Marilyn Manson has pretty much based his entire career on doing things that shock and surprise his audience, but a journalist unwittingly found himself the subject of one of those stunts recently.
Alexis Petridis was interviewing Manson for The Guardian in Berlin about his forthcoming album 'Heaven Upside Down' when the musician demonstrated a unique technique for illustrating a point he was making.
Manson, who was drinking neat vodka in a 'dimly lit' hotel room, had also reportedly pulled a fake gun on Petridis as he entered the room.
He wrote: “It is while discussing the difference between his stage persona and his day-to-day life that Marilyn Manson leans over and flicks me in the testicles. This comes as quite a surprise: I have encountered a lot of unusual things as a journalist, but have thus far managed to get by without an interviewee touching my genitals.
"More surprising still is that leaning over and flicking my testicles appears to form part of his answer to a question about whether he has ever felt consumed by the character he created a quarter of a century ago, in the same way that Bowie struggled to separate himself from Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke. Certainly, the way he says: ‘That’s the difference!’ immediately afterwards suggests it is, but I’m not sure.”
He added: "For one thing, I’m distracted by my sore testicles, and, for another, I wasn’t really following his line of argument at the time. First, he took my notepad, wrote ‘person’ on it and added an ‘a’ at the end. ‘I’m this and I’m this,’ he says. ‘A person and a persona. But I can’t really divide the two. There’s a difference on the stage; people I don’t know I just seduce, in a lot of ways. You go offstage and people … even me and you now, talking …’ His voice trails off and, while I’m trying to work out whether he has just said he does inhabit a different persona on stage he flicks me in the testicles. It’s all a bit peculiar, but then the interview has been peculiar from the minute I stepped into the Berlin hotel suite where Manson is receiving the press.”
You can read the full entertaining interview here.
