Bands like KISS had themselves started to become something of a proto-internet meme, and for a while there, the trend appeared to have been run down into the dirt. Throughout the ’90s, interest in corpse paint began to wane. But so is the striking white face paint that has become his trademark. His inventive and beautiful albums are part of that debt. It was an integral part of a complicated and dark creative world.Įvery inch of Diamond’s aesthetic and sound went on to influence an entire generation of performers - bands as varied as Slayer and Cradle of Filth have acknowledged the debt that they owe to him. The make-up wasn’t just empty theatrics, as it had become thanks to bands like KISS. In particular, Fatal Portrait, his masterpiece, is riddled with the dark omens, calls to Satan and promises of violence that he would also daub all over his face. Diamond coated himself in complex pictures, his cheeks stained with upside down crosses and thick, wavy lines that were deeply indebted to the signs and symbols of his most famous albums. These were not just lashings of white paint, applied at random. ![]() In particular, Diamond took great care in linking his make-up with the music that he made. King Diamond took things to the next level. All those before him in the metal scene had merely dabbled in on-stage theatrics. After all, the musician - real name Kim Bendix Petersen - is as famous for his complex and beautiful face paint as he is for his falsetto voice and his complex, heavily thematic records. King Diamond, the one-time lead singer of heavy metal icons Mercyful Fate, is one of the most influential figures in the history of corpse paint. But on the other end of the corpse paint spectrum, another performer was making his mark, combining the theatricality of the American scene with the archaic flourishes of the European metal-heads. He didn’t do it to look cool.”ĭead’s look became one of the most influential fashion statements of the European metal scene, inspiring everyone from heavy metal duo Darkthrone to Immortal, the outfit fronted by the legendary Olve Eikemo. “Dead actually wanted to look like a corpse. “It wasn’t anything to do with the way Kiss and Alice Cooper used makeup,” Mayhem’s bass player explained in an interview. His face daubings shared nothing with the arch theatricality of KISS, and everything with old European folktales about lost and haunted spirits. Mayhem’s early vocalist, Per “Dead” Ohlin, wore the make-up in order to resemble an actual corpse. They also did the same with corpse paint. And that explosion in the ’70s was all thanks to one man. ![]() ![]() But while the theatrical tradition disappeared, corpse paint found new life in the world of metal and hard rock. The Grand Guignol tradition would later die out, with a new director of the theatre moving away from horror and towards comedy, killing the troupe’s momentum in the process. They created their own vibe, a kind of heightened, brutal magic that established everything that black metal performers would later attempt. These effects were usually extremely cheap and chintzy-looking, but that became their defining vibe. Importantly, the performers would also daub themselves in exaggerated face paint, contorting and twisting their features into horrible grimaces. Audiences would flock to see heads chopped off, bodies mutilated, and blood sprayed up to the theatre ceiling. Those shows were proto-slashers, often brutal in their violence and deeply pessimistic in their outlook. Their style of performance has its roots in the tradition established by Grand Guignol, a Paris theatre company that operated in the early 20th century and specialised in “naturalistic horror performances.” But even Hawkins and Brown were playing into a tradition much older than themselves.
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