Deity

by Matt Wesolowski

  Skexxixx is no longer the shock-rock musician of the early noughties, the dervish in fishnet and makeup who filled arenas across the US and Europe, his vast armies of fans screaming along with him to ‘Embrace Your Nothing’. These days, he has a quieter life. He’s aged gracefully, like the whisky he no longer drinks. He grins at me from behind vast sunglasses, his teeth no longer caked in the Ohaguro-style blackener than had been his trademark.

  Skexxixx knows all about what it’s like to be a giant in music. He knows how it is to be suddenly responsible for the well-being of a million young people, despite never asking for it.

  —It’s easy to go crazy, having that much responsibility. I never asked for it and I certainly never thought that I’d become the devil because I wrote some songs.

  I never thought it would be me that was the evil one, not in a society that values money and possessions over love, a society that tells its children they have to be rich and popular and if they’re not, they’re no one. Amazing what some lyrics and a guitar can do, huh?

  This is, as I say, the second time I’ve talked to Skexxixx. The first time, I was considerably more nervous. I’d read a lot about the singer’s reputation and his unpredictable nature. Like you, I was all too aware of the famous DEPRAV interview, in which Skexxixx decided he would lead a documentary team on a tour of the swamps of his Louisiana property and then sit there in silence, allowing their boat to be surrounded by alligators. He sat back, watching them squirm from behind his sunglasses.

  The same ones he’s wearing now, he tells me, and laughs, his voice still rough with the echoes of old debaucheries.

  —I’m still involved in music. It’s something that was always a release for me, a way of getting out whatever … demons took up residence inside me. But my time as the face of a furious generation? That ship has sailed long ago. Sometimes I miss it. Most often, I don’t.

  Today, we talk in Skexxixx’s recording studio in the Marylebone area of London. It’s suitably dark inside, the walls peppered with oddly angled spines of foam. Skexxixx talks to me from behind a vast pair of mirrored sunglasses, sat in front of a mixing desk that looks like something from Star Wars. The death of Skexxixx’s son, Olli, was the beginning of the end of his celebrity, and brief notoriety. After having bottles thrown at him by a hostile crowd at the Reading Festival in 2007 and subsequently walking offstage, his career never really recovered.

  —I decided to bow out gracefully. The Macleod thing happened in 2014. That was the final straw for me, you know? I let the new album rot. Pissed off a lot of record-label people, paid back a bunch of money. You know how it goes. There’s better people coming through now, kids with the same anger, the same struggle. There always will be. I’m in a place now where I can help them make that struggle into music. It’s always the way. I’m no longer relevant. It’s time for the next angry voice to come through.

  Skexxixx actually received a flurry of attention after my series a few years back. Remastered versions of his most critically acclaimed albums – 2004’s Embrace Your Emptiness and 2007’s Through the Mocking Glass were recently re-released. Through the Mocking Glass was a flop in terms of sales at the time, but seems to have drawn retrospective appeal. DEPRAV ran a rather interesting article recently about Skexxixx’s legacy: ‘The Spooky Kid We Forgot We Loved’. They even mention the swamp incident.

  Skexxixx goes so far as to thank me, but he assures me that it’s not because of this that he’s speaking to me today.

  —I don’t pretend you ever became a fan of mine, Scott, but I have to say, I became rather a fan of yours. Your podcast, at least. When I heard you were taking on the story of Zach Crystal I wondered if you’d lost your mind.

  —Why?

  —I mean … with respect, you’re not exactly a big podcast gun, are you – like Marc Maron or Joe Rogan? Not that either of them could get anywhere near Zach Crystal either. What chance do you have?

  —I don’t believe I have any chance whatsoever, if I’m honest. Especially now he’s gone. But with all the new allegations against him, I just wanted to see what I could find, I suppose.

  —And that’s what brought you here? The last resort?

  Skexxixx gives a smoky chuckle and sits back in his chair.

  —You know I didn’t date his sister for very long. Certainly not long enough to become his friend … again. Zach Crystal’s not capable of friendship. He never was. He never will be. To him people either have their uses or they don’t.

  This time, I had no trouble getting to interview Skexxixx – no back and forth for weeks with a publicist, no awkward meeting in a hotel. No restrictions. This time, the man, whose real name is Leonard Myers, was happy to pick up a call from me and arrange this interview. It was almost as if we were old friends … almost.

  I got back in touch with Skexxixx after drawing a bit of a blank. There’s still so much that I don’t know about Zach Crystal, that’s been hidden, covered up, smoothed over and, I guess, burned. After talking face to face with Marie Owen, I feel like at least, for her, I have to keep going. There’s something absolutely not right with what happened to her daughter, Kirsty, and the lavish house that Crystal had bought them. It seemed to me, as it did to Marie, that Crystal was paying them off, buying their silence.

  I’m not sure what I want right here, with Skexxixx, but my tenuous link with him and his rather brief link to Naomi Crystal might take us somewhere unexpected. When I got in touch and Skexxixx’s reply was ‘I thought you’d never ask’, I knew there was something to be heard here.

  —Zach Crystal wasn’t a musical genius. That was well known within the industry, I can tell you that.

  Skexxixx cackles again.

  —Maybe he’s me and I’m him? That would be a nice little twist in the tail of this series, wouldn’t it?

  To be fair, I’d already thought of that, but I’m not telling Skexxixx. So what is it that Skexxixx could possibly tell me about Zach Crystal? He’s already hit me with this revelatory statement about Crystal, right off the bat. I wonder if, during the time he and Naomi Crystal dated in 2005, he was able to get any other insights into the man.

  —I mean, you can believe me or not. I imagine many won’t, but contrary to what I just said; he and I were actually friends … well, as much as someone like Zach Crystal is capable of having friends.

  —Really? You became friends when you dated Naomi? It’s an odd pairing.

  But is it, really? Skexxixx, the ‘God of Nothing’ in his black-toothed glory, and Zach Crystal, the eccentric recluse with his bizarre, haunted forest, his capes, veils, masks and makeup.

  —The only real difference between us was that when I got home, underneath the makeup and the music, I was Leonard Myers again. Behind the masks, Zach Crystal was never anyone else. Unfortunately he would always be Zach Crystal, and for him, that just wasn’t enough.

  —It sounds like you knew him rather well.

  —I don’t think anyone knew him well. But yes, I think I came close briefly. But it was long before I dated Naomi Crystal. I met Zach Crystal long before then.

  This is something of a revelation. I had no idea that the two had ever even met, let alone been friends. Like everything to do with Crystal, it was kept quiet. Crystal, who rarely did interviews, has never mentioned it. Skexxixx tells me that’s because it would have ruined both their images back then.

  —Your peak, shall we say, was 2004–05, around the same time as Zach Crystal’s.

  —You may be surprised to know, I existed before then. Back in ninety-four, when I was about eighteen, I was front man of my old band, Chüd. We were a struggling experimental-industrial outfit, playing shitty bars up and down the country to a gaggle of uninspired metalheads. They didn’t like us because we were too weird, and the experimental noise scene didn’t really like us either – too poppy for that scene … Well it wasn’t really a scene, unless you count six people stood in a basement bar while a guy in a horse mask plays terrorcore drum loops over the modulated so
und of a screaming baby on a laptop for forty-five minutes.

  —It sounds the polar opposite of Zach Crystal’s rise to fame and fortune, if I’m perfectly honest.

  —It was. But here’s something you may not know. Zach Crystal did a lot of his early solo gigs under a different name. Just after he kicked his sister to the kerb and The Crystal Twins were no more, Zach also did a lot of gigs in shitty basement bars to crowds of people who didn’t give a fuck. That’s where we met. On a cold night in his home town, Barlheath, in 1994. He was only a kid too – twenty years old.

  Another revelation. As far-fetched as it sounds, I have no suspicion that Skexxixx is lying. I can’t figure out why he would. The music industry is a funny place. There’s an element of pantomime about it sometimes – goodies and baddies. Skexxixx certainly falls into the latter category, but he tells me that, the young Zach Crystal he encountered was rather confused about his own identity.

  —They’d been kids, hadn’t they – he and Naomi, when they were The Crystal Twins? Cutesy, wholesome shit. Sing-a-longs for drunk people in bars. They got signed early as well, when they were only children. Fifteen, sixteen, whatever.

  —Zach was writing his own songs by then, wasn’t he?

  —Correction: Naomi was writing the songs, not Zach.

  Skexxixx raises one hand and stares at me. At least I think that’s what he’s doing from behind his glasses. Despite being much older, there’s nothing less intimidating about the man who was once called the scourge of the Christian West. He leans back in his chair and runs his hands through his hair, shaking his head at me. His tattoos peer from under the sleeves of his shirt. Eventually he sighs, long and loud.

  —I’m going to tell you some things, Scott, that you don’t know, that no one knows. I’m telling them to you, because – well, I know how you do things. You’ll tell it like I say it. You won’t twist my words. I have a certain reputation with the rest of the media. Imagine if I decided to make a statement to the press, now. I’d be ‘washed-up rock star trying to stay relevant’, or I’d be ‘rabble-rousing Satanist trying to smear the memory of a great musician’. So let’s talk. Let’s clean out the closet shall we?

  —How exactly did you and Zach Crystal meet?

  —It was at one of our last shows in 1994. The rest of the band and I, we were barely speaking. I was already planning on doing something else. Going solo, perhaps. We’ve just played this little festival, a clusterfuck in some bar in Barlheath, to about ten people. The dressing rooms are filled with bottles and food, everything’s a mess, there’s people all over the place, equipment everywhere.

  I just want to get the fuck out and go home, when these two guys walk in. Not much older than me. One’s done up in a suit and the other’s … well, he’s some local celebrity. Everyone looks up, starts laughing. Who the fuck are these guys, you know? A pair of fucking straight dorks. The guy in the suit walks over and says his friend’s name is John Smith and he wants to meet whoever was singing ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’.

  —The Righteous Brothers song?

  —Correct. We always closed with it; turned it into a beautiful mess of noise. People either loved it or they fucking despised it. I loved singing that one.

  —Did you recognise Zach Crystal when you met him?

  —No. I’d never heard of the guy. ‘John Smith’, really? But it was him alright. The guy in the suit? He became his right-hand man, his partner in crime.

  —James Cryer?

  —That’s the one.

  —What a bizarre coincidence.

  —It was. What I also found odd was that James Cryer seemed to worship the very ground ‘John Smith’ walked on. I mean, he was just some ten-a-penny pop singer. What was he even doing at my show? Crystal was all in trendy sports gear and a baseball cap. Cryer looked like he’d borrowed his suit off his dad. I nearly told them to go fuck themselves.

  —Why didn’t you?

  —To be honest, I was too surprised. That they had just walked in like that, just walked backstage. Crystal shakes my hand and he says to me in this quiet, little whispery voice, he says, ‘We cover that song too, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. It’s a song about pain. I like that.’

  There was just something about him. I don’t know what it was. According to Cryer, they’d been walking about after a gig, overheard us playing, and Crystal had stopped. He’d wanted to come in and listen. They’d stood at the back and watched our show.

  —Why were they just wandering around the street after a gig?

  —They’d fallen out.

  —With each other?

  —No. Zach and James had fallen out with Naomi for some reason. They were tired of her. He wanted to go solo. When they told me they already had an agreement with Orpine records in place, they had my interest.

  —So what was it he wanted – to meet you?

  —More than that. To work with me. James Cryer gave me a business card. It looked homemade. He said that the record label were onboard but they had to keep it secret. He told me to give him a call and then off they went.

  It was, Skexxixx says, a bizarre circumstance. Here he was, faced with no band, no income and little hope, and this guy with a record deal walks into his life. At first he thought it was an elaborate joke. He nearly threw away the card, but the next day, just to see what would happen, he decided to give James Cryer a call.

  —He tells me all about his friend, this ‘John Smith’, who’s actually Zach Crystal, and that he’s some prodigy, that he and his sister were already famous, that he was about to go solo and conquer the world. I asked him what he needed me for. Who was I? Just some kid from Aigburth, sat here in some ripped up fishnet tights and makeup I robbed from Bodycare in Bootle. Why not get in touch with Trent Reznor or Nivek Ogre, the big US industrial producers at the time, if this kid wanted to change his image? Fly the kid to LA. Make the money that they clearly wanted. How could I help?

  I remember his words. I’ve never forgotten them:

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, dude. Zach digs you and … he gets what he wants.’

  I have to taper this rather long and extraordinary story. A cynic might accuse Skexxixx of using this as free publicity, another attempt to resurrect his career, but I’m sat here before him and I don’t believe that.

  Zach Crystal and Skexxixx formed an unlikely friendship, meeting together occasionally at a recording studio in Birmingham. All of it kept secret, especially from Naomi Crystal.

  —Why you specifically? Did you ever ask him yourself?

  —He told me that it felt ‘right’; that was all he ever said on the matter.

  —What was it you two were doing, exactly?

  —The thing about Zach Crystal was that the guy could sing. His vocal range was beyond anything I’ve ever heard before, and his performance ideas were so new, so fresh. He seemed ahead of the curve on a lot of things. But his song writing … sucked.

  —Really?

  —‘Burning Eyes’ – that was mine. Orpine Records purchased it from me for a sum that I’m not going to tell you. I didn’t get a writing credit on the record, but let me tell you something: it’s made me a lot of money, that song has.

  I’m almost speechless. I have no way of proving any of this. Skexxixx doesn’t get excited. He tells me all this in his slow drawl, quite matter-of-fact.

  —What about … the others, the other songs?

  —Mostly we cowrote. Zach had a concept and lyrics, and I helped him realise them. I helped bring it out of him. We just … clicked.

  —But why wasn’t this known? Surely you wanted credit. You wanted to share some of his fame. The guy was a global megastar. I can’t believe that you didn’t want some of that.

  Skexxixx is quiet. Another sigh. He looks around at his array of recording equipment. There are golden discs and awards in glass cases.

  —I have everything I need.

  —I just don’t believe that a younger you would be happy to sit back, let him take a
ll the credit. Why?

  Skexxixx grins at me.

  —You ever heard of Euderus set? Named, quite correctly, after the Egyptian god of war, chaos and storms?

  —What?

  —It’s a bug. Otherwise known as the crypt-keeper wasp. You see, our little crypt-keeper lays its eggs in the niches carved out in the sides of trees by another wasp species. Once Euderus set’s little ones hatch, they eat their way into the wasp in the hole and take control of its mind. The wasp, under control of the larvae, starts trying to tunnel out of the tree, providing a safe passage to freedom for the larvae, are you with me? It gets better. The tunnel ends up just too small for the wasp to escape, allowing the mini crypt-keepers to eat their way to freedom, emerging from the head, out into the big, wide world.

  —So … if I’m right in thinking, you wrote songs for Zach Crystal to what? Get them out into the world?