'90s baddie may be long in the pointy tooth but his Copps fans love him
BY ROB FAULKNER
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Shock rocker Marilyn Manson took the stage like a gawky kid who's too old for halloween but too fond of candy to give up his platform boots.
Greeting about 4,000 frenzied fans in a scaled-down Copps Coliseum, the man who used to scare us desended on an MM-inscribed throne surrounded by floor-to-ceiling banners.
"Everythings been said before, there's nothing left to say anymore," Manson sang in This Is The New Shit, off his latest album, The Golden Age Of Grotesque.
His fans - mostly young and clad in black - ate up his 80 minute show, crowd-surfing, moshing and throwing middle fingers in the air.
At the chorus - "babble, babble, bitch, bitch, rebel, rebel, party, party" - they all screamed like there was no tomorrow. Or atleast no need to speak tomorrow.
As the '90s baddie gets in long pointy tooth, he's fighting to stay edgy with a themed tour based on 'degenerate' art of Weimar Berlin, vaudeville and the decadence of 1930s Hollywood
Last night, we had a peek.
Donning bowler hat and tails he took fans on a tour of cabaret life in pre-war Germany with the help of two scantily clad women of the night
That led to perverse cover of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams during which he simulated several act of depravity with the ladies.
Earlier, like a reminder to the old times. "Everytime I come to Canada there's some kind of church that doesn't like me," Manson said before spouting an anti-god polemic that would make a priest faint.
But unlike his last visit to Hamilton in 1997, he lacked the two-dozen Christian Picketers and the anti-Manson lobby that would have been an easy foil.
On The Dope Show, an older tune, Manson put on extended arms that let him callapse the fake limbs into creative shapes. A novelty the first time, they developed into a tribute to Manson's fellow primates.
At this point in his 13-years career, many see Manson returning to the industrial metal sound that made him (in)famous in the mid- '90s by winning him a fan base of disaffected white kids with darkened eyes from the suburbs.
Now he's become a Frank Zappa-style paragon of free speech. Especially when he tells his fans to "be obscene" in the catchy new tune Mobscene. On that tune, he kept the audience rapt by tearing the panties off one of his naughty uniformed burlesque dancers.
His set changed quickly as stage hands wheeled out a three-metre high podium from which Manson, now clad in deaths' head make-up and Mickey Mouse ears, led the audience in a quick chorus of the Disney song It's a Small World After All.
The fans were with him. Even the girl who decided a not-so-small world to share with the amoralist.
Seconds before Manson launched into one more ear-bleedingly heavy song, she flashed her breasts at him.
One small act of audience participation.
From the Tuesday, October 21st, 2003 Hamilton Spectator
(including the picture to the left)