Goth botherer

Why is Marilyn Manson so cross?

You have the opaque blue contact lens. You have the black clothes. You have the Wahl home clippers for making exciting shaved patches on your head. You've been watching what you eat for years so you're good and skinny, especially for a middle-aged man. You've got the white foundation. You've got gallons of mascara and eye shadow in ghoulish shades. You've got spooky, nihilistic song titles. Now all you need is a song.

Trent Reznor makes it look so easy: capturing teenage angst in a way that still excites grown men, with fearsome beats, noisy guitars, industrial clanking and, most important, catchy tunes and lyrics. And that's the hard bit.

Marilyn Manson has been trying to be a musician for decades, and the only sniff of success he's had was with a cover of Tainted Love. Ouch! The poor fucker hasn't had it easy from the start. He's called Brian, about as unGoth a name as you can imagine. And he clearly wasn't blessed with any musical talent whatsoever. I'd probably be angry too. This does not remotely excuse any of the alleged behaviour towards women. But as in so many #MeToo cases, if this is one, he comes across as a deeply frustrated little man -- one who hasn't managed to become his ideal image of himself. He probably sees himself as someone who would have written Hurt is only Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman, hadn't done it first.

The thing that's hard to work out is what any of his girlfriends saw in Brian in the first place. Presumably he has made a reasonable living with his sub-industrial-Goth dross, and picking the name Marilyn Manson was, let's give him this one, inspired. But I like this kind of music and I've never managed to play a whole song by him.