BREAKING SILENCE
“I understand that you have to ask a question like that, but I don’t want to talk about rumours as much as I want to talk about music.”
Marilyn Manson is speaking down a phone line between Los Angeles and London.
So is there no truth in it, I ask?
“Like I said. I won’t qualify it with an answer.”
It’s fair to say that our conversation is going downhill rapidly.
So you only want to talk about the new album? You don’t want to talk about the allegations against you?
“There’s no allegations against me, and I’m not going to talk about it. Rumours…”
There’s an empty, black silence. Marilyn Manson – one of modern music’s most articulate figures and a man who never ducks a question – has hung up.
This wasn’t the plan. The plan was to talk to him about his new album, We Are Chaos, and his place in the era of #MeToo and Cancel Culture – a time when the more toxic aspects of old- school rock’n’roll behaviour increasingly won’t wash.
We never get as far as that. The reason: I have ventured into an area that Manson clearly does not want to engage with. It turns out that the way to silence Marilyn Manson is to say three simple words: Evan Rachel Wood.
It’s just gone 11pm in California and just after 7am in the UK when Marilyn Manson calls. These aren’t common hours for interviews, even among rock stars. But Manson isn’t so much a night owl as someone who lives in a permanent state of timelessness, curtains closed, shutting out not just the light but the world too.
He’s charm personified. Off the bat, he asks if we have spoken before. We have, twice: once briefly at an aftershow party following his first UK gig in 1996 and once in similar late night/early morning circumstances around the time of 2003’s The Golden Age Of Grotesque. On both occasions, he was funny and insightful, the smartest person in the conversation by a long stretch.
He’s no less smart today, though his), and, finally, alighting on the psychological machinery that drives .
