Marilyn Manson: ‘I created a fake world because I didn’t like the one I was living in’

After a lifetime of being an outsider, Marilyn Manson, born Brian Warner, is coming to terms with his past. In a frank and soul-searching interview, he talks to Carole Cadwalladr about the loss of his mother, growing up angry – and why he’s ready for fatherhood

Interview conducted over 24 months before Recent Marilyn Manson interview: shows pedo heart tattoo he shares wirh Johnny Depp and says he wants to make "Tinder for sexy children" called Kinder.

I have indeed, cherry-picked this particular section of the interview, for the purpose of emphasizing Brian's early life - I fully encourage others to read the rest as it provides an insight into the darkness which seems to plague him.

It turns out Manson’s lyrics about killing, about killing strangers, are true in a literal way that even he hadn’t quite realised. His father did kill strangers. And Manson, and his mother, lived with the aftermath.

“I think that he was very, very good at what he did. In the same way as the character that Martin Sheen plays in Apocalypse Now. I think my father was selected to do a job. He entered the air force at 17 and you just don’t know what your life is going to be at that age. He never talked to me about it. He still hasn’t really spoken of it. I think it was after my mother’s passing that he felt it was a time where it was necessary to tell me: ‘This is who I really am.’ And I think he was selected for being good at what he did – and that was killing people.”

When you realise that he spent the first 18 years of his life in a household dominated by the after-effects of violence, Marilyn Manson and his music, his obsessions, his sense of alienation, his fascination with killing, his insistence on living outside the strictures of mainstream American society, suddenly makes much more sense. And if it’s a light-bulb moment for me understanding who he is and where’s he come from, it also seems to have been for him.

His father had told him not to write. And he went to journalism college anyway. “The first article I ever did,” he recalls, “was about Marilyn Manson, which I wrote as myself as Brian Warner, and that was in part why I had to have a pseudonym, a stage name. I was put in a situation where I was suddenly stuck with… where I had created a Frankenstein’s monster. There was Marilyn Manson, but there was no music yet. I created a fake world maybe because I didn’t like the one I was living in. But that’s what made me make music. I had to fill in the gaps I’d created.”

It seems to me, that this particular interview does tie in to his cryptic interview from September 2017; I would say that the latter was part of a bigger decision by Brian, to make peace with his past an 'exorcise some demons', so to speak...

I have also listened to several songs on Heaven Upside Down and the lyrics seem to firmly bolster my theory that Brian was dropping hints in the 2017 interview, hence his seemingly-suspicious injuries of late.

@Wisconsin_Is_Corrupt @Commoner @carmencita @Jem777 @bungled