Meeting Trent Reznor on X at the Sharon Tate Horror House

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1502076070/mondo-2000-an-open-source-history/posts

Meeting Trent Reznor on X at the Sharon Tate Horror House
6-18-10

16 days to go to raise more funds for the MONDO 2000 History Project. Please buy a reward. And please spread the word.

I have located the esteemed Mark Frost aka Somerset Mau Mau, on Facebook. Had to fight my way past many other talented Mark Frosts. “Mau Mau” was really the person who co-created the first edition of anything to do with all this … the first issue of High Frontiers… with me. He says he’s ready to try to remember something/anything from that period… which will be a heroic effort indeed. I’ve also friended many other old friends on Facebook and on LinkedIn, so I’ve got ‘em right where I want ‘em. Or else I’ve located email addresses.

I’m in the hunter-gatherer stage of the project right now – gathering names and contacts for later deployment.

And I’ve been writing a few entries in conversational style… pretending I’m talking to someone… most of the entries start at the beginning. It seems like I’ll have to trudge through my part of the story in a linear fashion, beginning to end. Because if I try to describe something that happened, say, in 1992, I have to explain who everybody is and all kinds of circumstances – stuff that will probably already have been ‘splained in the final book.

This piece below is an exception to the rule… and is rather long. It’s the story of Mondo Vanilli and Timothy Leary going to a housewarming party thrown by Nine Inch Nail mainman Trent Reznor after he moved into Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s old place… yes, that place.

So, ok… it’s very name-droppy (Drop names, not acid!), but that’s the way it was. And yes, I’m throwing this up because I think it may gain some last minute attention before the end of our Kickstarter period on July 4.

btw, all entries are experimental at this point, and I welcome suggestions...

Hey! We do need more money. This is a two year project with bells and whistles and site management and video and writing and interviewing. Let’s just say we would love to get this at least up above 12k during this final push.

16 days to go to raise more funds for the MONDO 2000 History Project. Please buy a reward. And please spread the word.

I hope you enjoy this entry.

R.U.
****************************
November 1992
R.U. Sirius

It was about three months after I’d quit MONDO 2000. We (Mondo Vanilli) headed down to L.A. with a demo tape and this very fun and very silly little Xeroxed package offering music industry behemoths the opportunity to get in on the cutting edge of cyber-absurdism.

Actually, the day before, I’d discovered that issue #8 of MONDO 2000 had come out in my absence. It was the first one without me. I was down at Tower Records off of Telegraph Ave (in Berkeley) and I saw it on the stands. And I actually bought it. I could have gone up to the MONDO house and grabbed a dozen for free, but pride etcetera… you know. And it looked great. The Negativland v. The Edge confrontation (as mentioned earlier, I had walked out of MONDO in an argument with Alison over whether to run it at all) was in it, but it was a much shorter version and it wasn’t mentioned on the cover. I read the issue all the way through that night and it was the best issue ever – it was the most flawless and sophisticated issue yet, which was a bit upsetting, actually. I kind of wanted it to totally fall apart in my absence. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that it was good since St. Jude and Andrew Hultkrans were still guiding the editorial content.

We were going to stay with Leary in Beverly Hills and we had a whole lot of really amazing music industry connections to look up. I had connections because of MONDO 2000. And we were going to meet this girl Yvonne, from Chicago, who had gone to art school with (Mondo Vanilli musical force) Scrappi. And she knew all kinds of people in the industry. She was sort of… well… let’s just say that Al Jourgenson called her a groupie. I certainly wouldn’t pin that tag on her… because she wouldn’t accept it and secondly, because she’s a great, multidimensional, real human being -- but she did hang out with a lot of musicians, let’s put it that way. She has been a babysitter for Anita Pallenberg, which to me, was the height of hipster cred. And she knew a lot of people. I also had heard from Billy Idol, who was just starting work on his infamous cyberpunk thing. So I had his phone number to plan a visit.

On our first full day in L.A., we saw a bunch of people. I think the first person we met was Cara Burns, an old friend of Yvonne’s. She was part of a very powerful law firm, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. They represented lots of high-powered people in the entertainment industry. And she agreed to take us on, which I think was ultimately our undoing, actually. And we met with this guy who was like one of the top agents representing bands… as I recall, he mostly signed people to Warner Brothers. Our connections were actually too good.

At some point during that day, I called Casey Cannon, a MONDO friend from LA who knew everybody in Hollywood. At that time, she was making most of those short two minute previews you see in movie theaters… and her husband Van Ling was with Lightstorm and was Cameron’s go-to guy on the new technology. I must have called her from a phone booth since, like most people at that time, I didn’t have a cell phone. And she told me that we had to go to Trent Reznor’s party that night.

As she informed me, Reznor had just rented the ol’ Tate mansion. That is, he’d rented the house that had been occupied by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate… the place where Sharon and all those other people were slaughtered by the Mansonoids. And this was to be his housewarming party.

I didn’t have a pen, so I promised to call her back when we got back to Tim’s house and get Reznor’s phone number. And almost as soon as I got there, she called me. “You’ve really got to go meet Trent Reznor!” Plus, she noted that Leary’s house was right around the corner from Reznor’s new place. So I got the phone number and called it right away.

I always have anxiety about calling famous people – a fear of rejection. Particularly then, sort of at the height of MONDO’s media hype… when some famous person said, “Who the fuck are you?” it bruised my ego. (Now, it feels like there’s less at stake.) But I called, and fortunately, I got an answering machine. And I was able to leave the message that I was staying at Timothy Leary’s house. Howdy, neighbor! The Leary name was a first-rate calling card.

The phone rang almost constantly at Tim’s house, but at some point a couple of hours later, he came out of his office with his phone in hand and announced that he was talking to Peter Christopherson (Coil, Throbbing Gristle) -- who identified himself to Tim as Pighead Christopherson -- and we were invited to Trent Reznor’s housewarming party. It was all a bit of a synchronicity too, because – at that time -- this underground theater group was putting on a play based on a conversation Leary had with Charlie Manson when he was in prison and there were posters and flyers for it around the house. Leary was pretty excited about the play.

Just before we were about to head to the party, Tim came out with a mint dish filled with pink ecstasy tabs, offering them around. Simone (Third Arm – the other member of Mondo Vanilli) took one and I think Yvonne may have taken one. Scrappi and I refused.

But something about the historical resonances nagged at me. What would the small town freak who I had been back in the ‘70s think about refusing a hit from Timothy Leary before heading up to the infamous Manson horror house to a rock star party. After a few minutes, as we worked on our beers before heading out, I snuck over and pocketed two hits. I went in the bathroom, broke one of them in half and took it. (I guess it seemed more shameful to be a lightweight and take half-a-hit than it was to just refuse it all together, thus the subterfuge.)

I must have had an empty stomach because it came on quick and rather strong for a low dose. Reznor’s new home was only a few blocks from Leary’s, but it was on some windy roads and getting there became interesting when a red Ferrari started tailgating and some guy began gesticulating wildly out the window. He cut in front of us and made us stop. Out popped Gibby Haynes, shouting. He wanted to know if we knew “the way.” He didn’t even have to say the way to what. Yes. He let us get in front again and we made our way to the Reznor party.

On arrival, an enthusiastic Gibby jumped out of the car to meet Tim and bragging that the red Ferrari was on loan from Johnny Depp. With the ecstasy coming on, the entire L.A. media world started to seem like a serene and glittery playground filled with happy children playing grownup and I settled into a comfort zone. The world was a friendly place. Relatively speaking, of course.

There were two buildings on the Reznor grounds. One relatively small looking house and another building that looked like a warehouse space. The lights were all out in the house and a sign said to go to the other building.

The scene inside was grunge boy meets Barbie doll. Very odd. The guys – who all looked to be in their thirties -- were all in jeans and t’s and leather jackets, with long hair and puffy beer faces. (OK… me too… except I had the lambskin, fur collar, floor length overcoat.) And the girls -- who looked like they were just about past high school -- were all perfect mostly blonde babes with inflated boobs and noses pointed to the sky wearing impossibly short skirts and generally dressed and made up for sex. And for the most part, the guys and girls weren’t together.

Gloomy Kraut techno blared too loudly for conversation, and the general mood seemed dour. Everyone carried plastic cups filled with beer. No one was talking to each other. The girls all looked disappointed. No rock stars in sight. This was nothing more than a college kegger with a bit of hipster edge. Where the hell was Trent?

Leary looked lost and confused. Nevertheless he asserted his tribal leadership and brought us all to safety -- a place to sit –- some benches around an unlit fireplace. Once settled, Tim and Simone found comfort locked in each other’s eyes, while Scrappi, Yvonne and I continued to scan the room in search of a glimmer of glamour.

After awhile, I realized I had to move. If I sat there any longer, I was going to trance out for the entire evening into the rather boring pink spongecake that the inside of my head was turning into. Yvonne must have been feeling the same thing. By this point, too bored for paranoia, she suggested we “creepy crawly” around the grounds, which made me laugh.

As we were exiting the building, Reznor appeared and greeted us with a sly grin. He followed us out, and around the corner was Anthony Kiedas. Reznor introduced me. Kiedas asked: “Your name is Are You Serious?” Somehow my ecstasy displaced ego mustered a response. I looked up at the towering pop star whose face had been on my TV screen a thousand times over the previous decade and smiled and said, “Yes. And who are you?” Kiedas deflated. “I’m Anthony,” he muttered, humbly, and we shook hands.

And so, Yvonne and I soldiered on to check the perimeters of the ol’ Tate mansion, wondering what walls a creepy crawler would crawl over; what bushes would a Squeaky Fromme creep through (Fromme actually wasn’t involved in the Tate-LaBianca episodes). It was all just a funny game and Squeaky was just a famous name… like Reznor or Kiedas or Leary. Somehow the horrible reality of that day some 25 years earlier didn’t feel any closer at hand on the grounds of the ol’ Tate mansion than it had from any other spot on the planet. If there are ghosts, maybe ecstasy chases them away.

After a good half hour of wandering around, and Yvonne videotaping the arriving party guests (she kept her video camera with her at all times), we noticed a little bit of light now peaking out from behind the curtains of the smaller house. We slinked up to the door. There was a handwritten sign that read: “COME IN HERE TO BE KILLED.”

While Yvonne laughed it off, I actually thought it through. Let’s see. Reznor is a major rock star with money and ambition. He doesn’t want to die right now from a lethal injection, particularly one that doesn’t get you off first. Now, maybe if he had spent the last year of his life sucking up to Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson only to have his song lyrics ripped… achhh! Don’t go there. Thankfully, my little reverie was interrupted before it turned into full blown empathy for the devil. Yvonne did the only sensible thing. She opened the door and walked in, camera first.

There they were. Seventeen Illuminati figures, including Marilyn Monroe, George H.W. Bush, David Bowie and The Penguin, all in black robes, huddled over Britney Spears, laying in the center of a Pentagram while Reznor raised his blade.

OK. I just made that up. Actually, it was terribly normal inside. Kiedas and Gibby and Trent were there, and some music industry types, and the hottest of the young girls, clearly selected with care from the warehouse space. Within minutes, Tim and Simone wandered in. Record industry guys came over wanting to ask me about virtual reality. Here I was, in this world historic cosmically weird Manson horror house with Timothy Leary and rock stars sorta situation and I was getting into the same conversations that I would have had back in San Francisco.

There was one moments of vintage verbal violence. Gibby started screaming at some way porno looking girl because she wouldn’t believe that this greasy looking longhaired dude with a southern accent was the driver of the red hot Ferrari and that he’d borrowed it from his good friend, Johnny Depp.

“CUNT!” he screamed. “Stupid fucking L.A. cunt!” But it wasn’t to be taken seriously. She laughed at him, extended her middle finger and walked out and he immediately turned his attention elsewhere.

And that’s basically the whole story. I did see a laughing Reznor waving around a baggie of mushrooms and heading into a room with one of the girls. Maybe that’s why he liked the Mondo Vanilli tape so much that he called the next day to offer us a recording contract.

Later that night, Gibby came up to Leary’s house and started asking if he’d ever seen any of that real acid… “like the stuff you guys used to take in the ‘60s.” Tim got annoyed. “LSD is LSD. It’s just that they make the doses smaller.” Then, Gibby started ranting about how nobody tries to change the world by hijacking planes anymore, and Tim got even more annoyed and denounced terrorism in a couple of brief sentences. Gibby paced the entire house in long rapid steps for a few minutes and then flew out the door. I believe they eventually became friends.

Mansonites Converge at El Coyote

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-08-13/columns/the-last-supper/

The Last Supper: Mansonites Converge at El Coyote
By Skylaire Alfvegren
August 12, 2009

El Coyote is Movieland’s idea of a Mexican restaurant: The lighting is garish, the margaritas stiff. Waitresses clad in petticoated, off-the-shoulder cotton fiestas have been serving, as they call it, “authentic California-style Mexican food” to actors and others since 1931, but the blood-red leather booth in the back played host to its most infamous party on the night of August 8, 1969, when actress Sharon Tate dined there with Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger. Later that night, the group would be slain by followers of Charles Manson in Tate’s home at 10050 Cielo Drive. Tall, blond, and forever gripping a camcorder, odd-teur Jon Aes-Nihil (director of the gory cult classic Manson Family Movies) gathered his unusual band of miscreants for “the Last Supper” this past Saturday night, as he has done every August 8 since 1979. Manson’s long-standing appeal? “It was the first time the hippies struck back,” one diner commented. Or was it?

Never a true crime buff nor serial-killer dilettante, I had long viewed Manson symbolically — a guitar-strumming ecoterrorist with a Messiah complex, who effectively extinguished the Age of Aquarius, but on this, the 40th anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca slayings, a different picture emerged.

Manson, suspected of being both an FBI informant and agent provocateur, may well have been a patsy. “The FBI took out the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the Weather Underground, and it’s a contention that the murders were orchestrated,” author Adam Gorightly pointed out between sips from a margarita. Manson’s connections to military intelligence, the Church of Scientology, government-sponsored mind-control experiments and the ’60s occult underground ripple through The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Gorightly’s definitive Manson tome, recently rereleased by Creation Books.

Manson referred to his family as “slippies,” and only grew his hair long in the months preceding the murders; but because of Manson, “it was a long time before you saw longhairs portrayed in a positive light.”

Aes-Nihil’s group of historians, writers, musicians and filmmakers traded stories of the weird, twisted Hollywood of old, attracting the attention of a pudgy industry type who, with no prompting, described the “peaceful vibe” surrounding Tate’s house when Trent Reznor recorded “Helter Skelter” there with a not-yet-famous Marilyn Manson. Archivist Aes-Nihil (short for “aesthetic nihilism”) poked his ever-present camera in the man’s face, adding to the hundreds of hours of Manson-related footage he’s acquired over the decades, smirking all the while.

In all the years I’d known Aes-Nihil, I’d always thought it was the Family’s creep factor that had attracted him. But “there’s infinitely more to the Manson thing than Tex Watson killing people,” he explained. “I’m obsessed with the effect the murders had on the ’60s, since I was there, part of a group somewhat like the Family. When the story came out, we didn’t believe it for a second.”

A man of few words, he resumed shooting the party’s chatter: Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey had cursed Tate’s husband, director Roman Polanski, after they’d had a falling-out on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. Drug-addled orgies at the house on Cielo Drive were filmed and later sold on the black market by crooked LAPD cops, who’d stolen them from the crime scene. Family member Patricia Krenwinkel, in correspondence with researcher John Judge, swore she had been a victim of mind control. The acid Manson gave his followers was allegedly of the same, government-issued variety “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz had been dosed with while in the military. Standard dinner-party conversation.

Gathering the assembled for a postdinner portrait, Aes-Nihil continued: “Charlie and Sharon [Tate] have been baptized in the well of eternity via mass culture and universal myth. As for Charlie, he’s a modern-day Nietzsche.” This is apparent, he says, in Manson’s unedited interviews. “If a lot of what Charlie has said had been attributed to someone who is politically correct, it would be hailed as genius.”

I heard him out, knowing that many people don’t, and smiled for his camera.

A most bizarre encounter with Marilyn Manson

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6432653.ece

From The Times
June 5, 2009
A most bizarre encounter with Marilyn Manson
A friendly, forthcoming Marilyn Manson, conspicuous by his absinthe, talks about loose women, drugs and role models
Hugo Rifkind

Hopeless naif that I am, I don’t immediately realise that Marilyn Manson is totally wasted on absinthe. I can see he’s drinking the stuff, but I assume it’s just for show. By the end, though, when he’s showing me the picture on his iPhone of the swastika freshly shaved into his new girlfriend’s pubic hair, I know differently.

“I drew it on,” he’s saying as his publicist ushers him from the room, “with blue eyeliner. I had to call the hotel: ‘Can I have a protractor, please?’ It was 6am. But you gotta, uh, line it up properly. You know?”

Sort of. But that was later. For now, we’re just getting started in a room at the London Metropolitan Hotel. Manson, the self-proclaimed Antichrist Superstar and God of F*** and the major reason why Americans tend to be scared of their goths and not just snigger at them as we do, has an album to promote.

He didn’t want to come in here with me. He wanted to stay next door with that statuesque blonde, the one with the enormous heels and tiny Lycra dress. I don’t know who she is. I do know that she’s not the new girlfriend, the one with the unusual pelvic topiary. I checked. Different face.

Manson was out last night, downstairs in the Met Bar. I have a hunch that last night might not have ended yet. Today he is wearing huge sunglasses, streaky make-up, black lipgloss and a black hooded top with the hood up at which he keeps pushing, as though it were hair. He has leather trousers on and black platform boots. The window behind us keeps rattling, and he keeps thinking it is gunfire. Little details of his evening filter out.

“Somebody left a knife in my room,” he growls, in that crackly, gravelly voice. “Like, a proper small knife? I almost used it. On a woman. But then I thought . . . no. I didn’t have a shovel or anything. And the airport, immigration, can’t bury her in the shower curtain . . .” Like all the horrible things that Manson says, this is said with a disarmingly sweet smile. You laugh. There’s wit here, peeking out through the aniseed haze. Later he’ll feel his side, and frown. “I caused . . . I have a bruise. It goes from here to here. I don’t know where it came from. That means I had a good night. Loose women. Intoxicated on loose women.”

Manson has his own brand of absinthe, dubbed Mansinthe. That’s not what he’s drinking at the moment. “I don’t drink my own absinthe,” he says. “I drink this. It’s Serpis. I based the taste of mine on it. It’s like black liquorice, which I f***in’ hate. Try it,” he adds, passing me the glass. “Mmmm,” I say, sniffing deeply. I pass it back.

The High End of Low is Manson’s seventh album. It’s funny, you’ll almost certainly have heard of him, but could you could name any of his songs? It’s 15 years since he burst on to the public consciousness on MTV, with the video of his death metal cover of Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams. Remember that? Him painted black, riding a pig? “That pig,” he says, “did not want to be ridden. And I did not want to ride it. I have ridden no other pigs. That sounds like such a misogynist statement.”

Manson was born plain Brian Warner in Ohio in 1969, and was actually not, contrary to the best showbiz hoax ever, the geeky one out of The Wonder Years. What he was, briefly, was a rock journalist, before starting his first band, Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. He finally emerged, all those years ago, from under the wing of the producer Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails. The debut album, Portrait of an American Family (1994), sold two and a half million copies.

The next, Smells Like Children (1995), sold four million. The third, Antichrist Superstar (1996), has sold nearly eight million. Musically speaking, none were exactly ground-breaking, but look behind the bondage, Nazis, Satanism, death fetishism and long black fingernails and you’ll find a perfectly respectable sort of industrial metal, maybe halfway between Reznor himself and Guns N’ Roses. Manson, though, was always about the whole package.

“I’m not trying to be something that is simply a clown,” he rasps. “I’m a role villain. Role models are mannequins. I want to be the person who f***s shit up.” Then he flinches. “Is that guns?” he says. It’s the window, I tell him again.

Britain, I think, struggles a bit with Marilyn Manson. He’s all-American in his own way, and we don’t really get the references. Most crucially, we just don’t think he really means it. We just see a sort of zombie Boy George, pretending. He knows this, and minds it. “This has always been the most cynical and calculating country,” he says, “and the country I most want to impress. All my heroes are British, whether it’s Aleister Crowley or Bowie. All the best art has come from your godforsaken island. And it makes me mad.”

Just because we don’t get it, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to get. In America Manson remains a poster boy for the disaffected. A fortnight ago Justin Doucet, a schoolboy in Louisiana, forced a teacher to say “Hail Marilyn Manson” before shooting at him and then shooting himself. Manson brings this up himself. “What do I say?” he says. “Thanks for hiring that kid to promote the record? No! It’s f***ed up. I didn’t say do it. But I get blamed for it.”

Ten years ago, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher in the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, it was swiftly reported that both were Manson fans. Two years later, when he next played in the state capital, Denver, he was still receiving death threats. “I had, like, 30 undercover cops escorting me to the stage,” he says. “Everyone was telling me not to do it. My girlfriend, my friends. I had my mother on the phone, Hunter S. Thompson going ‘F*** ’em! Come to my house! I got a tank!’ And onstage, at every moment, I thought it was the last thing I’d do.”

Fifteen minutes before going on he was being interviewed by the film-maker Michael Moore. “Boning for Concubines,” says Manson now, meaning Bowling for Columbine, Moore’s documentary about gun control. To almost everybody’s surprise, Manson came across as a calm, lucid voice, discussing the problems of a society that celebrated war and consumption. When Moore asked him what he would have said to the killers, Manson replied that he wouldn’t say anything. “I’d listen to what they had to say,” he said. “And that’s what nobody did.”

“I don’t like that movie,” he says now. “But I like the fact that it opened a window for me, to have people go, ‘Oh wow, you’re smart.’ Because they saw me in that movie and I could form two sentences. And last week . . . you hear that? Is it firecrackers?”

Window, I tell him. “Oh yeah,” he says, and carries on. Doucet, the schoolboy, is in a coma now. “And of course,” Manson says, “he was 15. Because that’s my number. Marilyn Manson, 15. Brian Hugh Warner, 15. Look.” He pulls down his T-shirt and there, below his neck, is tattooed the number 15. Why? God knows. I ask. He just says “15” again, and I count the letters in “Marilyn Manson”. That’s when I ask him how much absinthe he’s had today. He replies with a diagram, drawn on my notebook. It’s a rectangle, coloured in. “Is that glass,” I ask, “or a bottle?” “It’s life,” he says.

Marilyn Manson isn’t 15. He turned 40 in January. It looks a bit different, all this dark lord of gothic angst business, when you’re 40, doesn’t it? “The 40 part doesn’t matter,” he says, although he sounds a bit annoyed. “God decided to forsake me so I became a vampire, sold my soul to the Devil and f*** off, good luck to the rest of you.”

He says he’s not slowing down as he gets older, not at all, and still takes drugs whenever he can. “I learnt a new lesson,” he says. “Do drugs and drink when you are in a good mood, not in a bad mood. And you’ll be happier.” This failure to calm down reportedly had a lot to do with the breakup of his marriage in 2007 to Dita Von Teese, the burlesque artist.

They went to court, famously, over who was to get custody of their three cats. “I saw her two days ago,” he says. “At a bar. And I was like, ‘Hey, you’re my ex-wife!’ And we got along well. So that was nice.” And who got the cats in the end? “She got the boy cats. I got the virgin girl cat.” He pauses. “Did you know that if you say ‘in the end’ it infers anal sex?”

No, I say, and I ask him if he has a girlfriend at the moment. “No,” he says, and thinks. “Yes,” he says, “but I’m single.” After Von Teese he was involved with the actress Evan Rachel Wood, but that’s not who he is talking about. That’s when he starts hunting for the swastika picture. He won’t tell me her name out loud, but he writes it down on my notebook. Stoya. Later I Google her. She’s a Serbo-Scottish porn star, aged 22.

He’s fun to chat to, Marilyn Manson, absinthe or not. But I just don’t think the Antichrist Superstar and God of F** is in a particularly good place right now. Maybe it’s an existential panic. The corpse-in-black-lipstick look, it’s getting old. He must know that. Who wears black platforms in 2009? And also, I just keep thinking about that swastika. At a push, I can see how a certain kind of guy might find it exciting. But at 40? Still? I suppose he does really mean it, and always has. Poor guy.

The High End of Low is released by Polydor. Manson plays the Download Festival, Donington Park, Derby, on June 13

Nine Inch Nails offer free album

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7384324.stm

Nine Inch Nails offer free album
Monday, 5 May 2008

US rock band the Nine Inch Nails are giving away a second new album online, just two months after the first.

The 10-track record, called The Slip, is available for free from the band's website "as a thank you to our fans for your continued support", they said.

In March, the group released nine songs from their instrumental album Ghosts I-IV for free on the site, with the full 36 tracks costing $5 (£2.55).

The group sold more than 10 million albums in the US between 1992 and 2007.

But they have been outspoken critics of the music industry and the price of CDs.

Singer and songwriter Trent Reznor has attacked his former record label Universal for "ripping off" fans, and once told a crowd to "steal, steal and steal some more".

The band's deal with Universal has now ended, but The Slip will still be coming out on CD, Reznor said.

"For those of you interested in physical products, fear not. We plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in July."

The move follows the pay-what-you-like offer to download Radiohead's latest album In Rainbows and Coldplay's recent decision to give away the first single from their new album.