Christian Death

"Only Theatre Of Pain", the debut album by Christian Death, is, within the same gothic rock scene, the "cursed" record par excellence. An album that is the purest expression of the ideas and personality of Rozz Williams, the band's founder, a figure who, in the wake of his death on April 1, 1998, rose to become one of the most "underground" yet most alive and deeply felt cults among those dedicated to rock's many burned-out lives.

A controversial and provocative figure, Rozz Williams — in all his musical activities, both with Christian Death and in his various later projects (some of them wonderful, like Shadow Project with Eva O, who for a few years was also his wife, and the 1995 album made with Gitane Demone, "The Dreamhome Heartache"), as well as in his spoken-word records, his poetry and his paintings, and in all his scandalous performances — always embodied the archetype of the decadent artist locked in eternal, extreme rebellion against reality: stubbornly closed off within his own visions, incapable of dealing with the "concrete" problems of life, from the battle for the legal rights to the name Christian Death — which he coined but then handed over, in 1985, to guitarist Valor, before vainly trying to reclaim it in the early Nineties — to the alcohol and drug dependency that accompanied, and largely devastated, his entire life.

The Rozz Williams who, in 1982, set out to record his band's first album was a nineteen-year-old coming from a background in punk and ultra-underground scenes, fleeing the rigidly religious upbringing imposed on him by his parents, and therefore drawn to everything dark, forbidden and hidden, in love with surrealist art and British dark-punk, especially the "theatrical" strain embodied by Bauhaus. Christian Death already existed in 1979, in a lineup featuring, alongside Williams, bassist James McGearty and drummer George Belanger, but it was in 1981, with the arrival of the phenomenal guitarist Rikk Agnew, that the band truly took flight: after an EP, in 1982 the band landed its first record deal and the chance to record its debut. The result is perhaps the most "diseased" and occult album of the entire gothic rock saga: it doesn't yet have the musical excellence of its successor "Catastrophe Ballet" (an album already heavily marked by the presence of new guitarist Valor, whose taste for ornate, imaginative arrangements contrasted with Agnew's dry, direct style, though in the long run it would curdle into sterile preciousness); nor does it have the depth of the great British masters, but it possesses an unsettling naturalness, a nearly miraculous balance, especially considering that within the band many of the tensions and conflicts that would lead to a complete lineup change were already brewing by the very next record. Above all, the album thrives on the perfect fusion between Rikk Agnew's extraordinary guitar work and Williams' tortured, monotone vocals, as he recites his lyrics — steeped in occult references — in a witchy tone of constant agony (it's said, and probably true, that Rozz Williams recorded all the vocal parts in a single night, in a studio lit only by a few candles, with a bag of cocaine always within reach).

Williams' "theatre of pain" opens with the marvelous "Cavity", plunging the listener straight into an atmosphere of fear and unease, with a hypnotic, measured pace, before suddenly bursting into a breathtaking gallop worthy of the best Bauhaus. "Figurative Theatre", Rozz Williams' tribute to his great love, surrealism, is a perfect example of what is meant by "dark-punk", while "Burnt Offerings" slows down and stretches out the harmonies into a dissonant showcase close to the experiments of Pil. The "black" heart of the record is made up of the bleak "Mysterium Iniquitatis", "Dream For Mother" and "Stairs", marked by searing refrains and steeped in graveyard atmospheres, sequenced so that each one sinks ever deeper into an abyss of anxiety and fear, culminating in the malevolent sabbath of "Spiritual Cramp", with a stunning crescendo driven by a Rikk Agnew increasingly in command of the scene.

But the absolute masterpiece of the record, the track that towers over everything else, is "Romeo's Distress", a romantic and desperate ballad, a wild dance of lost souls, of restless ghosts darting past like lightning bolts. Rozz Williams' theatrical pantomime culminates in the jarring "Resurrection", while the psychedelic experiment "Prayer" closes the record, sinking into the atmosphere of an occult ritual.

In the wake of its release, "Only Theatre of Pain" was subjected to an outright boycott over its lyrics, deemed blasphemous, satanic, and so on; there are famous stories of groups of religious fundamentalists burning copies of the album outside venues where the band was performing, or the talk show on satanism during which the host gave a copy of the record the same treatment. For his part, Rozz Williams never did anything to prove his detractors and enemies wrong (quite the opposite...): he carried on undeterred along his own path, debatable as it may have been, but always consistent, courageous and above all always shamelessly sincere and authentic. Like so many others before him, Williams eventually chose to stop fighting and surrendered himself to the cult of his fans, a victim of those inner torments which, on this record, appear in their purest form.

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27/10/2006