‘I may be a bit broken but you can’t fucking break me,” Marilyn Manson says after the heavy thunder of his most recent album opener, Revelation #12, subsides. He says this with his leg in a cast, propped up in a black throne that doubles as a standing wheelchair.
Behind the black-clothed and makeup-clad singer are two giant guns. It was these prop firearms that recently fell on Manson in New York and broke his leg, postponing the tour. It’s not the only incident surrounding his latest album, Heaven Upside Down – he also recently parted ways with longtime bandmate Twiggy Ramirez, after sexual assault allegations were made against the bass player (although Johnny Depp stars in Manson’s recent Say10 video despite the actor’s domestic abuse allegations). He then drew criticism on his return show when he brought out a prop assault rifle on stage the day of the Sutherland Springs church shooting; his fascination with firearms also led to him pulling a fake gun on the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis earlier this year.
Tonight such theatrics and gun-toting are kept to a minimum, no doubt due to Manson’s restricted movement. Instead he chooses to embrace his role as a patient: after every song, men in green doctors’ scrubs attend to Manson in some way, be it attaching a crutch to allow him to walk around or to assist with a wardrobe change. With Manson somewhat incapacitated and incapable of the crowd interaction he’s known for, the focus is on the band, who are a bare-bones hard rock outfit. The hissing ambience and clattering industrial electronics that often bubble through Manson’s recorded work is largely absent, replaced by the weight of aggressive guitars, hammering bass and crashing drums as the group, led by a screaming Manson, hurtle through older songs such as This Is the New Shit and Disposable Teens.
The fundamental subtext that swirls around Manson’s show is: what impact can his shock-horror tactics actually have in 2017? Manson’s persona exists to showcase the decay and sickness of American society – but if the world around him is yet more troubled, where does that leave him? When you have a president that eclipses farce and parody on a seemingly daily basis, a rock star in makeup who embraces Satan, sings about drugs and covers the Eurhythmics’ Sweet Dreams doesn’t quite cut it. So his show instead becomes entertainment rather than provocation, taking the audience into a world of heavy-metal vaudeville – playful and knowing in its theatricality, but loaded with enough musical ferocity to elevate it beyond simple posturing.
Amid the guttural screams and the furnace blast of guitars there are smatterings of melody throughout, be it The Dope Show or his recent single Kill4Me, the latter of which is flat-out pop music. While Manson has cited Killing Joke and Bauhaus as influences on his new record, he also picked out Rihanna, and such pop leanings have never been clearer than on this track, which bounces along with shimmering new wave guitars and a seductive, rolling bass line. Such deviations are welcome moments in the set, which comes dangerously close to feeling a little one-note, though Manson remains sarcastic and sardonic throughout.
After a brief stint lying in a hospital bed on the middle of the stage, thrashing around like a patient kept against his will, Manson transfers to a wheelchair and is pushed to the front row, where he shines a bright white torch into his audience during a punchy take of We Know Where You Fucking Live. This, along with a gritty yet tuneful Say10, shows that Manson is producing some of his best material in years.
The opening scratch of the encore, The Beautiful People, is a welcome plunge back into a song that, underneath the car-compactor crunch of the guitars and scorched vocals, remains an irresistible piece of pop music. Twenty-one years since its release, as Manson throws the microphone and its stand to the ground and hobbles off stage, the role that songs like this once played has now reversed. No longer is Marilyn Manson the a figure that instigates fear, panic and chaos. Instead he has he’s created a space where people can go to escape such fears and enjoy the spectacle of the grotesque, safe from the claws of reality.
- At O2 Academy, Glasgow, on 5 December. Box office: 0141-418 3000. Then touring until 9 December.
