peter steele for KERRANG! Magazine (1999),
(VIA BiggestBaddestWolve ON REDDIT)
(OP has said it suffered some water damage, so i’m transcribing what i can read from the first full sentence i can make out. but i hope you still enjoy!)
“I’m waiting for the strength to kill myself…” PETER STEELE
But, consistent with recent interviews in which he’s disparaged the album as a “waste of money,” he’s about as interested in playing his record company's hard sell games as the Pope is in the contents of Pamela Anderson's bikini. He admits that he's only here at all because “I promised the other guys (guitarist Kenny Hickey, keyboardist Josh Silver and drummer Johnny Kelly) that I'd do my job.”
Steele's apathy is all the more surprising given that “World Coming Down” is his band's most complete, cohesive and fully-realized work to date. It's also arguably the New York quartet's bleakest recording: an album which resonates with world-weary cynicism and self-loathing and sees Steele cheerlessly embracing self-destructive urges and yearning for descent into oblivion.
Given his huge appetite for sarcasm and deadpan piss-taking, the album's none-more-black atmosphere verges on goth-metal parody - but today it's disturbingly evident that Steele's current dark mood isn't just an ironic affectation.
"I FEEL like a total ingrate," he sighs, slumping his massive frame into a leather-bound armchair as we retire to the hotel bar. "I have a great life, I have my health, my family and friend; I'm not the worst-looking person in the world, I've got a half-way decent band - and yet I'm not happy. I'm just waiting for the strength to kill myself."
From other rock stars, such whinging might seem like mere melodrama. But when Peter Steele admits to suicidal thoughts, his matter-of-fact musings are coloured by personal experience. On October 15, 1989, tanked up with alcohol and self-pity, the vocalist slashed both his wrists and crawled into the back seat of his car to die. “At that time it was because my girlfriend had left me and took 95 per cent of me with her. I thought I could not go on without her,” he sighs.
“The worst part was actually
coming home and hearing that my ex-girlfriend's mother had phoned my Mom and told her that i'd been hammering on her door with blood dripping from me. That was really embarrassing.”
At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, isn't slashing your wrists more of an attention-seeking act than a genuine suicide attempt?
"I wanted to shoot myself in the head," he shrugs, "but I couldn't get a gun - which is kinda ironic, considering you seem to be able to buy a gun on every corner in Brooklyn. Okay, it was probably not a wholehearted attempt last time - but next time it will be. Life is a game, and like cards sometimes you have to know when to stop playing. l'm not getting anything out of this any more.”
You must have fans writing to you telling you that Type O Negative's music has got them through difficult times - what do you think those fans are going to make of what you're saying today?
Steele shrugs, and drains his first glass of red wine.
“I’d advise anyone who's depressed to stop reading right now,” he smiles.
THE SHADOW of death hangs ominously over “World Coming Down,” Songs like “Everyone I Love Is Dead” and “Everything Dies” are rested in tragic personal experiences for Peter Steele.
The album was written in the aftermath of the death of his father on February 14, 1995, and recorded during a period when Steele lost an aunt and uncle and watched his mother battle againat serious illness for almost a year in a New York hospital.
"I expected her to die," Steele says quietly, "and unfortunately I still think she'll be next to go. One of the most traumatic things in life is loving someone and watching them die and knowing you can't help them. I just don't know how to handle watching people die. Maybe It's cowardice but I truly wish I'm next. I've tried everything in excess - Prozac, alcohol, cocaine and women - in an effort to deal with life. Nothing works for me.”
Steele says that his parents never discussed his own suicide attempt, but admits: "I think I hurt them a lot." The death of his father, has had a "profound effect" on the singer.
Is there anything you wish you'd asked your father before he died?
“I’d just like to have asked, Why didn't you spend more time with me?,” Steele says, sounding uncharacteristically vulnerable. “When I was a kid and he'd come home from work, it was like Superman coming to the house, but I always felt like I was some little happy dog that was always underfoot and he was always trying to kick me away.”
The youngest of six children - he has five elder sisters - Steele can trace his current feelings of worthlessness right back to his childhood.
“I used to feel that I was an unsuccessful abortion,” he sighs. "That I’d pulled myself out of the bottom of the bucket and lived. I remember when school would start, my father would say things like, ‘Now we have to buy him clothes’, and I’d just wish I could unzip my skin, crawl out and slime myself under the bed and die. I felt like such a piece of shit.
“My mother still doesn't have a good word for my father,” he reveals.
“I don't think she ever forgave him for inflicting kids upon her. I'd love to say to her, 'Mom, if he was such a prick, why did you stay?’ He didn't seem a bad guy to me. I think he was just tired by the time I was born. My mother had me when she was 39 and my father was about 41.”
No offence intended, but as the youngest of six kids, did you consider the possibility that your conception might have been a mistake?
“Put it this way, there was an average of three years between my sisters, but there was eight years between me and my nearest sister,” Steele replies without flinching. “I know I'm just the result of a biological urge at four in the morning when the pharmacy was closed."
DEATH FIRST impinged upon Peter Steele's consciousness at the age of seven, when his grandfather passed away (“I didn't really understand what was going on but I saw my mother was crying, and thought that it was probably my fault,” he notes). Born of Russian and Icelandic parentage, Steele grew up in the middle of two theo-fascistic ideologies - Catholicism on one side and the Orthodox church on other”, and although he recalls praying after the deaths of his grandfather and uncle, he rejects the Christian notion of life after death.
“If Hell does exist, then I'm certainly going there,” he smiles. “I actually think it's cruel that someone who suffered their whole life is just going to go to the grave and share the same fate as people like Hitler or Stalin, who deserve to go to Hell, But no one said life is fair.”
Do you believe you have a soul?
“No, I'm just a very inefficient meat machine lubricated with mucus and semen,” he answers.
And you don't fear dying?
“I don't fear death, but i fear dying.” Steele confesses. “The thought of being in a car accident or being burned and lying in a hospital suffering is horrible. I don't like pain - If I found out I had cancer, l'd probably rob a bunch of banks and hope I'd get shot by the police.”
So when you shuffle off this mortal coil, how would you like to go?
“I've been thinking of the cleanest way to kill myself recently,” he admits.
“Everyone talks about poisoning themselves - but you vomit and shit everywhere, which is not cool. A shot in the head would be ideal, but I'd feel sorry for the person who had to clean my f**king brains up.
“I’ve got a tidier solution, actually," he smiles. "I want to attach a water pipe to the wall of my house and then take one of my weightlifting bars, sharpen the end like a spear and place it into the top of the pipe about 40 feet off the ground, with a rope attached. Then I'd lie under the other end of the pipe, point it at my temple and let go of the rope. Gravity would take its course and it wouldn't be too messy. That would be a neat end to all this misery.”
You don't go along with the view that suicide is the coward's way out?
“No, anyone who kills him or herself automatically gains my respect,” Steele shrugs, betraying not a flicker of a smile. “No one knows what lies beyond, and it's a trip from which there is no return. You have to admire anyone who'll willingly step into the unknown.”
You don't think it's a selfish act?
“It is, but I don't think if I killed myself 'd be affecting anyone detrimentally.” he considers. “If I had a wife and child I might think differently.
“I'm starting to think that children are maybe what I need, actually,” he continues. “Maybe bringing new life into the world is a way of replacing the void you feel when you lose someone. At the moment, though, I don't think that I could be so cruel to a woman as to implant her with my demon seed.”
SUCH COMMENTS are a reminder that even when discussing grave matters, Peter Steele's bone-dry sense of humour is never far from the surface. The singer concedes that “sarcasm has always been part of my insecurity” and admits: “It's a strange thing that when I'm lying people believe me, and when I'm telling the truth they don't.” But he insists that he's deadly serious about initiating his own exit from this life.
“I know someday I'll do it, I just don't know when,” he smiles. “When I feel l've become more of a burden than a help to those around me, It'll be time to take that swan-dive from the World Trade Centre. But one of the things that gives me a slight glimmer of happiness is irritating people, so l continue to live just to annoy them.
“But nothing gives me pleasure ary more,” he sighs, gulping down the dregs of his second glass of wine. “I’ve become really nihilistic and I just wonder who's going to be next to die. And I pray to God - if She's listening - that it's me.”
TYPE O Negative's ‘World Coming Down' album is out now.
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