by Erin Broadley
“I had nearly both of my feet in the grave.”
– Ville Valo
For Ville Valo, life as a musician is very surreal, or very “Dali-esque” as he might say, and he’s not referring to the painter’s infamous mustache. In some ways Valo is still waiting for the day when he wakes up and finds out it’s all been a giant LSD experiment in the Finnish military, where institutional illusions of grandeur and dreamlike oddities smash artistic ambition through the looking glass of fame, personal casualties be damned. “Its like ‘Alice in Wonderland’,” he says. “Because there are so many unexpected things happening all the time…surrealism actually exists in your everyday life…youre there ‘in the looking glass’ so to speak.”
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by Nicole Powers
“It’s likely that zombies don’t eat brains.”
– Matt Mogk of the Zombie Research Society
May is Zombie Awareness Month. To mark it, and help you, dear reader, prepare for what many think is an inevitable and impending invasion, we organized a round table discussion (by phone) with one of the world’s leading zombie experts, Matt Mogk, the Founder & Head Researcher of the Zombie Research Society, and one of the world’s leading zombie enthusiasts, Scott Ian, of the heavy metal band Anthrax and the supergroup The Damned Things. Are you prepared for the apocalypse?
Read our exclusive interview with Scott Ian (Anthrax) and Matt Mogk (Zombie Research Society) on SuicideGirls.com.
by Aaron Detroit
“You can protest all day, but you gotta go drinking at night.”
– Al Jourgensen
Al Jourgensen has just released the last chapter in the annals of his nearly three decade-long career as the self-professed maniac behind industrial godfathers Ministry. It’s appropriately titled The Last Sucker and also serves as the final piece in Ministrys trilogy of albums attacking the Bush Administration and the United States current political system. Al is also throwing one last party, in the shape of a world tour and a party album of covers, before he splits to allow fans a chance to say goodbye and dance with him on Ministry’s grave.
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by Erin Broadley
“I’m really able to tell a story and make emotion come to life.”
– Debbie Harry
Before punk and new wave erupted in New York City in the late ’70s, female pop singers were like carefully crafted charms dangled from a bracelet; they were chanteuses whose sexuality was packaged as the ultimate pop commodity. When the tokenism of ’60s rock finally gave way to the rebel yell of late ’70s and early ’80s punk, female singers pushed a brazen, me-first attitude and redefined tough-girl with a heart of gold, or in Debbie Harry’s case, the romantic she is, a heart of glass. And though some said she was too beautiful for punk, Debbie Harry was more than just somebodys darling.
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by Keith Daniels
“I can play every instrument but, like, really shitty.”
– Seth Bogart
Hunx and His Punx are a Bay Area punk band fronted by Arizona transplant and sometime hairdresser Seth Bogart, a.k.a. Hunx, that have a Ramones-like musical philosophy: take ‘60s Phil Spector-ish girl group music and simplify and speed it up. Their songs are mostly direct odes to love and sex, sung in Hunx’ distinctly nasal delivery, supported by the lovely harmonies of his all-female backing group. Having just released their first full-length album, Too Young To Be In Love, and played a solid week at SXSW, Hunx and his punkettes are now embarking on a nationwide tour — so I was lucky Seth found a few minutes to talk with SuicideGirls about why SXSW sucks, getting stoned, and French perverts.
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by Nicole Powers
“I’m looking for the mystery in the shadows.”
– Nikki Sixx
“My dream has always been the same since I was a kid, to somehow show people life through different colored lenses,” writes Nikki Sixx in the introduction to his new book, a collection of very personal words and images called This Is Gonna Hurt. “Now more than ever I feel it’s important to see that way. We need to be aware that the warped perspectives of television, Internet, and magazines are sometimes poisonous,” he continues. “I cannot walk down the street without feeling I am being subjected to some constant sales pitch on what we should look like, smell like, dress like, or even worse, what we should be like.”
A devout nonconformist, Sixx wears many hats in his life. SuicideGirls last caught up with Mötley Crüe’s co-founder and bass player shortly before the release of his bestselling book, The Heroin Diaries, a collection of journal entries that chronicled his self-destructive – but ultimately self-saving – journey to the other side of drugs. To accompany its release, Sixx put together a side project called Sixx:A.M. – a band which went on to have a life of its own. The musician, songwriter and author also has his own clothing line, and hosts two radio shows, Sixx Sense (which airs Monday to Friday) and The Side Show Countdown (which is broadcast on weekends).
But it’s Sixx’s work as a photographer that made a further conversation with the multi-talented man mandatory. His photography, as seen in this first bound collection, is shockingly beautiful. However, the beauty within the images is of a kind that complies with nothing except Sixx’s own very individual aesthetic. Reflecting the contradictions in life that have troubled him in the past, his often preconceived portraits are both ethereal and hyperreal at the same time.
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In celebration of 420, SuicideGirls rolls up a fatty and shares five of our fave mellow interview moments.
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