Somewhere in The Vatican is a butt plug with Lord Of The Lost frontman Chris Harms’s face on it. He knows this because he sent it.
“We sell them as ‘paperweights’ because you can’t sell sex toys without a different kind of merch store,” explains Chris. “But we didn’t sell them to the Pope – we sent them. I wanted the guys in The Vatican to – pun intended – open up. We sent them with tracking numbers and insurance. We know they got there, we just don’t know what happened with them.” Lord Of The Lost are very much the kind of band you’d expect to send sex toys to the home of the Catholic Church. The German band’s industrial/goth metal hybrid sound and flamboyant, fetish-adjacent imagery is designed to get them noticed. It’s worked – they’re stars in their homeland and across the rest of Europe, while the UK and USA is catching up. They’ve caught the attention of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, who invited them to support his band, and even met the recently crowned King Charles III.
And then there’s Eurovision. In what could be the weirdest moment of the year so far, Lord Of The Lost were picked to be Germany’s official entry in the final of the 2023 edition of the long-running pop contest. Theirstood out like, well, a butt plug in the Vatican. It begs the question: how the hell does a bunch of feather-sporting, PVC-clad Germans go from opening for Iron Maiden to appearing at Eurovision? “It’s a long story,” says Chris with a chuckle.
