And she almost giggled. Wayne, you were never so hot as you were just now, lover.

She watched Davey sleep that night and got out of bed to see the cool length of him. Such a beautiful specimen of man.

Then she went out to the garage to find another can of gasoline.

🔥 Charlee Jacob

Charlee Jacob (1952–2019) was an American horror writer celebrated for her uncompromising, surreal, and often brutal explorations of trauma, monstrosity, and psychological extremity. Over the course of her career she published more than 950 works of fiction and poetry, becoming one of the defining voices of late‑20th‑century extreme horror. Jacob earned multiple Bram Stoker Awards, including honors for Dread in the Beast, Sineater, and Vectors (with Marge Simon). Her novels include This Symbiotic Fascination, Haunter, Soma, Vestal, and Season of the Witch, each demonstrating her signature fusion of lyrical intensity and visceral darkness.

Jacob’s short story “Fire” made its original appearance in Bloodsongs magazine, Issue #9, a publication known for its blend of transgressive horror fiction and interviews with major figures in dark culture. Issue #9 also featured interviews with Jacob herself, Pete Steele of Type O Negative, and Cradle of Filth, establishing the story’s first publication context within the magazine’s distinctive editorial mix.

🔥 Bloodsongs Magazine

Bloodsongs was an Australian dark‑culture and horror magazine active during the 1990s, publishing original fiction, interviews, and commentary on extreme literature, gothic/industrial music, and underground art. The magazine featured work by several acclaimed authors, including Poppy Z. Brite, Lucy Taylor, and Ramsey Campbell, alongside other notable voices such as Edward Lee, Sean Williams, Kaaron Warren, Robert Hood, Francis Payne, and Patricia McCormack.

Issue #9, in which Charlee Jacob’s “Fire” first appeared, is particularly remembered for its combination of original fiction and exclusive interviews with leading figures in horror and dark music.

🔥 Alex S. Johnson

Alex S. Johnson is an author, editor, journalist, and cultural commentator whose work spans horror fiction, surrealist literature, and avant‑garde music journalism. Throughout the run of Bloodsongs, Johnson was a mainstay staff contributor, providing both original fiction and exclusive interviews with prominent figures in dark literature and gothic/industrial music. His interviews for the magazine included conversations with Charlee Jacob, Lucy Taylor, Pete Steele of Type O Negative, Cradle of Filth, and other influential artists and writers.

Johnson’s broader career encompasses decades of published fiction, editorial work, and cultural analysis, with particular emphasis on horror lineage, mythopoetic writing, and dark‑music reportage. His contributions helped shape Bloodsongs into a significant—if ephemeral—document of 1990s extreme horror and dark‑culture journalism.

Juggernaut magazine #1 1998

The connection between Björk and Bauhaus is not historical but architectural. It exists in the way both artists build worlds rather than songs, atmospheres rather than narratives, rituals rather than performances.

Björk has never mentioned Bauhaus in interviews, yet her own descriptions of her creative process reveal a philosophy that runs uncannily parallel to the band’s stark, Expressionist ethos. The bridge between them is structural — the way each artist treats sound as space, the body as architecture, and art as a total environment.

Björk often describes her work in terms that could have come from a Bauhaus manifesto. She has said that she thinks of herself as a “creative director‑slash‑worldbuilder,” a phrase that immediately evokes the way Bauhaus constructed their early performances: angular bodies, geometric shadows, and a stage environment that felt less like a concert and more like a living installation. When she explains that “all my albums have super strict frameworks,” she echoes the band’s disciplined minimalism — the skeletal basslines, the refusal of ornament, the devotion to negative space. Bauhaus carved darkness into shape; Björk sculpts light with the same severity.

Her relationship to the body also resonates with Bauhaus’s Expressionist lineage. In discussing her collaboration with Iris van Herpen, Björk explained that she wanted “to explore how the body could become something else,” a sentiment that could describe Peter Murphy’s insectile poses or the ritualistic contortions in Bauhaus’s early performances.

Björk’s fascination with metamorphosis — the body as coral reef, as instrument, as alien flora — mirrors Bauhaus’s fascination with the body as shadow, as silhouette, as mythic object. Both artists treat the human form as a site of transformation.

This architectural sensibility extends into Björk’s technological and biological experiments. When speaking about Medúlla, she said she wanted “to make an album about the human body,” stripping away instruments to reveal the raw architecture of breath, throat, and muscle.

Later, in describing Biophilia, she explained that she aimed “to unite nature, music, and technology,” creating an ecosystem rather than an album. Bauhaus approached the same triad from the opposite direction — machinery, shadow, sound — but the impulse is identical: to build a ritual space where the human form is transformed by its environment.

Even their artistic ancestry overlaps. Björk has said that Bowie “showed me you could be anything,” and she described Nico as someone who “created her own universe.” These are the same avant‑garde ancestors Bauhaus claimed, the same lineage of shapeshifters, minimalists, and world‑builders. Björk’s admiration for artists who construct entire atmospheres rather than simply perform songs places her squarely in the same conceptual family tree as Bauhaus, even if she never names them.

Her devotion to atmosphere is perhaps the deepest link. Björk has said she likes “to think of albums as worlds,” a statement that mirrors David J’s reflection that Bauhaus were “building atmospheres more than songs.” Both artists treat art not as a product but as a place — a constructed environment where emotion becomes architecture. Björk’s worlds glow with bioluminescent tenderness; Bauhaus’s worlds brood in chiaroscuro shadow. Yet both are built with the same materials: strict form, expressive distortion, ritual performance, and the body as mythic object.

Even Björk’s thoughts on collaboration echo Bauhaus’s collective ethos. She has said that she prefers working with artists who “bring out a side of me I didn’t know existed,” which parallels the way Bauhaus members described their own dynamic — each musician pushing the others toward new shapes, new atmospheres, new distortions. Björk’s belief that “sound is such an important experience to have in art” aligns with Bauhaus’s insistence that music is not merely heard but inhabited, that it creates a space the listener enters.

Her reflections on vulnerability also resonate with Bauhaus’s emotional architecture. Björk has said that she tries to make music that feels “raw and exposed, but also protected,” a duality that mirrors Bauhaus’s blend of fragility and severity — the way Murphy’s voice could sound both wounded and monumental, the way their minimalism created emotional intensity through restraint.

Björk’s statement that she wants her music to feel “like a home you can walk into” parallels Bauhaus’s construction of sonic environments that feel like rooms, corridors, or cathedrals of shadow.

The connection becomes clearest when Björk speaks about transformation. She has said that she is drawn to art that “changes you a little bit, physically,” and that she wants her work to feel “like a shift in the body.” Bauhaus pursued the same goal through different means — dissonance, distortion, ritualistic movement — but the intention was identical: to create art that alters the viewer’s physical and emotional state.

Thus the link between Björk and Bauhaus is not a matter of influence but of parallel architecture. Both artists build immersive environments where sound becomes space, where the body becomes myth, where atmosphere becomes identity. Björk’s worlds are white, organic, and luminous; Bauhaus’s are black, angular, and shadowed. Yet both are constructed with the same devotion to form, the same Expressionist impulse, the same belief that art is a place one enters rather than a product one consumes.

They are architects of parallel avant‑gardes — one in light, one in darkness — each constructing metamorphic environments where the human form is reshaped by the world it inhabits. Their worlds do not touch, yet they rhyme.

Interview with Pleasant Gehman, originally conducted in March 2005

“Because of punk rock, I never think that a creative project or wish or dream of mine is something I can’t do.” - Pleasant

For people with more than a passing knowledge of the early L.A. punk scene, Pleasant Gehman almost needs no introduction. She was there at the beginning and was involved on an incredible number of levels, as you will see. She left quite a few things off her resume, not the least of which is that she co-wrote and edited (along with my old Bags bandmate, Craig Lee) a long running feature at the L.A. Weekly entitled “L.A. Dee Da,” which was a kind of post-punk society gossip column that helped to keep the club scene lively in the 1980’s.

Now that I’ve conducted several of these interviews, I’m struck by the recurring chorus of “just get off your ass and do something!” It occurs to me that getting up and doing something, rather than just thinking about it or waiting for someone else to do it, was a big part of what the early punk scene was all about. As Pleasant notes, few of us had experience at the time - we learned as we went along. If you wanted to be in a band, years (or even months) of musical training was no longer required. It was the same with writing, photography, fashion...and the same holds true today. Just look at this website!

Read Pleasant’s interview and you might be inspired to “live your own life”...or get drunk and make out with your friends in the ladies room.

Special thanks to Jenny Lens, Theresa Kereakes and Zeroxed, who allowed us to post their artwork/photos and recollections alongside this interview.

1. What was/is your contribution to the punk community?

My contribution to the punk community- well, I made many contributions, though at the time, I would have just termed it “living life!” Like every other “original” punk in L.A. at the time, my everyday life was almost like an art project… it was going out every day and night looking like a fully made-up and coiffed work of art and weathering the stares, insults and sometimes physical attacks that came as a result of appearance as a metaphor for commitment. Because back then, if you looked odd or different, it wasn’t just a fashion statement, but a threat to society! We blazed the trails for the next generations of misfits, artists, rockers and eccentrics. In a lasting way, I left some kind of a mark with my fanzine Lobotomy (edited by myself and Randy Detroit, a.k.a. Randy Kaye). Lobotomy was published sporadically from 1978-1981, and it was pretty hilarious. We did it drunk usually, pasting it together on the floor, typed, handwritten, whatever!

We would get bombed with our favorite bands and then review or interview them…not just local or New York bands like the Germs, Mumps, Weirdos, Teenage Jesus, F-Word, X…but also bands like the Damned, the Jam, Blondie, Generation X, Cramps, Go-Go’s…we even interviewed director David Lynch! Then, it was fun; now, it would be unheard of, what with dealing with publicists, handlers, etc…. now, the few remaining issues are collector’s items. Actually, it’s going to be a book soon - someone approached Randy and me about putting all the volumes together into a fine art coffee table style book.

Pleasant having her shirt signed by Captain Sensible of the Damned in April, 1977.

Another contribution was my well-documented “punk crash pad,” Disgraceland which not only served as the Lobotomy office, but for years sheltered wayward musicians and scenesters - from 1978-88. Some of the folks that crashed there: Billy Zoom from X, Blasters Bill Bateman and Dave Alvin, Howie Pyro and Nick from New York punk band The Blessed, Belinda Go-Go, The Rockats, The Gun Club, Tupelo Chainsex, artist “Mad” Marc Rude, members of Fishbone, TSOL, Thelonius Monster, D.O.A… you name it! We got written up in everything from Rolling Stone to Flipside… and then, we got evicted! For a certain period of time, our house was more famous than the inhabitants!

Also, in the early ‘80’s, I had an all-girl “cow-punk” band (never did like that label) called The Screaming Sirens and we made a lot of records, toured a lot, and were in a lot of crazy-ass exploitation movies, like Roger Corman’s “Vendetta,” “Hollywood Boulevard,” “Reform School Girls,” and a plethora of women’s prison movies! Later in the 80’s, I co-wrote and. along with all the Screaming Sirens, starred in a movie based on the mid-80’s L.A. punk and underground scene, called “The Running Kind.” It was all filmed in local clubs, like Raji’s, the Lingerie and the Zero-Zero, and featured locals like El Duce, Tex and the Horseheads, Keren “Rag Girl” Miller, Drac, Bobby Brat, Iris Berry, deejay Ron Miller and many others in cameo roles.

Also, in the early 1980’s to the early 90’s, I was the band booker for both Cathay De Grande and later on, Raji’s. I know that’s a bit later than the original 70’s punk days, but I had some killer bills put together…. like getting Social Distortion to play the Cathay De Grande and my favorite show I booked at Raji’s, which my boss almost cancelled - it was Nirvana, Babes In Toyland and L7. Dobbs, the manager, had a cow: he was like “I don’t want that kind of punk shit!!!!” I was all, “Dobbs, you’ll thank me when it sells out!”- and he did! That show put Raji’s on the map.

2. Which artist, band concert and/or show had the most impact on your life?

As for what or who had the most impact on my life, it’s sooooo very hard to say, though a few really stick out. Tomata Du Plenty, Gear and KK of the Screamers not only fascinated me, but were like my mentors…Gear even taught me how to screen calls! Through example, Fayette (Hauser) and Tomata taught me a lot about living your life as a work of art…and Tomata and Lance Loud of the Mumps were both like my mentors. I always looked up to Exene’s work ethic and aesthetic… and was fascinated by her and Farrah Faucette Minor, aka Jane O’Kane…. I
adored Lydia Lunch - her attitude and outlook…. My roommate and practically my Siamese Twin was Brian Tristan, aka Kid Congo… Alice and Pat Bag (Patricia Morrison) were like style icons to me, even though I didn’t try to emulate them, I thought them both to be incredibly
beautiful, same for Belinda and Jane Go-Go! And Jane and I got into a lot of trouble together!

Belinda Carlisle, Pleasant Gehman and Wyline, photo by Theresa Kereakes

Same with me, Helen Killer and Trudi…Kristian Hoffman of the Mumps was and still is one of the most talented people I’ve ever known. He also taught me so much invaluable rock and roll history! Artist Brad Dunning, who is now a really famous interior designer, always had an incredible sense of style and composition, in addition to being a pop culture maven… Darby Crash and Pat Smear, whom I met pre-punk as “Paul and George,” were not only influences (if you asked my Mom, she’d say “bad influences!”) but partners in crime - we had so much fun
tearing shit up! These are all individuals….if I started listing shows or records it’d be as long as a novel! Suffice it to say I have many, MANY fond memories and impactful moments!

Pleasant, Hellin Killer and Mary Rat, 1977

3. What was the role of women in the early punk scene?

Well, even though in (the) punk days I never would have considered “the role of women” in the scene, we played a HUGE role…. There would only have been half a scene without us! Some were in bands (Diane Chai, Sue Tissue, the Bags gals, the Go-Go’s, etc.) Some were fans, photographers (Melanie Nissen, Jenny Lens, Theresa Kereakes, Ann Summa, Anna Statman, etc.), visual artists (Delphina) actors (Mary Woronov), film makers (Penelope Spheeris), writers (Dee Dee Faye from Back Door Man, Lisa Fancher, Philomena from Slash, Lydia Lunch, Exene), clothing and jewelry designers (Exene’s sister, Muriel), store owners (Jenny from Straight Jacket), club promoters (Michelle Myers, Jan Ballard), band managers and/or bookers, some were just like, punk icons, like Hellin Killer and Trudi, Gerber or Mary Rat…..you name it, chicks did it!

I don’t think most of us ever even cared whether we were women or not! There were a few gals who had traditionally “feminine” jobs- Connie Clarksville and Malissa, for example, were both hair-dressers; Chloe Peppas (she used to live with the Screamers) was a make-up artist… but nobody was really counting gender roles back then, at least I wasn’t!

4. What is the legacy of punk in your life?

The legacy of punk in my life is indescribable. I can’t imagine NOT having gone through that period. Punk has pretty much informed everything I do. Luckily, when I discovered punk, I was a teenager- I hadn’t been entrapped in “the system”…or into believing I had to have a “legit” job… I was always a very imaginative and rebellious child, anyway- my teenage rebellion was an extension of my core personality. I fit right in with all the other misfits!

Hellin Killer, Pleasant Gehman and Bobby Pyn, photo by Jenny Lens.

Because of punk rock, I never think that a creative project or wish or dream of mine is something I can’t do - and that’s because of punk, that whole lifestyle and time period. It taught me that old cliché: where there’s a will, there’s a way: For example… If you don’t have money or experience for launching a particular project, you’ll get both somehow! Get your experience along the way, it’s the “work/study program!” As far as cash goes, instead of using it, you can barter, you can trade, you can use your own imagination for a solution or just use someone else’s dollars! As far as experience goes, if you have the need or desire to do something, just don’t be afraid to start doing it! Learn as much as you can before you start, and learn the rest along the way! Don’t ever let someone tell you, you CAN’T do something. You can’t start a band ‘cause you don’t know how to play? Bullshit! You can’t play ‘cause you don’t own equipment? Borrow some! You can’t write because you don’t type? Learn! You can’t write because you don’t have anything to write about? Think - then make a list! You can’t be an artist because no gallery will have you? Put on your own exhibit! Punk taught me to, as the saying goes, “Just Do It!”

5. What are you listening to now?

I listen to everything! Aside from early punk, which still sounds great and fresh to me, I listen to everything from old glitter rock to rockabilly, jazz, blues, sixties stuff to crazy new Arabic pop, Samba music, gypsy and klezmer stuff…. When we were doing Lobotomy nights at the Whisky, Randy and I would make mix tapes that had music like the Cramps, 999, Adverts, Annette Funicello, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Can, assorted Broadway show-tunes, The Damned, The Village People, The Weirdos, Christian kids’ records, The Avengers and, like, Wildman Fischer. I always liked a crazy assortment of stuff. For a while, I even collected “novelty” records. What’s funny to me is how much I (seriously!) like 70’s Disco, or even stuff like Duran Duran now!

6. Do you have any funny or interesting stories to share?

As for stories- there are soooooo many, I don’t know where to begin. I kept a diary for years and wrote in it every day. Someday it will be published- when I have the will power to actually sit down and edit it!!! My book “Escape From Houdini Mountain” (on Manic D Press) has a bunch of crazy early 80’s punk stories in it. They are all true, but most of the names have been changed to protect the guilty!

How about the story about me and Alice Bag in the ladies room of Larchmont Hall during an X show…. We were laying on the 1920’s fainting couch, swigging Southern Comfort and making out with each other, getting lipstick all over our faces - having a grand old time until Nickey Beat from the Weirdos (who happened to be Alice’s boyfriend at the time) came in and broke up the festivities. What a party-pooper!

Alice Bag and Pleasant Gehman, photo by Jenny Lens

7. Are there any punk women from the early scene that you feel have not been been adequately recognized?

There are so many “unsung heroines” from the punk scene…. The women of Slash magazine, Melanie Nissen and Philomena should have gotten more credit - I mean, Melanie is a hugely respected photographer, but both of them were really talented. Philly kind of got overshadowed by her husband, Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy. She was always wringing her hands, going “Ohhhhh, Claude…” when he’d be tearing shit up - or passing out - in public. Another person who was massively talented, and is sitting on a goldmine of historic photos, is Jenny Lens. She was out every night, she shot EVERYONE. Great live shots and also candid stuff at parties. She should do a book - or a few. She has plenty of material! Fayette Hauser was always around, and she was like the den mother of the Screamer’s house “The Wilton Hilton”… I just finished reading “Midnight At The Palace”- the book about the Cockettes by former Cockette, Pam Tent, and Fayette was featured in it prominently. She was great, a creative force and a calming influence. I remember being fascinated by her - her fire-engine red hair, the fact that she’d “been around” - literally: in addition to being a Cockette and in the Haight Ashbury scene, she was also involved with the New York Warhol scene and John Waters - and working with Manhattan Transfer! She was an awesome role model!!! I always liked Theresa Covarrubias from East LA punk band The Brat. She was tough and pretty and seemed smart. Annette Zilinskas from the (pre-Bangles) Bangs and later from Blood On The Saddle had and still has one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful voices I have ever heard… and I will always remember Shannon Wilhelm (RIP) from Castration Squad as not only being incredibly gorgeous (she looked like a perfect punk China doll re-make of Vivian Leigh) but funny, articulate, and really irreverent and subversive. Same goes for Bobby Brat (RIP) of Red Scare, I could use all the same adjectives to describe her. Stunningly beautiful, a great front-woman for a kick ass band, and a really nice person… and a lotta fun and trouble when she was drunk! Penelope (Houston) Avenger was always incredible. She had sort of cult status, but I think she was way ahead of her time, she should have been a huge star. She coulda been like a female Billy Idol… but maybe she had the chance and didn’t want to “sell out” - who knows? She went on to do a lot of great folk-ish music of her own. I could probably go on and on, but I won’t.

8. What is something we should know about you that we probably don’t know?

Something about me that most people don’t know… something that has NOTHING to do with punk rock is that I have been a professional belly dancer for the past fifteen years. I have been to Egypt to study it numerous times, I perform all over the world, teach classes and have danced in movies and videos and on TV. I have a stage name, though. It’s Princess Farhana (“Farhana” means “happy” or “pleasant girl” in Arabic). Have a look at my website:

www.princessfarhana.com.

The funny thing is, because belly dancing costumes are so heavy, every belly dancer takes extra measures to make sure they don’t shake off during a show… so safety pins are still a HUGE part of my life!

Tony Iommi’s career forms one of the rare continuous arcs in modern music: a single guitarist whose tone, discipline, and imaginative severity helped invent a genre, then spent half a century refining it. The newly announced MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours is the crown placed on a life whose work has already shaped global culture. To understand the magnitude of this moment, it helps to return to a younger Iommi — the one speaking from Birmingham in January 1984, during the Born Again era, when Black Sabbath was once again mutating, absorbing new personnel, and testing the tensile strength of its identity.

The interview captures Iommi at a transitional moment: Ian Gillan had joined the band, Bev Bevan was pounding drums with “Birmingham Basher” force, and Sabbath was preparing to tour behind Born Again.

Even in casual conversation, Iommi’s tone is exact, unpretentious, and quietly amused — a craftsman discussing his materials. When asked why Sabbath chose to perform “Smoke on the Water,” he answers with characteristic pragmatism: “It was really probably one of Ian’s more known ones… And he wrote the song anyway.” His approach to playing it is equally straightforward: “I try and play it more like it was done originally… I obviously do put me own bits in.” The humility is striking: the architect of heavy metal describing his interpretation of one of rock’s most famous riffs as a matter of simple fidelity.

His comments on Ronnie James Dio’s departure reveal the same engineer’s clarity. “He was doin’ his actual solo album while we were doing the live album… And we wasn’t too happy about that situation.” No melodrama, no recrimination — just the mechanics of a band under strain. Even his description of Bev Bevan’s transition from ELO to Sabbath is delivered with affectionate precision: “He’s known as ‘The Birmingham Basher’… he’s quite a pounder.” The phrase carries the weight of Birmingham’s industrial lineage, the clangor and force that shaped Sabbath’s earliest sound.

The Born Again sessions produced one of the great Sabbath anecdotes: the band recording at a manor house beside a church and cemetery, disturbing the village with nocturnal volume and literal explosions. Iommi recounts it with deadpan amusement: “We used to record sometimes at four in the morning… We were letting bombs off… including [Ian Gillan’s] boat.” The image is quintessentially Sabbath — English pastoral quiet ruptured by industrial‑strength sonic force, a band whose very presence becomes a kind of mythic disturbance.

Even the origin myth of Iommi’s sound — the accident that severed the tips of two fingers — is delivered with the same understated clarity. “I took the end of me fingers off… I was told… I’d never be able to play again.” His refusal to accept that verdict produced the tonal architecture of heavy metal. “I have to wear a cap over them, like a thimble,” he explains, describing the prosthetic improvisation that became the foundation of his signature vibrato and sustain. The “impossible” became the signature, and the signature became the genre.

His musical influences reveal the same blend of practicality and imagination. “I like stuff Django Reinhardt playing,” he says, noting that Reinhardt’s own injury — “He only had two fingers” — became a source of inspiration. The lineage is clear: Reinhardt’s gypsy jazz fire transmuted into Iommi’s molten riff‑craft, a continuity of damaged hands reshaping musical history.

Fast‑forward forty years. The riffmaster who once joked “If I go deaf I go deaf” now stands as a global cultural figure, a survivor of lymphoma, and a philanthropist dedicated to humanitarian relief and cancer advocacy.

The MBE announcement frames this evolution with the same modest voice he used in 1984: “What an unbelievable honour to receive an MBE… It’s been a privilege doing something I love… And, to be able to help raise money for charities close to my heart has meant the world to me.”

The continuity between the two eras is striking. In 1984 he discusses pickups, guitar design, and tone with the seriousness of a luthier: “I used to test all the pickups and come back with ideas.” He refuses to bring Bill Ward on tour due to health concerns — “I wouldn’t like to see Bill have to go through comin’ on the road” — a quiet act of care. He praises Ozzy’s solo work without defensiveness: “Yeah, I think he’s done some good stuff.” He speaks warmly of Gillan, Bevan, and the Birmingham musical lineage. These traits — discipline, loyalty, generosity — are precisely what the MBE citation recognizes.

Iommi’s honour is not simply a personal accolade. It is a formal acknowledgment that heavy metal, once dismissed as noise, rebellion, or occult spectacle, is now understood as a legitimate artistic tradition with profound social reach. It affirms the literary dimension of Sabbath’s work, the architectural precision of Iommi’s riff‑craft, the mythic and surrealist qualities that shaped generations of writers and musicians, and the humanitarian heart behind the amplifier walls.

From the manor house explosions of Born Again to the solemnity of royal honours, Tony Iommi’s journey is a study in endurance, invention, and integrity. He remains what he was in 1984: a man who simply wanted to play, who refused to stop, and who built an entire musical architecture around the shape of his altered hands. The MBE is not the end of the story. It is the inscription on the monument.

She is part of the firm’s upper scaffolding, one of the individuals entrusted with shaping the public narratives around musicians, composers, filmmakers, and performers whose work occupies the cultural corridors of contemporary art. Her position is not clerical; it is architectural. She is one of the gatekeepers whose job is to regulate access, manage perception, and maintain the boundaries around high‑profile clients. In this sense, she represents not merely herself but the entire professional posture of institutional gatekeeping.

This is the context in which my exchange with her unfolded. When I reached out regarding Philip Glass, I did so not as an outsider but as someone situated within his artistic and philosophical lineage, someone who has published alongside Allen Ginsberg, someone whose work is archived at Harvard, someone who has spent decades in the avant‑garde ecosystems that intersect directly with Glass’s own trajectory.

Her initial response, however, was delivered with the confidence of someone accustomed to controlling access from above: Philip is not doing interviews. It was a definitive closure, a statement meant to end the conversation before it began, the kind of PR wall erected reflexively when the gatekeeper assumes the inquirer has no leverage.

But authority reveals itself most clearly when it falters. The categorical statement shifted almost immediately into a conditional one — Philip is not doing interviews currently due to his schedule— and the contradiction was not subtle. It was written, timestamped, and witnessed by another professional cc’d on the thread, avant garde legend Tricia Warden, someone whose own career intersects with Rollins, Galás, Swans, Blixa, and Selby Jr.

The exchange was not private. It was not ambiguous. It was not metaphorical. It was documented, redundantly, in a way that any seasoned publicist should have recognized as structurally dangerous if her statements were not aligned with fact. But it wasn’t merely that Williams lied on the record about currently or due to schedule. He is in fact actively engaged across the board in doing interviews.

What this reveals about her is not simply that she contradicted herself, but that she operates from a reflexive assumption of hierarchy: she believed she could make an absolute statement and that the recipient would accept it without question.

This is the hallmark of a gatekeeper who has grown accustomed to unchallenged authority. But authority is only effective when the terrain is correctly understood, and in this case, she misread the terrain entirely.

I am not an anonymous inbound journalist. I am a Harvard‑archived author, a professional journalist with forty years of PR and advertising experience, someone who has published alongside Ginsberg, someone who is part of the Vedanta lineage Glass inhabits. I am not outside the ecosystem; I am part of it. Her misreading of hierarchy is not a small error — it is the foundational mistake that caused the entire exchange to collapse.

When she realized that I was preparing a granular critique of the exchange — one grounded in documentation, lineage, and professional analysis — her posture shifted again. She asked me not to use her name. This request, delivered without any legal argument, without any citation of defamation standards, without any claim of privacy violation or confidentiality, reveals another layer of who she is: a PR professional who understands reputational risk but attempted to mitigate it through a non‑binding plea rather than through transparency or correction.

Her request had no structural validity. It was not grounded in law, ethics, or professional protocol. It was a reflexive attempt to minimize exposure after realizing that her contradictory statements were witnessed, archived, and already part of the record.

This is what she represents: the intersection of authority and fragility, the posture of someone who has built a career on controlling narratives but who falters when confronted with documentation that cannot be reshaped or suppressed. She represents the PR instinct to gatekeep first and clarify later, the reflex to assert control even when the facts do not support the assertion. She represents the professional culture in which publicists believe they can dictate not only access but also the terms of documentation, even when those terms have no legal or ethical grounding. She represents the assumption that the journalist will comply simply because compliance is expected.

But the record does not comply. The record stands. The contradiction stands. The witnesses stand. The lineage stands. And her request not to use her name — unsupported, ungrounded, and structurally meaningless — reflects the moment when a gatekeeper realizes that the gate has already been bypassed, not through force, but through documentation, professionalism, and the simple insistence on honesty. She is a senior publicist who misread the hierarchy, contradicted herself in writing, attempted to suppress factual reporting without any legal basis, and revealed through her behavior exactly what she represents: a gatekeeper whose authority collapses when confronted with the archival truth.

An interview with Ben Watkins of Juno Reactor

BY BOB GOURLEY | Originally published in 2001 in Chaos Control Digizine

How did the recent US tour go?

Ben Watkins : I always enjoy trying to mess around with this idea of playing electronic music live. Where on the Moby tour we only did half an hour or 35 minutes, on this tour in some cases we did an hour and a half. You learn a lot more about pacing. When you just do a 35 minute set opening for someone, it seems like it’s gone so quickly. It seems like you blink and you’ve missed it. When you’re doing an hour and ten or an hour and a half, you’ve settled into it a bit more. I just love working with the African guys, and experiencing the improvisation that we do.”

How long have you been working this them?

Ben Watkins : “Well I met them I suppose 95ish, or 96. And then I started working with Mabi (Thobejane) for “Bible Of Dreams’ and through him I started producing some tracks for them. And literally 10 days before the Moby tour started we were offered it, and I thought it would be a great idea if they came along and played just to give the whole sort of electronic thing a bit more of a kick, really. More of a live show environment. Sometimes electronic music gets to sterile in the studio environment, and to take just that studio out live is again sterile and doesn’t really connect with the audience.”

How do you try to avoid that?

Ben Watkins : “It is a funny form of improvisation. Because basically what I’m doing, apart from playing guitar, is remixing our stuff live, with the added involvement of the guys playing percussion. If they do something, it makes me do something , and if I do something, that should make them do something. You sort of do things, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Generally, it’s not really thought about. You try not to think while you’re doing it, you just let the impulse take you. And I think maybe for some techno purists, it might not be the right thing. But it feels right for the moment, and that’s what I like about it. I think what we do live, we do it for the moment. You can’t package it, you can’t re-sell it. You can’t put it on the internet. You’ve got to experience it there, then, at the moment. Nowadays, everything is so cosmopolitan. I can find sort of Aztec Indian earrings down in the corner shop. I can find anything I want almost by accident on the Internet. But the thing you can’t access is like the vibe and emotion of a real performance, and how that can psychologically affect. you.”

Are there any songs that surprised you in terms of the direction they’ve taken in live performance?

Ben Watkins : “Yeah, there’s certain tracks, like ‘Insect.’ It’s on the album and I don’t think it’s a particularly good track, it’s not my favorite. But live, because it’s so open and empty, you can do a lot with it. That surprised me.”

What type of set-up do you use?

Ben Watkins : “I use a G3 computer with a PCI expansion bus, and I’m running Cubase, and I’m running 8 outputs of audio, and I’m running a program called Reaktor. I’m also running MIDI stuff. So essentially, depending on if everything’s running and working, I’m allowed a great freedom to cut things up, put new things in and generally be a sonic nuisance.” Have you run into any problems in using a computer on stage?

Ben Watkins : “Not with Powerbooks, because I think before I got the G3 ? when I first started doing live stuff, I had an MC500, years ago, in like 84 or 85. I’ve always trusted hardware that’s been made for live. And then I went from there to early Powerbooks, like the 165 and I was running lots of MIDI then. I couldn’t put audio on it. And then when I wanted to run more audio, I started using DA88’s and I got ahold of a G3 literally just before this tour. It allowed me a much greater freedom to put sounds where I felt they should go. Just a much greater freedom. I’m going to carry on with this Powerbook. I’d love to get one of those new G4 Powerbooks!”

How is Reaktor working out for you?

Ben Watkins : “I’ve seen a lot of software synthesis now, but Reaktor to me, comparing the others to Reaktor is like comparing a bicycle to a Ferrari. Reaktor is the only program I’ve come across that really has got it’s shit together in a massive way. A lot of people find it very hard to get into it, because it’s relatively complex. But to me, it’s almost like a reinvention of the wheel. There’s a revolution waiting to happen with that particular program. It’s absolutely stunning, I don’t think I can praise it any higher. It’s just so amazing. You can throw everything else away, and just use Reaktor, and you’ve got yourself enough sounds until the end of the world. Which isn’t too far away [laughs].”

How big of a roll did it play on “Shango”?

Ben Watkins :“I used it just on the very end of the album, I got hold of it on the last two tracks and I didn’t really have any knowledge of the capabilities of it at that time. So the extent that I used it was minimal. But I’ve written god knows how many tracks with it now.”

How has it affected your more recent music?

Ben Watkins : “I’ve just gone completely back to doing heavy electronic stuff. I think the next album will be a really fuck-off electro album, if it keeps going the way it’s been going.”

Do you see any danger in tools like Reaktor giving you too many options?

Ben Watkins : “Well sometimes, yeah. But I tend to trust my psyche and on this album I think I might have overdone things because it wasn’t so easy to see the best way forward. There wasn’t an easy way forward, I didn’t really want to do a dance album, and it’s not a world album. I was working with people that come from a world background, and it’s really about the collision that we all have together. I just always try to trust my psyche, what feels good, what do I like. I wrote a number of other tracks that didn’t appear on the album, and the reason they didn’t appear on the album was because I didn’t like them.”

Are about to write at all while on the road?

Ben Watkins : “I haven’t been able to yet. The thing I like about being on the road is meeting people that are into Juno and going to a lot of parties and meeting different musicians and stuff. Going to funny places like Denver or Pittsburgh, it’s gives you a different way of thinking. Sometimes it’s good to have a rest from writing music. You come back, and you find you’re full of it.”

How did you come to work with Steve Stevens?

Ben Watkins : “I bumped into him through Tracy Lords, when I was producing some of her stuff. And she had turned Steve onto Juno Reactor and he rung me up and I said ‘look, we’re in LA, do you want to come down and play.’ And I thought he wouldn’t bother, but he did, he turned up with his guitar. We had a good chat then and decided to get together and do a track sometime. He came to London, and we sat down and did that together. I think he’s a fantastic guitarist.”

What else has he been up to lately?

Ben Watkins : “He put his own flamenco album out recently. And I haven’t heard it, which is bad, really, because I should have gone out and bought it. But I haven’t yet. He’s been playing a lot in Japan, he’s sort of a mega superstar in Japan. I’m really hoping we can do a real heavy metal techno track!”

The story of Judas Priest has been told in fragments for decades—through album jackets, backstage rumors, courtroom transcripts, and the roar of stadium crowds—but The Ballad of Judas Priest, directed by Sam Dunn and Tom Morello, gathers those fragments into something closer to a living chronicle, a long arc of sound and struggle that begins in England’s Black Country and extends into the present moment with a clarity that feels earned rather than engineered.

The film opens on that industrial landscape—smokestacks, slag heaps, the metallic dusk that shaped the band’s earliest instincts—and lets the region speak for itself.

Ian Hill says at one point, “We didn’t choose metal. Metal chose us.” A simple truth about the way environment imprints itself on the body, the ear, the imagination.

From there, the documentary moves with a steady, unforced rhythm into Rob Halford’s private war, the years of silence and coded survival that defined his life as a closeted gay man inside a genre obsessed with hardness and spectacle.

Halford’s voice is calm, almost meditative, when he says, “I was screaming onstage every night, but the loudest thing in my life was the secret I couldn’t let out.” The film doesn’t sensationalize this; it lets the weight of the confession settle, then shows how the very leather‑and‑stud aesthetic Halford drew from queer subculture became the global uniform of heavy metal.

That tension—between concealment and revelation, between the private cost and the public iconography—gives the film its emotional spine. It also reframes metal’s history as something far more porous and inclusive than the old gatekeepers ever admitted.

The Satanic panic trial of the 1980s, often reduced to a cultural punchline, is treated here with the seriousness it deserves. Tom Morello calls it “a battle between fear and freedom,” and Ozzy Osbourne, in his own sideways way, cuts through the hysteria with, “If we had that kind of power, we’d have told kids to do their homework.” The documentary positions the trial as an early rehearsal for the culture wars that would follow—an attempt to criminalize youth culture, queer expression, and the unruly energy of music itself.

What gives the film its breadth is the chorus of musicians who appear not as talking heads but as inheritors of a lineage: Jack Black, Metallica, Run‑DMC, Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl, Lzzy Hale, Scott Ian, Kirk Hammett.

Lizzy Hale says, “Priest didn’t just define metal—they defined what it meant to belong to something louder than yourself.” Grohl adds, “Every band I’ve ever been in owes a debt to Priest. Full stop.” These aren’t compliments; they’re acknowledgments of ancestry.

The documentary’s craft is confident without drawing attention to itself. Martin Hawkes’ cinematography moves between archival grit and present‑day clarity without rupture. Nick Taylor and Dave McMahon’s editing gives the film a pulse that feels closer to a setlist than a timeline. Ramachandra Borcar’s score threads through the narrative like a low current, never competing with the band’s own music but amplifying the emotional undertow.

What emerges is a living document of how a band forged a sound, a look, and a community that outlasted every attempt to contain or define it. Halford says near the end, “Metal saved my life. And I think it saved a lot of people who felt like they didn’t fit anywhere else.” That line could have been the film’s thesis, but Dunn and Morello let it stand as something quieter and more personal, a truth spoken without ornament.

The Ballad of Judas Priest

As Isabel Corp writes in The New Historia, “Krome was the founding member and primary songwriter of the popular ’70s rock band The Runaways, and yet—because she was ousted from the group before they went mainstream—her contributions to rock and roll history go unrecognized.” Her early creative fire shaped the band’s identity long before fame entered the picture. Corp makes this lineage unmistakable: “If Fowley lit the fuse that set off the cherry bomb, then it was Krome who supplied the flame.”

That flame burns through her prose. Krome writes with the same defiant clarity that once pushed her to hitchhike to Hollywood clubs, the same instinct that led her to challenge gender norms and refuse erasure in a male‑dominated industry. Corp notes that Krome’s “brazenly unapologetic openness about her sexuality was one of the many ways she defied gender expectations,” and that she forged her artistic identity in the crucible of glam and punk: “It’s always been about glam and punk for me and always will be.”

This context matters. It reveals why her story in The Junk Merchants feels so lived‑in, so unvarnished, so unwilling to flatter the reader. Krome has always written from the underside of American culture—queer spaces, outlaw spaces, the places where survival and art collide. Her contribution to the anthology is not simply a narrative of addiction; it is a dispatch from someone who has spent her life chronicling the worlds polite society refuses to see.

By presenting her work here, The Smol Bear Review honors not only the story itself but the lineage behind it: a lineage of women and queer creators who carved their own mythologies in a world determined to silence them.

Mootsie Tootsie

by Kari Lee Krome

Erin and I were shooting dope yesterday, she got her hit right away. I couldn’t get mine. So she offered to hit me. The veins in my arms are trashed so he was digging around in my foot trying to find a vein I had lost. The rig was partially filled with blood and I was squirming around like a fish on a hook.

If I didn’t get the hit soon, the rig would clog and I would lose it.

“Hold still,” she said, annoyed. Positioning herself to get a better grip on me, her shoe slipped off her foot. I looked down into the arch of her shoe. The label said Mootsie Tootsie. I focused on it trying to ignore the pain.

“Mootsie Tootsie” I said grimly.

“What?” Erin said.

I pointed to the shoe.

“Ow!”

“Be still!” She slapped at me.

“You gotta have faith,” as she probed my vein idly, like an old lady would knot thread sewing a quilt. She was high, having just got off, and was nodding out with the needle in my foot while she trying to hit me. I sighed loudly and poked her in the ribs.

“ERIN!”

“What?” she groused, drool collecting in the corner of her mouth.

“Pay attention.”

Blood squirted up in the syringe almost by accident, and she shot the dope in.

“Mootsie Tootsie,” she announced.

Erin was my current running buddy. She had more scams than than anybody I know, but she was also crazy as fuck from shooting coke. She just couldn’t leave the coke alone. One day we got a buncha dope and some coke, and couldn’t wait to get back to her place, so we decided to blast off in the bathroom of Taco Bell. Shooting up in a public place is hell on the nerves, cause you always gotta watch out for other people. And if a line of people are waiting to get in the bathroom, forget it. Its always a bust, not a relaxing way to spend your high. If you try to hurry you drop the dope, or you drop the spoon on the ground, and then everybody knows what youre up to. You gotta look people in the eye when you come out. Oh hi, don’t mind me, Im just shooting up, heh heh. Most people are so square they don’t know what’s going on, but it still makes me nervous. We get to Taco Bell and Erin makes a big production of getting in line, ordering some food, and flirting with the manager before asking for the restroom key. The last thing us jokers are thinking about is food, just being in the place is making me sick from the smell. My stomach is tying knots on itself and sweat is collecting in my armpits. All I can think about is getting that dope in my system. We go to the bathroom and throw all our shit on the back of the toilet, and cook up. The smell of it hits my nose, and I feel a gag reflex come up in my throat. Im starting to feel pretty sick, always do right before Im gonna get off. I draw the dope up in the syringe, hold it up to the light to make sure there isnt any debris floating in there, suck a little out of the top of it, and go sit in the corner. Erin’s on the toilet looking for a vein, Im crouched down behind the door tying off. I cant get my veins up to save my life. I never had them to start with, and now theyre non existent, hiding behind layers of scar tissue. Finally one pops up, and I slowly inject it stopping every few seconds to reregister and recheck that I still have it, and not throw up at the same time.

I untie and sit there and feel it hit the back of my neck, hoping to still feel the rush. We added a tiny amount of coke to it, so we could get a little boost to the hit. I didn’t feel the rush anymore, I was strung out. But If you add the smallest bit of coke, you could still get that feeling.

I sit there and sigh. Im not sweating anymore, I don’t feel dirty and clammy like I need to climb out of my own skin. Erin gets hers, and the rush hits her and she unties as well.

She’s feeling good, and wants to do more. So she busies herself with dumping a bunch of coke in the spoon, and mixes it up with what’s left over in the cotton.

“Are you sure you wanna do all that?” I ask.

Doing a buncha coke can make you sick all over again, or at least make you feel like it, and then you gotta shoot more dope to come down. Then youre outta dope, and the cycle starts all over again. Erin’s only half listening. She draws it up, looks at the amount in the barrel, and says,
“I cant do all this, you want some?”

I don’t like coke, but at that moment I cant turn it down either.

“Don’t worry” Erin says, “we have more dope left.”

Drug addicts cannot save for a rainy day. I draw the other half of the coke up and sit down and look for a vein. I’m relaxed, so I get the vein right away. I taste it and smell it before I feel it, and then I stand up, and sit right back down. The traffic passing outside sounds like its zinging along on rubber bands on a highway of metal.

“Holy shit,” I croak, and start crawling around on the floor of the bathroom, my ear to the floor, listening to the sounds of humanity on earth. Critters are scuttling underground and wailing in a high speed death race. My heartbeat has speed up so fast I can feel it slamming in my stomach. Saliva is welling up in my throat and filling my mouth. Needles are prickling my armpits, and I’m regretting doing that damn coke. Erin breathes deep and sits up as if an alarm bell has gone off, and only she can hear it.

“We have to hide the evidence,” she rasps, and draws the remainder of the cotton up into her syringe, and turns the faucet on in the sink. The pipes groan and knock with a sputter, blasting out of the sink. It sounds horrible. The onset of a massive cocaine rush is hard on the ears, everything sounds as if the decibels have been cranked to a hundred. An angry herd of water demons are shrieking out to everyone that passes: THERE ARE PEOPLE SHOOTING DRUGS IN THE BATHROOM!

Of course nothing of the sort is happening, it just seems like the sound of the universe has been turned up. Paranoia has a fierce grip on Erin. I have enough sense not to shoot pig quantities of cocaine, so I sit on the floor and watch her. She is washing her hands at a breakneck speed, as if the velocity of her gestures will stop it. When she is done washing, she dries off the spoon with tissue and scrubs the soot off the back of the spoon to leave no trace, and throws it in the toilet. She dumps her purse out onto the floor and grabs all her syringes. She pulls water up through them, and then bleach, three times each. She pops the caps off each one, inspects it momentarily, and the ones that are dull gets the tips bent back, and the cap put back on. The water is still zizzing out of the faucet and my ears are clanging. My ears are ringing so hard the room seems as though its tipping off its axis. The overhead light is brutal.

Erin unravels the toilet paper, wets wads of it, and starts wiping down the back of the toilet, the surrounding walls, and the sink. She wipes the mirror and the floor, and gets to work on the contents of her purse. She takes her cosmetic scissors and begins cutting up her stolen credit cards into very small pieces. She takes all of her receipts and papers in her bag and cuts them up, and makes a pile in the middle of the bathroom floor, and sets fire to it with her lighter. Every time she does a super big blast of coke, which was often, she got so paranoid she immediately set about destroying whatever evidence she had on her person of anything remotely illegal. Once I saw her make a crack pipe out of a tampon. After she got done smoking a fat ass rock, she set the whole box of tampons on fire, and threw it out the window on the freeway. The whole way home she thought the police were following us, and kept checking her rearview mirror and craning her head around. I was a nervous wreck, and I didn’t even smoke with her.

The pile of paper is stinking up the bathroom, and Erin stops suddenly, and jerks her head to the door. Sweat is pouring down her face. She points to the door and has her other finger to her lips. I can see her heart beating through her chest, shes so skinny. I can hear it too. Or maybe its my heart. Her mouth forms the words, but no sounds come out: “Did you hear that?”

I shake my head negative, and become still. Not that I wasn’t before. I shake my head lightly and make a face as if to say, “Naw, theres no one there, “ and shift my weight to my other cheek. My ass was falling asleep. Her body relaxes, and she goes back to her fire, when she stops again, and grabs my arm. She’s stock still and her head is tilted slightly to the side in concentration.

She drops down to her chest and puts her head to the floor, looking in the direction of the door, trying to see under it. The fire is smoking away, and I creep over to her side and try to see under it too. Her face is smudged with dirt and her eyes are like saucers. It’s the porcelain patrol. We know Charlies out there, and like tunnel rats, lay there listening, determined to keep our territory safe. After what seemed a safe amount of time,she turned her attention to the fire. The bathroom was getting too smoky, so Erin flipped up the lid of the toilet and tried to scoop up the fire with her sneaker. She got half the fire in there, and looked at the sink for options.

The water was still blasting out of the faucet. She filled her sneaker up with water and poured it over the fire till it died. “Good work,” I whispered. What else was I gonna say? Her finger shot to her lips and her eyes darted to the door again. Nobody was out there, but I played along. I sat there and waited for her to come down, for the coke to sweat out of her system a little bit. Eventually she put the rest of the fire pile into the toilet and wiped up the floor. She turned off the water in the sink, and said,” lets get outta here”, and threw her stuff in her purse. I stood up, brushed myself off, and Erin flushed the toilet. She looked down into the toilet bowl. Evidence. She tried to flush it again, and nothing happened. She hoisted the top of the toilet off halfway, stuck her hand in there, and fiddled around. There was still no flush. She tossed her purse on the floor, rolls her sleeve up farther, and starts tweaking on the toilet. I couldnt believe it. The pyromania was one thing, but now she has to start fucking with toilets. She’s got her arm all down in there, and there’s a little click, but again no flush.

She takes her arm out, flushes the toilet manually, and the water from the back of the toilet shoots straight up in the air into her face. I can tell you right now that I have never witnessed anything like it in my life. The toilet just went BOOM! And she was drenched. The sound was a thundercrack. The expression on her face was priceless. Her tweak earlier was nothing compared to what unfolded before my eyes. I was horrified and watched with morbid fascination. She stood there with shit water all over her and the second wave of paranoid hit. Before she had time to fully comprehend what was happening, her body was in motion. She reached up to pull paper towels down from the overhead machine, and thinking there was resistance and getting none, the whole roll came out, and she went flailing backwards holding onto it. I must admit she put up a brave fight. The floor was so wet that her legs were spinning out from under her, and she was trying to regain her center with the fury of a mad woman. She had one shoe on, and one shoe off. I jumped up to grab her before she fell, and as I caught her arm, all of her weight fell on me with no balance. Were both hung onto each other from the waist up but our legs have no grip. Were slipping and sliding around the bathroom, the water still cascading out of the the toilet. It’s like some demented scene from I Love Lucy, and nobody has said anything. We are fiercely defending our secrecy with silence. Neither of us has uttered a sound. I don’t know how long we slopped around there for. Grunting and skidding around like silent retards. Could have been hours. Someone is knocking on the door, and finally one of us, I think it was me, said in a cheery panic, “We’ll be right out.”

Who knows how long we had been in there, trapped in our own drug addled world. I let go of Erin, gave her a shove, and made a grab for the wall. I’d had enough of her shenanigans. As fast as she could come up with a plan, she could destroy it even faster.

I hydroplaned on my boots to the wall and slowly glommed on. Erin sputtered off in the other direction. She looked like an idiot. I tried to get myself together. I leaned against the wall and took a deep breath, and tried to figured out what my next best move would be. I just couldn’t figure out what to do. Sometimes when you don’t know what to do, it’s best to do nothing, unlike some people. Erin slammed into the toilet waterfall once again. The events of the last hour happened too fast. I looked at Erin getting her face soaked and knew that the rest of the dope was ruined, turning to mush in her pocket. I debated lighting a cigarette but figured that was probably too insensitive at the moment. Fuck. I made a vow never to hang out with cokeheads again.

(First publication; exclusive content)

FINDING MR. BARKER

by
Caitlín R. Kiernan

The more years come and go, leaving me still stranded here, the less stock I place in my recollections. They’re growing more than a little threadbare, if you catch my drift. All I recall is to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, here’s the scene: June 1986, a soft summer evening in Boulder, Colorado. Dusk is fading quickly to night, and there’s a breeze blowing down across the city from the tilted rust-red peaks of the Flatirons, whispering through the branches of the maples and lindens and honeylocust trees. I arrived only a few weeks before, to begin my work towards a master’s degree in geology and this evening, a friend and I have walked the three or four block from our dorm to Pearl Street and a little comic-book shop there. I can’t recall the name of the place. It might have been Time Warp Comics and Games. They’d been around a couple of years by that time. Anyway, the very last thing I had was money to spend on comics. There was money for food and warm clothes, textbooks, school supplies, money to (mostly) keep my rattletrap VW bus running, and absolutely nothing else. My friend reminded me of this, as she often did. Yes, but, I’m only window shopping, I promised, dragging her in after me. She was far less interested in such things than was I, levelheaded Ozark girl that she was.

I probably passed an hour or so just browsing the shelves, drawing out this excuse not to go head back to campus. And then, as we were getting ready to quit the place, I happened to notice a small, tidy display of mass-market paperbacks right up front, on the counter by the register – all three volumes of the original edition of The Books of Blood by Clive Barker (Berkeley Books). I’d honestly never heard of him (I read very little “horror” fiction back then; I read even less of it now). But the pimply kid behind the register assured me this Barker fellow was the hottest new thing out there, and to drive home his point he tapped an index finger at the blurb on the front cover, at those now infamous lines: “I have seen the future of horror...and it is named Clive Barker.” — Stephen King

I’d not yet learned to look askance at such wildly hyperbolic blurbs. Indeed, that summer I assumed I would spend the rest of my life cloaked safely in Academia, and the Byzantine labyrinth of selling mass-market paperbacks to a mass market, trying to understand such awful things, that was still waiting many long years and several then unimaginable traumas in my future. But I picked up one of the books. I can’t say which. The covers were all a bit interchangeable and the very definition of garish. Near as I could tell, they were photographs of latex Halloween masks, the sort that slip on over your whole head. One had a trickle of blood, the other were two backlit with what might have been intended as hellfire. And the whole affair might have stopped then and there, had I not opened the book and read these lines:
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened we’re red.

I might not have been very impressed by the King endorsement, but man, that sentence really got its hooks in me. As I quickly scanned the table of contents of volume one, there were more hooks, titles like “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” and there was something about the sheer visceral nature of this thing, well, fuck it...I shelled out my $2.95 cents and bought the damned thing, and my carefully calculated budget be damned.

Over the course of the next year or so, I picked up the other two volumes. I’d swing by the same Pearl Street comic shop when I’d reached a point with say, the fundamentals of stable isotope geochemistry or some bit of geomicrobiology when I’d need the sort of escape and frission that I’d found in the first volume. This stuff was magic. This stuff was breathtaking.

I did not have anywhere near the foresight to even begin to suspect that only a few years down the line my life would go entirely off the rails, my shot at a sedate academic life would be lost in the chaos, and I’d find myself turning to my own nascent skills as a fiction writer to try and keep my head above water. So I did not understand that these tales I was reading over and over again — “Rawhead Rex,” “Son of Celluloid,” “Sex, Death and Starshine” — would play as much a role in shaping my own dark fiction as would more sedate writers I’d been reading since childhood — Poe and Lovecraft and those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. But, to be sure, Barker would worm his way into my own voice when the time came to send that voice out to walk the streets and sing for my supper.

Even stranger, in October 1994 I’d find myself at the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans, where I actually met Clive Barker, and then we crossed paths again at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta a couple of years later. We struck up a sort of casual friendship, and eventually he’d go on to provide my first novel, Silk, with a blurb and illustrations for a limited edition. It’s a small damn world, as they are wont to say. But I am, if nothing, careless with friendship and acquaintances, and the last time I saw Clive was — I think — at a gallery opening of his work in Beverly Hills in November 1998. In, as it happens, the back of a comic book shop.

If I’m trying to say anything of substance here, I suppose it’s something about Jung’s meaningful coincidences, what he called synchronicity. Or maybe I mean serendipity. Or maybe just the likelihood that very unlikely things happen all the time. But, regardless, it was something special, Clive Barker’s arrival on the scene here the States, as Stephen King and all his various imitators were reaching saturation. Fresh blood, let’s say, surprisingly literary and proud of the punches that were not ever pulled. An imagination like shark teeth and razor wire, something harking back to, say, Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories a decade earlier. I think Clive woke a lot of us up, saved a genre was that fast growing gentrified, and, at least for a little while, he made dark fiction dangerous and unsavory again.

Caitlin R. Kiernan
27 February 2026
Birmingham, Alabama

copyright ©2026 Caitlin R Kiernan and Nocturnicorn Books. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce in any form.

South America, the UK & Europe — 2027

On a cool Monday morning, February 23rd, 2026, the announcement dropped like a long‑awaited thunderclap: Rush — or rather, the living, beating heart of Rush, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson — expanding their Fifty Something Tour into South America, the United Kingdom, and Europe for early 2027. Not a reunion. Not nostalgia. Something stranger, deeper, more luminous: a continuation of the current that began more than fifty years ago and refuses to dim.

The 2026 run across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico had already erupted beyond expectation — 22 shows sold out instantly, swelling to 58 shows across 24 cities, more than half a million tickets claimed by fans hungry for the sound they thought they’d never hear live again. And now, after more than a decade away from Europe and seventeen years since setting foot in South America, the band returns to those stages like travelers stepping back into a dream they left mid‑sentence.

These will be “evening with” shows — two full sets, shifting nightly, drawn from a living library of 40+ songs, each performance a different constellation.

Geddy Lee speaks with the clarity of someone who has rediscovered the joy of the craft:

“We can’t wait to get back to all these cities we haven’t played in so long… learning around 40 songs which will enable us to keep the shows evolving… We dearly hope you will come along and help us celebrate 50 years of Rush music, while giving Neil the long overdue tribute he so richly deserves.”

And from Neil Peart’s widow, Carrie Nuttall‑Peart, and daughter, Olivia Peart, comes a blessing that feels like a lantern placed gently in the hands of the fans:

“Neil’s musicianship was singular… compositions of intricacy and power that expanded what rhythm itself could express… Inimitable in his artistry… he profoundly shaped how fans connected with him and the band… As the band enters this new chapter, it promises to be truly unforgettable.”

The new configuration honors the past without embalming it.
Anika Nilles, German drummer and rhythmic architect, steps into the impossible space with precision and fire, carrying the lineage without imitation.
Loren Gold, whose keys have supported The Who and Roger Daltrey, adds new harmonic architecture, widening the Rush sound without diluting its core.

The experience extends beyond the stage:
VIP rituals, the 2112 Platform Experience, the Xanadu lounge, curated travel packages, signed moments, production tours — a pilgrimage built for those who want to step inside the machinery of the myth.

And then, the map unfolds — South America first, then Europe, then the UK — a sweep across thirteen countries, twenty‑four shows, each one a beacon.

This is not a band returning from silence.
This is a band continuing its myth, reshaping itself in real time, honoring the absent third member whose presence remains carved into every measure.

Rush is not back.
Rush never left.
They simply waited for the right moment to open the next chapter.

From Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975.

When I was first asked to write an article on the Led Zeppelin group, to be based on attending a concert and talking with Jimmy Page, I was not sure I could do it, not being sufficiently knowledgeable about music to attempt anything in the way of musical criticism or even evaluation. I decided simply to attend the concert and talk with Jimmy Page and let the article develop. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

My first impression was of the audience. As we streamed through one security line after another–a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middle-class kid. The security guards seemed to be cool and well-trained, ushering gate-crashers out with a minimum of fuss. We were channeled smoothly into our seats in the thirteenth row. Over a relaxed dinner before the concert, a Crawdaddy companion had said he had a feeling that something bad could happen at this concert. I pointed out that it always can when you get that many people together–like bullfights where you buy a straw hat at the door to protect you from bottles and other missiles. I was displacing possible danger to a Mexican border town where the matador barely escaped with his life and several spectators were killed. It’s known as “clearing the path.”

So there we sat, I decline earplugs; I am used to loud drum and horn music from Morocco, and it always has, if skillfully performed, an exhilarating and energizing effect on me. As the performance got underway I experienced this musical exhilaration, which was all the more pleasant for being easily controlled, and I knew then that nothing bad was going to happen. This was a safe and friendly area–but at the same time highly charged. There was a palpable interchange of energy between the performers and the audience which was never frantic or jagged. The special effects were handled well and not overdone.

A few special effects are much better than too many. I can see the laser beams cutting dry ice smoke, which drew an appreciative cheer from the audience. Jimmy Page’s number with the broken guitar strings came across with a real impact, as did John Bonham’s drum solo and the lyrics delivered with unfailing vitality by Robert Plant. The performers were doing their best, and it was very good. The last number, “Stairway to Heaven”, where the audience lit matches and there was a scattering of sparklers here and there, found the audience well-behaved and joyous, creating the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play. All in all a good show; neither low nor insipid. Leaving the concert hall was like getting off a jet plane.

I summarized my impressions after the concert in a few notes to serve as a basis for my talk with Jimmy Page. “The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests, a theme that was treated in Peter Watkins’ film ‘Privilege’. In that film a rock star was manipulated by reactionary forces to set up a state religion; this scenario seems unlikely, I think a rock group singing political slogans would leave its audience at the door.

“The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”

THE INTERVIEW

I felt that these considerations could form the basis of my talk with Jimmy Page, which I hoped would not take the form of an interview. There is something just basically WRONG about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, “Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?” Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn’t going to be that way.

We started talking over a cup of tea and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page’s purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness; John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert; Donald Camel, who worked on ‘Performance’; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris. The subject of magic came up in connection with Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger’s film ‘Lucifer Rising’, for which Jimmy Page did the sound track.

Since the word “magic” tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by “magic” and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of ‘will’ as the primary moving force in this universe–the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self-evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the rooom is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy. Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time… “The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital…one must pretend an interest,” drawled the dandified Commandante, safe in the pages of my book; and as another rock star said to me, “YOU sit on your ass writing–I could be torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus.”

I found Jimmy Page equally aware of the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconcious. I took on a valence I learned years ago from two ‘Life-Time’ reporters–one keeps telling you these horrific stories: “Now old Burns was dragged out of the truck and skinned alive by the mob, and when we got there with the cameras the bloody thing was still squirming there like a worm…” while the other half of the team is snapping pictures CLICK CLICK CLICK to record your reactions–so over dinner at Mexican Gardens I told Jimmy the story of the big soccer riot in Lima, Peru in 1964.

We are ushered into the arena as VIPs, in the style made famous by ‘Triumph of the Will’. Martial music–long vistas–the statuesque police with their dogs on leads–the crowd surging in a sultry menacing electricity palpable in the air–grey clouds over Lima–people glance up uneasily… the last time it rained in Lima was the year of the great earthquake, when whole towns were swallowed by landslides. A cop is beating and kicking someone as he shoves him back towards the exit. Oh lucky man. The dogs growl ominously. The game is tense. Tied until the end of the last quarter, and then the stunning decision: a goal that would have won the game for Peru is disqualified by the Uruguayan referee. A howl of rage from the crowd, and then a huge black known as La Bomba, who has started three previous soccer riots and already has twenty-three notches on his bomb, vaults down into the arena. A wave of fans follows The Bomb–the Uruguayan referee scrambles off with the agility of a rat or an evil spirit–the police release tear gas and unleash their snarling dogs, hysterical with fear and rage and maddened by the tear gas. And then a sound like falling mountains, as a few drops of rain begin to fall.

“Yes, I’ve thought about that. We all have. The important thing is maintain a balance. The kids come to get far out with the music. It’s our job to see they have a good time and no trouble.”

And remember the rock group called Storm? Playing a dance hall in Switzerland…fire…exits locked…thirty-seven people dead including all the performers. Now any performer who has never thought about fire and panic just doesn’t think. The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time, and you can’t see it if you refuse to face the possibility. The bad vibes in that dance hall must have been really heavy. If the performers had been sensitive and alert, they would have checked to be sure the exits were unlocked.

Previously, over two fingers of whiskey in my Franklin Street digs, I had told Page about Major Bruce MacMannaway, a healer and psychic who lives in Scotland. The Major discovered his healing abilities in World War II when his regiment was cut off without medical supplies and the Major started laying on hands…”Well Major, I think it’s a load of bollocks but I’ll try anything.” And it turns out the Major is a walking hypo. His psychic abilities were so highly regarded by the Admiralty that he was called in to locate sunken submarines, and he never once missed.

I attended a group meditation seminar with the Major. It turned out to be the Indian rope trick. Before the session the Major told us something of the potential power in group meditation. He had seen it lift a six-hundred-pound church organ five feet in the air. I had no reason to doubt this, since he was obviously incapable of falsification. In the session, after some preliminary excercises, the Major asked us to see a column of light in the center of the room and then took us up through the light to a plateau where we met nice friendly people: the stairway to heaven in fact. I mean we were really THERE.

I turned to Jimmy Page: “Of course we are dealing here with meditation– the deliberate induction of a trance state in a few people under the hands of an old master. This would seem on the surface to have a little in common with a rock concert, but the underlying force is the same: human energy and its potential concentration.” I pointed out that the moment when the stairway to heaven becomes something actually POSSIBLE for the audience, would also be the moment of greatest danger. Jimmy expressed himself as well aware of the power in mass concentration, aware of the dangers involved, and of the skill and balance needed to avoid them…rather like driving a load of nitroglycerine.

“There IS a responsibility to the audience,” he said. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to these kids–we don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.” We talked about magic and Aleister Crowley. Jimmy said that Crowley has been maligned as a black magician, whereas magic is neither white nor black, good nor bad–it is simply alive with what it is: the real thing, what people really feel and want and are. I pointed out that this “either/or” straitjacket had been imposed by Christianity when all magic became black magic; that scientists took over from the Church, and Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as “the way things are.” Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.

Jimmy told me that Aleister Crowley’s house has very good vibes for anyone who is relaxed and receptive. At one time the house had also been the scene of a vast chicken swindle indirectly involving George Sanders, the movie actor, who was able to clear himself of any criminal charges, Sanders committed suicide in Barcelona, and we both remembered his farewell note to the world: “I leave you to this sweet cesspool.”

I told Jimmy he was lucky too have that house with a monster in the front yard. What about the Loch Ness monster? Jimmy Page thinks it exists. I wondered if it could find enough to eat, and thought this unlikely–it’s not the improbability but the upkeep on monsters that worries me. Did Aleister Crowley have opinions on the subject? He apparently had not expressed himself.

We talked about trance music. He had heard the Brian Jones record from recordings made at Joujouka. We discussed the possibility of synthesizing rock music with some of the older forms of trance music that have been developed over centuries to produce powerful, sometimes hypnotic effects on the audience. Such a synthesis would enable the older forms to escape from the mould of folk lore and provide new techniques to rock groups.

We talked about the special effects used in the concert. “Sure,” he said, “lights, lasers, dry ice are fine–but you have to keep some balance. The show must carry itself and not rely too heavily on special effects, however spectacular,” I brought up the subject of infra-sound, that is, sound pitched below 16 Hertz, the level of human hearing; as ultra-sound is above the level. Professer Gavreau of France developed infra-sound as a military weapon. A powerful infra-sound installation can, he claims, kill everyone in a five-mile radius, knock down walls and break windows. Infra-sound kills by setting up vibrations within the body so that, as Gavreau puts it, “You can feel all the organs in your body rubbing together.” The plans for this device can be obtained from the French Patent Office, and infra-sound generators constructed from inexpensive materials. Needless to say, one is not concerned with military applications however unlimited, but with more interesting and useful possibilities, reaching much further that five miles.

Infra-sound sets up vibrations in the body and nervous system. Need these vibrations necessarily be harmful or unpleasant? All music played at any volume sets up vibrations in the body and nervous system of the listener. That’s why people listen to it. Caruso as you wil remember could break a champagne glass across the room. Especially interesting is the possibility of rhythmic pulses of infra-sound; that is, MUSIC IN INFRA-SOUND. You can’t hear it, but you can feel it.

Jimmy was interested, and I gave him a copy of a newspaper article on infra-sound. It seems that the most deadly range is around 7 Hertz, and when this is turned on even at a low volume, anyone within range is affected. They feel anxious, ill, depressed, and finally exclaim with one voice, “I feel TERRIBLE!”…last thing you want at a rock concert. However, around the borders of infra-sound perhaps a safe range can be found. Buddhist mantras act by setting up vibrations in the body. Could this be done in a much more powerful yet safe manner by the use of infra-sound rhythms which could of course could be combined with audible music? Perhaps infra-sound could add a new dimension to rock music.

Could something be developed comparable to the sonar communication of dolphins, conveying an immediate sonar experience that requires no symbolic translation? I mentioned to Jimmy that I had talked with Dr. Truby, who worked with John Lilly recording dolphins. Dr. Truby is a specialist in inter-species communication, working on a grant from the government–so that when all our kids are born Venusians we will understand then when they start to talk. I suggested to him that ALL communication, as we know it, is actually inter-species communication, and that it is kept that way by the nature of verbal and symbolic communication, which must be indirect.

Do dolphins have a language? What is a language? I define a language as a communication system in which data are represented by verbal or written symbols–symbols that ARE NOT THE OBJECTS to which they refer. The word “chair” is not the object itself, the chair. So any such system of communication is always second-hand and symbolic, whereas we CAN conceive of a form of communication that would be immediate and direct, undercutting the need for symbols. And music certainly comes closer to such direct communication than language.

Could musical communication be rendered more precise with infra-sound, thus bringing the whole of music a second radical step forward? The first step was made when music came out of the dance halls, roadhouses, and night clubs, into Madison Square Garden and Shea Stadium. Rock music appeals to a mass audience, instead of being the province of a relatively few aficionados. Can rock music make another step forward, or is it a self-limiting form, confirmed by the demands of a mass audience? How much that is radically new can a mass audience safely absorb? We came back to the question of balance. How much new material will be accepted by a mass audience? Can rock music go forward without leaving its fans behind?

We talked about Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator, and I showed him plans for making this device, which were passed along to me by Reich’s daughter. Basically the device is very simple, consisting of iron or steel wool on the inside and organic material on the outside. I think this was highly important discovery. Recently a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced an “electrical cell” theory of cancer that is almost identical to Reich’s cancer theory put forth 25 years ago. He does not acknowledge any indebtedness to Reich. I showed Jimmy the orgone box I have here, and we agreed that orgone accumulators in pyramid form and/or using magnetized iron could be much more powerful.

We talked about the film ‘Performance’ and the use of cut-up techniques in this film. Now the cut-up method was applied to writing by Brion Gysin in 1959; he said that writing was fifty years behind painting, and applied the montage method to writing. Actually, montage is much closer to the facts of perception thatn representational painting. If for example you walked through Times Square, and then put on canvas what you had seen, the result would be a montage…half a person cut in two by a car, reflections from shop windows, fragments of street signs. Antony Balch and I collaborated on a film called ‘Cut-Ups’, in which the film was cut into segments and rearranged at random. Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell saw a screening of the film not long before they made ‘Performance’.

Musical cut-ups have been used by Earl Browne and other modern composers. What distinguishes a cut-up from, say, an edited medley, is that the cut-up is at some point random. For example, if you made a medley by taking thirty seconds from a number of scores and assembling these arbitrary units–that would be a cut-up. Cut-ups often result in more succinct meanings, rather than nonsense. Here for example is a phrase taken from a cut-up of this article: “I can see the laser gate crashers with an appreciative cheer from the 13th row.” (Actually a gate crasher was extricated by security from the row in front of us; an incident I had forgoten until I saw this cut-up.)

Over dinner at the Mexican Gardens, I was suprised to hear that Jimmy Page had never heard of Petrillo, who started the first musicians’ union and perhaps did more than any other one man to improve the financial positioin of musicians by protecting copyrights. One wonders whether rock music could have gotten off the ground without Petrillo and the Union, which put musicians in the big money bracket, thereby attracting managers, publicity, and the mass audience.

Music, like all the arts, is magical and ceremonial in origin. Can rock music return to these ceremonial roots and take its fans with it? Can rock music use older forms like Moroccan trance music? There is at present a wide interest among young people in the occult and all means of expanding consciousness. Can rock music appeal directly to this interest? In short, there are a number of disparate tendencies waiting to be synthesized. Can rock music serve as a vehicle for this synthesis?

The broken guitar strings, John Bonham’s drum solo, vitality by Robert Plant–when you get that many people to get it, very good. Buy a straw hat at the door–the audience all light matches. Cool well-trained laser beams channelled the audience smoothly. A scattering of sparklers. Danger to a Mexican border town. We start talking over a cup of the mass unconscious–cut to a soccer riot photo in Lima. The Uruguayan referee as another rock star. Sound like falling mountains of the risks involved. It’s our job to see trouble and plateau the center of the room–remember the stairway to Switzerland? Fire really there. You can’t see it if you refuse–underlying force the same. I mean we were playing a dance hall in heaven at the moment when the stairway actually possible for the audience was unlocked.

WORD FOR WORD

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I really, really enjoyed the concert. I think it has quite a lot, really, in common with Moroccan trance music.

JIMMY PAGE: Yes, yes.

WB: I wondered if you consciously were using any of that….

JP: Well, yes, there is a little on that perticular track, “Kashmir”–a lead bass on that–even though none of us have been to Kashmir. It’s just that we’ve all been very involved in that sort of music. I’m very involved in ethnic music from all over the world.

WB: Have you been to Morocco?

JP: No. I haven’t, and it’s a very sad admission to make. I’ve only been to, you know, India and Bangkok and places like that through the Southeast.

WB: Well, I’ve never been east of Athens.

JP: Because during the period when everybody was going through trips over to, you know, Morocco, going down, way down, making their own journeys too Istanbul, I was at art college during that period and then I eventually went straight into music. So I really missed out on all that sort of traveling. But I know musicians that have gone there and actually sat in with the Arabs and played with them.

WB: Yeah, well they think of music entirely in magical terms.

JP: Yes.

WB: And their music is definitely used for magical purposes. For example, the Gnaoua music is to drive out evil spirits and Joujouka music is invoking the God Pan. Musicians there are all magicians, quite consciously.

———————————

WB: I was thinking of the concentration of mass energy that you get in a pop concert, and if that were, say, channeled in some magical way…a stairway too heaven…it could become quite actual.

JP: Yes, I know. One is so aware of the energies that you are going for, and you could so easily….I mean, for instance, the other night we played in the Philadelphia Spectrum, which really is a black hole as a concert hall….The security there is the most ugly of anywhere in the States. I saw this incident happen and I was almost physically sick. In fact, if I hadn’t been playing the guitar I was playing it would’ve been over somebody’s head. It was a double-neck, which is irreplaceable, really, unless you wait another nine months for them to make another one at Gibson’s.

What had happened, somebody came to the front of the stage to take a picture or something and obviously somebody said, “Be off with you.” And he wouldn’t go. And then one chap went over the barrier, and then another, and then another and then another, and they all piled on top of…you could see the fists coming out…on this one solitary person. And they dragged him by his hair and they were kicking him. It was just sickening. Now, what I’m saying is this….Our crowds, the people that come to see us are very orderly. It’s not the sort of Alice Cooper style, where you actually TRY to get them into a state where they’ve got to go like that, so that you can get reports of this, that and the other. And the wrong word said at that time could’ve just sparked off the whole thing.

WB: Yes, there’s sort of a balance to be maintained there.

JP: Yeah, that’s right.

WB: The audience the other night was very well behaved.

———————————-

WB: Have you used the lasers in all of the concerts?

JP: Over here, yes.

WB: Very effective.

JP: I think we should have more of them, don’t you? About thirty of them! Do you know they bounced that one off the moon. But it’s been condensed….it’s the very one that they used for the moon. I was quite impressed by that.

WB: That isn’t the kind of machine that would cause any damage….

JP: Uh, if you look straight into it, yes.

WB: Yes, but I mean…it doesn’t burn a hole in…

JP: No….it’s been taken right down. I’m just waiting for the day when you can get the holograms…get three-dimensional. The other thing I wanted to do was the Van de Graaff Generator. You used to see them in the old horror films….

WB: Oh yes…Frankenstein, and all that.

—————————————

JP: When we first came over here… when the draft was really hot and everything…if you stayed in the country for more than six months, you were eligible for it, they’d drag you straight into the draft.

WB: I didn’t realize that.

JP: Yeah.

WB: Oh, I thought you had to be an American citizen.

JP: Noo. No no. We almost overstayed our welcome. I was producing and having to work in studios here, and the days coming up to the six month period were just about…it was just about neck and neck. And I still had a couple more days left and a couple more days to work on this lp.

WB: Were they right there with the papers?

JP: Well, not quite, I mean obviously it would have taken some time, but somebody would’ve been there…You know, they do keep an eye on people.

————————————-

WB: Did you ever hear about something called infra-sound?

JP: Uh, carry on.

WB: Well, infra-sound is sound below the level of hearing. And it was developed by someone named Professor Gavreau in France as a military weapon. He had an infra-sound installation that he could turn on and kill everything within five miles. It can also knock down walls and break windows. But it kills by setting up vibrations within the body. Well, what I was wondering was, whether rhythmical music at sort of the borderline of infra-sound could be used to produce rhythms in the audience–because, of course, any music with volume will set up these vibrations. That is part of the way the effect is achieved.

JP: Hmm.

WB: It’s apparently…it’s not complicated to build these infra-sound things.

JP: I’ve heard of this, actually but not in such a detailed explanation. I’ve heard that certain frequencies can make you physically ill.

WB: Yes. Well, this can be fatal. That’s not what you’re looking for. But it could be used just to set up vibrations….

JP: Ah hah…A death ray machine! Of course, when radio first came out they were picketing all the radio stations, weren’t they, saying “We don’t want these poisonous rays” [laughter]….Yes, well…certain notes can break glasses. I mean, opera singers can break glasses with sound, this is true?

WB: That was one of Caruso’s tricks.

JP: But it is true?

WB: Of course.

JP: I’ve never seen it done.

WB: I’ve never seen it done, but I know that you can do it.

JP: I want laser NOTES, that’s what I’m after! Cut right through.

WB: Apparently you can make one of these things out of parts you can buy in a junk yard. It’s not a complicated machine to make. And actually the patent…it’s patented in France, and according to French law, you can obtain a copy of the patent. For a very small fee.

JP: Well, you see the thing is, it’s hard to know just exactly what is going on, from the stage to the audience…You can only…I mean I’ve never seen the group play, obviously. Because I’m part of it….I can only see it on celluloid, or hear it. But I know what I see. And this thing about rhythms within the audience. I would say yes. Yes, definitely. And it is…Music which involves riffs, anyway, will have a trance-like effect, and it’s really like a mantra….And we’ve been attacked for that.

WB: What a mantra does is set up certain vibrations within the body, and this, obviously does the same thing. Of course, it goes….it comes out too far. But I was wondering if on the borderline of infra-sound that possibly some interesting things could be done.

JP: Ah.

——————————————

JP: Last year we were playing [sets] for three hours solid, and physically that was a real…I mean, when I came back from the last tour I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know where I was going. We ended up in New York and the only thing that I could relate to was the instrument onstage. I just couldn’t….I was just totally and completely spaced out.

WB: How long was that you played recently? That was two hours and a half.

JP: That was two and a half hours, yes. It used to go for three hours.

WB: I’d hate to give a three-hour reading….

Skinny Puppy’s story is, at this point, inseparable from the evolution of modern industrial music itself. What began in early‑1980s Vancouver as an experiment in tape manipulation, abrasive electronics, and anti‑authoritarian performance art has since become one of the most influential bodies of work in heavy electronic music. Across four decades, the group—anchored by cEvin Key and the late Dwayne R. Goettel, with the volatile theatrical presence of Nivek Ogre—forged a sound that fused electronic subversion, political provocation, and body‑horror aesthetics into something both confrontational and strangely beautiful.

Their discography charts a restless evolution: from the proto‑electro‑shock of Bites and Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, through the sample‑saturated paranoia of VIVIsectVI and Rabies, to the dense, psychedelic, and often mournful textures of Too Dark Park and Last Rights. Along the way, Skinny Puppy helped define the grammar of industrial music—its rhythmic violence, its collage‑based production, its distrust of institutions, its fascination with the grotesque. They also helped globalize the genre, touring relentlessly and pushing their stage shows into realms of Grand Guignol‑meets‑media‑critique spectacle that few dared to follow.

Their collaborations and intersections with other avant‑garde figures further cement their legacy. Work with Genesis P‑Orridge connected them to the lineage of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV; production overlaps with Bill Leeb, Al Jourgensen, and others helped shape the broader industrial diaspora; and their influence on artists like Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson, and countless electronic producers is so pervasive it’s practically structural. Even as imitators borrowed their sonic vocabulary, Skinny Puppy’s particular alchemy—equal parts dread, empathy, and technological curiosity—remained uniquely theirs.

This archival interview, first published in Zero Tolerance and now revisited for The Smol Bear Review, captures cEvin Key in a reflective mode. He speaks candidly about the loss of Dwayne R. Goettel, whose musicality and adventurousness transformed the band’s sound; about the gear and production techniques that fueled their innovations; and about the political undercurrents that have always animated Skinny Puppy’s work, including what he calls “the widespread misuse of power.” It’s a conversation that situates the band not just as pioneers of a genre, but as artists who used noise, rhythm, and theatrical extremity to confront the anxieties of their era—and, as their continued relevance shows, ours as well.

Yoking Grand Guignol stage-splatter to a hissing, shrieking, yet not infrequently melodic sonic onslaught, Skinny Puppy’s mix of radical propaganda, conspiracy theories, shattering noise, shuddering beats, blood and viscera has been frequently imitated (Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails admits to repurposing the Puppy classic “Dig It,” core beats and all, as “Down in It”) but never successfully duplicated. Commenting on the tour footage of Eurotrauma: Skinny Puppy Live in Europe 1986 paired with a live performance on the Greater Wrong of the Right DVD, cEvin Key states, “Actually, it’s nice for us to be able to look back at that period; that was when we were pretty young and naive and still growing and learning. I think just being able to have access to footage like that, that’s nearly 20 years old, that you can go back and look at, it’s sort of a gift almost, especially since Dwayne’s not around anymore.”

Classically-trained Dwayne R. Goettel was “a unique individual,” Key recalls. “There was no one like him. I’ve never felt the same vibe off anyone else in the studio. He was my best friend. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him, so I just try to move forward, thinking what he would think would be a cool thing to do to have the band represented well. And I know that he would probably feel good about the things that have been done since he’s passed away. That’s sort of been a driving force for both me and Ogre.”

Among the scarlet delights of the Greater Wrong DVD, viewers are presented with vocalist Nivek Ogre’s blood-oozing machine gun, used to target onscreen pop-up objects (and lessons) fresh from America’s military debacles in the Middle East.

“There’s so many things happening that we are merely witness to. Our original analogy with Skinny Puppy was that we’re like a dog—there’s nothing much we can do but just speak up. So we just speak up about the things that we find pertinent in society; government control and widespread misuse of power is something that’s quite concerning to us.”

Although in performance the song “VX Gas Attack” is illustrated by a conspiratorial text that warns individual humans of their vulnerability before these dangers, cEvin and Ogre don’t necessarily vouch for that message—just its essence. “Actually, Bill Morrison made this movie and a lot of it was a lot of elements that are coming from his soul too. He’s in the band, he’s our guitar player and he’s been making our videos for years. I think that between the band members, we’re not all politically minded. Some of us are more into other elements, and we all raise our concerns with the environment, animal rights or whatever. As we come together in the whole, we come together as Skinny Puppy. Bill has addressed many things with his Information Warfare documentary as well as certain angles of how the music has been represented with words, and I just find that each person can conjure their own meanings out of songs that we’ve written, and I’d like to encourage that to continue.”

Hounded for years by a German promoter to reunite for a single show, cEvin and Nivek famously demanded an impossible fee. But then the unlikely actually happened: “Five years ago, we got back together again. It seems like a joke, but we actually ended up making that happen with the Doomsday show that came up, and since then we haven’t had a day where we haven’t appreciated our friendship and what we’ve shared and everything. We’re completely different people than we used to be. It’s nothing like it used to be, with tons of strife and tons of ego battles and all sorts of crazy things.”

Sounding the Puppy klaxon from years of dust and disuse proved no obstacle to the intrepid, now reunited mates. “We still have all of our gear that we used for the first albums that we made 20 years ago. Going back to analog stuff is almost as good as anything you can try and emulate now with modern day stuff. But virtual synthesis has come a long way; we’re heavily into that; we utilize everything that comes out that is applicable to Skinny Puppy. Charlie Clouser (Nine Inch Nails) called me up and said, ‘You know, the Roland V-Synth is probably one of the most insane synths ever made. I believe it must have been made for Skinny Puppy.’ There are certain things that to make something conventional with them is a little more difficult, but when you’re up in the world of bizarro sound structure or whatever, anything that basically helps us to achieve those things, we will try and use.

“When we went back in, the first thing I wanted to do was to really set up all the old gear again, to get sort of a vibe going that would be similar to what would be recognized as Skinny Puppy, and that was something that I felt was fun, but at the same time, it was sort of like, let’s see what happens. So I just tried to move forward melodically on that level. What would Dwayne think would be cool? What do I think is cool? What type of gear should I use? How should it proceed? Mark Walk was a completely different style of producer than we’ve worked with in the past. He really would hear everything and destructure everything and then restructure it and then present it to us with a new idea. And that’s never been done before. In the past we’ve always worked with bed tracks that quite often stayed the same once they were written and then we would work around them and then not really adapt the bed track very much. Now we’re changing everything to suit the song, and I think that’s something we haven’t done enough, so I think that on the album we’re working on now, we’ll see where that leads. I think it’s exciting.”

How does it feel for Key, plowing back into classic Puppy jams like “God’s Gift: Maggots” or “Deep Down Trauma Hounds”?

“Sometimes we play and realize, ‘Hey, that song’s 20 years old!” Those are the songs that I don’t really have to stop and think to play. They’re there. It’s sort of a weird thing. It’s like someone saying ‘Hey, do that thing you do.’ I mean, it’s sort of second nature. The ball is rolling pretty heavily for Skinny Puppy, and I want to put all of my energy into making it right this time. Part of the problem last time was that we weren’t as focused as we could have been, where we needed to be, and that’s not going to happen again. The political climate is just the same, and so what better thing to do than to just bring back all the things that go with that…you want to bring up the crackers? How about a little cheese?”

Please enjoy “Deep Down Trauma Hounds,” song by SKINNY PUPPY, performed by LAETHER STRIP

Diamanda Galás’s work in the early 1980s emerges from a matrix of extremity—ritual, ancestral memory, political fury, and a survival intelligence sharpened by both lineage and lived experience. Her debut album The Litanies of Satan and her vocal performance as the Witch in Conan the Barbarian belong to the same current, a current in which the voice is not merely expressive but elemental, a force that cuts through sentimentality and exposes the deeper architectures of suffering, cunning, and power.

As Galas told me in a recent interview first published in Synchronized Chaos, she has no patience for the “namby‑pamby, like, crying into the hanky shit” that dominates so much contemporary singer‑songwriting, because for her suffering without irony, without perspective, without the intelligence that allows one to survive it, is not truth but indulgence. “If you got nothing else in your deck to show me, then why don’t you just get lost… I want a punchline in there,” she said. That demand for the punchline—an edge, a reversal, a flash of wily intelligence—runs through her entire oeuvre and becomes a key to understanding her uncanny contribution to Conan the Barbarian.

Her critique of confessional pop is not a matter of taste but of philosophy. She contrasts the outlaw sardonicism of Hank Williams and Johnny Paycheck with the “poor me songs” of the present, which she finds “revolting” when stripped of humor or self‑awareness, and she insists that the listener does not need to be drowned in the minutiae of someone’s heartbreak unless the singer can offer something more than the wound itself. As she put it in the Synchronized Chaos interview, she cannot bear the sweetness, the weakness, the endless self‑pity masquerading as empowerment.

For Galás, suffering must be metabolized through intelligence, and that intelligence is rooted in a Greek inheritance she describes with precision: the Stoics, originally Greek slaves advising Roman emperors, cultivated a form of cunning known as πολύμητις (polýmētis), a wily intelligence that allowed them to survive in situations designed to destroy them. “Wily is by no means a negative,” she told me. “It means you are a man who can survive in situations designed to destroy you.” This is not meekness; it is strategic cunning, the Odyssean ability to read patterns before they are enacted upon you, the intelligence of the hunted who refuses to be prey.

Seen through this lens, her performance as the Witch in Conan the Barbarian becomes newly legible. The Witch is a liminal figure—seductress, prophet, predator—whose power is carried entirely through sound. Her vocal transformation from lure to attack is a sonic enactment of wily intelligence, a shift from vulnerability to predation, from invitation to annihilation.

The shrieks, guttural ruptures, and breath‑torn phrases that erupt during the scene carry the same voltage as her early performance work, shaped by Greek and Anatolian lament traditions and the improvisational rigor she developed alongside free‑jazz musicians. Her relationship to these traditions is not casual; as she told me in the Synchronized Chaos interview, “Those of us who are invested in the tradition aren’t interested in listening to your stupid record… You’ve taken that culture in vain.”

That protective stance toward ancestral sound shapes the Witch’s presence, giving her a ritual gravity that resists genre cliché. She is not a fantasy creature but a force drawn from older strata of sound, a voice that feels as if it predates language itself.

John Milius frames Conan with Nietzsche’s maxim about strength forged through suffering, establishing a world in which the supernatural announces itself through force rather than whimsy. Galás’s voice fits this cosmology without strain. She gives the Witch a presence that persists long after her body disappears into the fire, a sonic haunting that lingers in the film’s atmosphere like a curse half‑spoken and half‑screamed.

Her contribution marks the beginning of a pattern in which directors turn to her for a vocal presence capable of carrying the supernatural without resorting to cliché, a pattern that continues in The Serpent and the Rainbow and Dracula, where her voice again becomes the medium through which the uncanny enters the frame.

Her reflections on Panopticon in our Synchronized Chaos conversation deepen the connection between voice, suffering, and systems of power. Drawing on Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, she describes the panopticon as “a system of mental destruction… a massive paranoia situation for prisoners,” and she critiques the naïveté of releasing institutionalized people into society without support, noting that the transition becomes a second punishment, a second execution, because the person no longer knows how to interpret gestures or signals in the outside world.

The psychological violence of constant surveillance, the erosion of the self under unrelenting observation, becomes another dimension of the suffering she channels in her work. The scream, the lament, the rupture of the voice—these become weapons against systems designed to crush the psyche.

In Conan, the Witch’s voice functions in a similar way. It is a surveillance of the soul, a test, a trap, a revelation. It exposes Conan’s vulnerability and his destiny. It is the panopticon inverted: the prisoner becomes the predator, the watcher becomes the watched, the voice becomes the mechanism through which power shifts and the scene tilts toward the barbarian sublime.

Across her interview and her cinematic work, a coherent aesthetic emerges, one in which suffering must be intelligent rather than indulgent, irony becomes a survival mechanism rather than a distancing device, wily intelligence is a sacred inheritance rather than a moral failing, and the voice operates as a weapon, a ritual instrument, a force that precedes and exceeds language.

Sentimentality is the enemy because it obscures the structures of power that produce suffering, and the Witch in Conan embodies this refusal with a clarity that remains startling decades later. The scene becomes a miniature ritual—seduction, revelation, attack, disappearance—an eruption of ancestral sound into the barbarian world, a flash of the wily mind in its most elemental form.

‘Selling is more of a habit than using,’ Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other ...

Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. ‘It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty,’ a cop says.

The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. ‘I’ll just set in my room,’ he says. ‘Fuck ‘em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.’

But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it.

‘Oh all right,’ the boy says. ‘So what you want to make?’

‘I just want to rub against you and get fixed.’

‘Ugh ... Well all right ... But why cancha just get physical like a human?’

Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. ‘Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,’ he says. ‘Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets well all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax ... I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe.’

‘Well it’s still an easy score.’

The boy signed resignedly; ‘Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I’ve got a meet with him again tomorrow.’

The Buyer’s habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharge every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It gets to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor:

‘Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors -- and I hope for your sake they are no more than that -- so unspeakably distasteful that ... I mean Caesar’s wife ... hrump ... that is, the Department must be above suspicion ... certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation.’

The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. ‘No, Boss Man, no ... The Department is my very lifeline.’

He kisses the D.S.’s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth ‘inna thervith.’ ‘Please Boss Man, I’ll wipe your ass, I’ll wash out your dirty condoms, I’ll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose ...’

‘Really, this is most distasteful! Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap.’ He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. ‘I must ask you to leave this office at once.’

‘I’ll do anything, Boss, anything.’ His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. ‘I’m still young, Boss, and I’m pretty strong when I get my blood up.’

The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser’s wand. He flows forward ...

‘No! No!’ screams the D.S.

‘Schlup ... schlup schlup.’ An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.’s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace.

The Judge : ‘Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh ... assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release.’

‘That one should stand in an aquarium,’ says the arresting officer.

The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthizes his victioms and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower -- the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.

a haunting possibility poised

you think i tried to take something from you

but i promise you have nothing that i would want

and for that matter i certainly don’t have anything

that is worth taking

your eyes resemble ash left behind

from a long dead family barbecue

although when you see me

you smile & laugh like some skeletal advice

but i see through the nylon of your cheap device

standing at my gate

straining your neck trying to see me

but i’m not in there behind those windows

i am out here behind you

watching you watch

the way you stare so intently

makes me wonder

what you see in there

that i can not

Tricia Warden is an American poet, novelist, and spoken‑word performer whose work emerged from the raw, transgressive edge of 1990s underground literature. She is the author of Brainlift (1994) and Attack God Inside (1997), both published by Henry Rollins’ 2.13.61 Press, where she became one of the imprint’s most distinctive and uncompromising voices.

Her writing is marked by brutal surrealism, psychological intensity, and darkly comic subversion, qualities that have earned her a small but fiercely devoted readership. Readers and critics describe Attack God Inside as “brutal, relentless and extremely savvy and funny poetry… one of a kind,” underscoring her status as a cult figure in avant‑literary circles.

Warden identifies herself as a “writer, hermit in training” and a spoken‑word performer/singer, a self‑description consistent across her published author profiles. Her body of work also includes Death Is Hereditary (2004), further cementing her reputation for uncompromising, genre‑defiant writing.

Her piece “What Do You Spy With Your Beady Little Eye”—appearing in The Smol Bear Review—first appeared in Attack God Inside, placing it within the same creative period that produced her most widely recognized work.

And as avant‑garde icon Diamanda Galás has said of her:

“Tricia Warden is brilliant.” — Diamanda Galás