Amp hiss and memories

• ARTIST: Type O Negative
• DATE: June 30 2007
• VENUE: Idroscalo (Milan, Italy)
• OPENING FOR: Ozzy Osbourne

Goodbye cruel world.

When Peter Steele howls those words into the afternoon air – the opening line of ‘The Profits Of Doom’, a song from Type O Negative’s sixth and final studio album ‘Dead Again’ – the delivery is so stark and brutal that you wonder for a second whether it’s part of the act or whether something is genuinely about to go very wrong on that stage.

A small group of die-hards shout the words back at him in unison. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon on a bright June day, and most of the crowd hasn’t arrived yet. Later, when Ozzy Osbourne takes the stage, the Idroscalo will be heaving, but for now, Type O Negative don’t seem to care.

Johnny Kelly, stationed behind the keyboards, is sporting an unexpected, Rasputin-like beard, uncannily echoing the image on the cover of ‘Dead Again’, released just a few months earlier. Peter Steele, meanwhile, clutches his customary bottle of red wine. One moment he flashes a mischievous grin; the next he looks like Robocop. He doesn’t die on stage, but more than once you find yourself wondering: is he holding up the bass, or is the bass holding him up?

A couple of summers earlier, during a period marked by a long list of personal struggles, the Type O Negative website homepage had displayed a giant tombstone bearing Steele’s name. Another grim joke, born of his famously caustic and politically incorrect sense of humour. A few months after that, during an interview, I asked him whether he’d come back from the dead or was speaking to me from hell. “If this is hell, it’s not so bad”, he replied. “Fuck heaven. I’m happy here in Brooklyn!”. And when I asked what the biggest lie he had ever heard about him was, he plainly, and perhaps not surprisingly, answered: “That I have a big sense of humor”. The line between man and character can be so thin when you’re larger than life.

Back on that stage in Milan, between Peter’s generous gulps of red wine, the band opens with an unexpected cover of Beatles’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, then rattles through five lengthy songs: two from ‘Dead Again’, three from the classic gothic rock-meets-doom metal-meets-hardcore ‘Bloody Kisses’. Some people seem briefly puzzled when Lacuna Coil’s Andrea Ferro suddenly appears on stage to lend his voice to the choruses of ‘Black No.1’. Then it’s over.

What stays with me—what keeps looping in my head long after—is that scream. That goodbye cruel world. Even in the moment, it feels like the only truly unguarded instant of a show that was enjoyable enough, but hardly remarkable. Three seconds that land like a punch to the stomach. And in hindsight, they hit even harder, because on April 14, 2010, those words would prove to be terrifyingly prophetic.

16 years later, Peter Steele, the man, the character, the music, is still deeply missed.

🟥 Amp Hiss And Memories is a series of posts revisiting concerts I’ve attended both in the past and more recently. A full index can be found here.