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Peter Steele, the ultimate goth metal figurehead, never saw Type O Negative as a goth metal band. “The ‘goth’ term was thrust upon us by the media,” he told The Aquarian in 1996. “People, in general, need to know where to put product. It’s like trying to hammer a semi-circular piece of wood into a circular hole. We kind of fit, but kind of don’t.”
That opinion was contrarian then and it’s contrarian now. Type O Negative remain the goth metal band by which all other goth metal bands are judged. And their fourth album, October Rust, is the perfect encapsulation of their dark majesty – a record that married the black-hole density of Black Sabbath to the gloom of The Sisters Of Mercy and the atmospheric sweep of prime Pink Floyd, all shot through with their frontman’s unique mix of obsidian-black humour and doomed romance.
Peter was into the goth thing
Johnny Kelly
Thirty years after its release, October Rust remains the unholy grail for many musicians who have taken on a little of its dark DNA themselves. It’s been held up as an inspiration by everyone from My Dying Bride to Carpenter Brut.
“When you listen to Type O, you get at one with the music, in a special bubble,” says Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia, a woman who knows a thing or two about goth metal.
“We weren’t really paying attention to any of that stuff at the time, we were just thinking of what we were doing next,” says former Type O drummer Johnny Kelly today. “It wasn’t until years later that we realised just how much it resonated with other people.”
![Type O Negative - Love You To Death [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/xD5No_JRrZw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Type O Negative were leaders in a field of one long before October Rust was released. They emerged from New York’s grotty hardcore and metal scene, where Peter Steele had made his name as the singer of knuckledragging metal provocateurs Carnivore. That band’s street sound was still present in Type O’s early music, though it would gradually be dialled back.
By the time of 1993’s breakout Bloody Kisses album, they’d struck the perfect balance between the ‘goth’ and the ‘metal’ parts of the goth metal equation.
“It was Peter who was into the goth thing,” says Johnny, who replaced original Type O drummer Sal Abruscato in late 1993, a few months after Bloody Kisses came out. “But he loved 80s pop too – Duran Duran, Devo, that kind of thing.”
Bloody Kisses had been a surprise success, propelled past half a million sales (and eventually a million) by deliciously dark singles Black No.1 (Little Miss Scare-All) and Christian Woman. Yet as befits a band who prided themselves on their pessimism and once printed up t-shirts bearing the ironic legend ‘Team Prozac’, they had little-to-no expectations for the follow-up.
“Everyone in the group was very cynical and the mood was always terrible,” says Johnny. “It didn’t matter that we had got a gold record – our attitude was, ‘Well, we still came off tour and had to go back to our day jobs, so nothing has changed.’”
It was Peter's attempt at being sensual
Johnny Kelly
But something had changed. Bloody Kisses had been the most successful record released by the band’s label, Roadrunner, to that point. If Type O Negative could do it once, Roadrunner reasoned, they could do it again, only even more successfully.
“There was some pressure because of the success of Bloody Kisses,” says Johnny. “The people around us were going, ‘The next record needs to be bigger, it needs to be more successful.’ We didn’t think it would be. We were realistic.”
That wilful fatalism was disingenuous. The drummer remembers Peter Steele presenting some of the songs he was writing for the new album to the rest of the band.
“The first thing Peter played us was Love You To Death,” he says of the song that would end up as October Rust’s lush opener proper. “We were sitting around going, ‘So what do you have?’ And he went, ‘Oh, I have this thing…’ I thought it was brilliant from the get-go. He didn’t have all the lyrics, but he had the vocal melody line and he was humming as he was playing. We all went, ‘Well, if this is what the rest of the record is like, we’re gonna be fine.’”
Love You To Death was emblematic of the direction Type O would take on October Rust. The last traces of their Neanderthal metal past had been excised and replaced by a luxuriantly enveloping black velvet sound, while Peter himself had dispensed with any attempt at hardcore shouting in favour of a rich vampiric croon – Count Dracula in a second-hand army-green t-shirt.
“It was Peter’s attempt at being sensual,” says Johnny of the band’s new streamlined sound. “He wanted the chicks.”
‘The chicks’ provided much of the inspiration for the frontman’s lyrics. October Rust is a hymn to sex and sensuality, from Be My Druidess’s pagan-goddess worship to In Praise Of Bacchus’s rueful, self-pitying dissection of a relationship gone wrong. Most notable of all is My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend, with the singer’s vivid celebration of a ménage à trois, or, as he so vividly puts it in the song, a ‘meat triangle’.
“I listened to it the first time at Josh’s [Silver, keyboard player/producer] house, and I said, ‘You can’t use this - it’s a Kiss song, War Machine,’” recalls Johnny of My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend. “So Peter said, ‘Speed it up and put a surfer beat on it.’”
![Type O Negative - My Girlfriend's Girlfriend [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/KgkBWZXVLyk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Such was the low bar that Type O Negative set for themselves that they didn’t even bother renting a studio to record October Rust. Instead, it was all done in Josh Silver’s home studio. There were practical reasons behind the decision.
“It was cheap,” says Johnny. “We were never all in the studio at the same time – that’s just the way we worked.”
A few minor myths have sprung up around the album. One is that Peter and guitarist Kenny Hickey recorded parts of the record in the dark, to capture the atmosphere.
“Not true,” says Johnny. “It’s not like we were recording in a crypt - it was Josh’s spare rooms.”
By contrast, he acknowledges that he used drum machines and samplers to play his drum parts.
“It gave us control of everything - we could change things right up to the last minute without having to go and do everything again.”
The success of Bloody Kisses meant the eyes of the record label were firmly focused on Type O Negative. To Johnny’s eternal annoyance, Roadrunner chose My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend as the lead single, with a cover featuring Peter in bed with two women.
“It should have been Love You To Death,” says Johnny, still sounding aggrieved. “It was the best song on the album. But the label heard My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend, this four-minute song with a goofy hook in it, and figured we were gonna sell 14 million records.”
The smart thing would have been to make Bloody Kisses 2
Johnny Kelly
October Rust was released in August 1996. By that point, Type O were on tour with Ozzy Osbourne and Sepultura.
“The banter between Peter and Ozzy was really funny,” says Johnny. “They’d pass each other in the hallway and Peter would go, ‘Ozzy! Vocal lessons! Our dressing room, one hour!’”
In the end, October Rust didn’t sell 14 million copies. It didn’t even match Bloody Kisses. “The smart thing would have been to make ‘Bloody Kisses 2’,” says Johnny.
“The DNA is there in October Rust, for sure, but it is a departure. There’s more colours and layers and texture. I thought that was a ballsy move.”
It may have fallen short of expectation, but October Rust’s reputation has only grown over the years. Type O made three more great albums, but none were as good.
“We never had any goals,” insists Johnny Kelly. “The only thing we wanted was to be able to pay our rent, and October Rust meant we could do that for a couple more years.”
Peter Steele died in 2010, and Type O Negative died with him. Josh Silver, his childhood friend and partner-incrime, stepped away from music to become an EMT and later a paramedic. Kenny Hickey and Johnny Kelly continue to play together, currently in Sun Dont Shine [sic] alongside Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein and Todd Strange.
The drummer says there are no fixed plans to mark October Rust’s 30th anniversary this August, though he’d ideally like to do something. The day before we speak, he unearthed three cassettes’ worth of demos for the album.
“I found one song that we never released,” he reveals. “I haven’t heard it in 30 years. I’m not going to tell you what it’s called, but we did use part of it on a song on [2003’s] Life Is Killing Me. Will we ever put it out? I’d like to think so, somehow. But this is Type O Negative we’re talking about, so who the hell knows?”
