![]() “And that vulnerability allowed some demons to come in.” “Peter was a very sweet, very funny guy, but he was also very fragile,” says Sal, who left the band after Bloody Kisses was released. The band’s funereal cover of Seals & Crofts’ soft-rock chestnut Summer Breeze may have seemed like a gag on the surface, yet Peter invested it with genuine longing and pain. It was there, too, in their self-coined nickname – the Drab Four, a reference to Peter Steele’s beloved Beatles.īut just as often, the irony and sarcasm masked a troubled soul. It was there in the title Black No.1 – their epic paean to doomed gothic love was named after a shade of over-the-counter hair dye. Type O’s sense of humour might not have clicked with everyone, but it was still a major part of the band’s DNA. “In Europe, we got accused of being Nazis at one point,” says Kenny. The latter addressed accusations of racism that had plagued Type O in their early days, a hangover from Peter’s time in Carnivore. Two songs on Bloody Kisses, the pounding Kill All The White People and We Hate Everyone, drew a line with the band’s hardcore-metal past. Type O’s music wasn’t just a racket from the crypt designed for goths and fetishists. We were going, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ We were just four guys from Brooklyn, we weren’t living that lifestyle.” “There were people dressed up and walking around on leashes. “It was this underground BDSM place with all this torture equipment,” says Sal. At one point, the band were booked to play a club in New York that turned out to be a sex dungeon. The gigs started getting bigger – and weirder. And the band soon started attracting a lot of female fans because of it.” I remember there was a store in East Village that started selling all kinds of ruffled shirts and velvet jackets and shit. “It was around the time of that movie, Interview With The Vampire, and everything blew up after that. “The whole vampire allure connected with people,” says Sal. That non-existent goth metal scene had suddenly been willed into life. Amazingly, an edited version of the latter became a US radio hit, helping propel Bloody Kisses to Gold and then Platinum status in the US. It was followed by Christian Woman, eight minutes of quasi-religious erotica that found Steele intoning the line ‘Jesus Christ looks like me’ in his sonorous voice. Black No.1 (Little Miss Scare-All) was a sarcastic, multi-part 11-minute ode to a girlfriend who had wronged the singer, that came with Addams Family-style finger clicks. The album’s first two singles repositioned Type O at the forefront of a non-existent goth metal scene. (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images)
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