Nothing ever happened, and it was a long time ago. I am a different man today. But I’m not embarrassed about my past. It’s what shaped me.
So your thoughts about burning churches remained just that: thoughts?
It went a bit further than that. I don’t remember exactly which building we targeted. It was either a temple in Nowy Port or another in Brzezno. Either way, we went as far as to scout the area. Together with the guys from Mastiphal, another band from Gdańsk, we drove past the church.
Browar took us there—the guy who played bass for us back then. He was older, and the only guy among us who had a car. When we got there we began to plan the whole thing. I think we agreed on Molotov cocktails; we wanted to throw them in through the windows.
Of course, the whole plan existed only in our minds. What was more significant was that we had created a team and that we had a common goal. In the end, I didn’t become a terrorist. Common sense prevailed over youthful exuberance. I understood that this was not how things should be dealt with, and my life is evidence that I made the right choice.
Musicians from iconic black metal bands like Burzum or Emperor chose a different path. They did their time, but—ultimately—achieved a similar effect. Their music became popular, and today they are in a position similar to yours.
It’s not my place to judge them. I knew—and still know—most of these people. I am friendly with of some of them to this day. Some of them have much heavier things on their conscience than burning down a church. Some of them were convicted for murder. There are some who were drawn in by criminal activities—and, of course, a few of them are now dead.
People usually associate these sorts of stories with hip-hop, not heavy metal …
Everything that is new and fresh in culture is radical to some degree. Near the end of the 70s, punk rock was radical. In the early 90s, black metal was, too. I’m sure hip-hop had a period like that also but I’d be guessing, because I don’t follow that genre. Rebellion is a part of youth. Sometimes it’s dangerous.
But now you’re saying that this is not the path to be followed?
Instead of a sword, I hold a guitar in my hands. I’m in the same, strong mind-set, but instead of Molotov cocktails, I’ve got a computer. It’s a much more powerful weapon.
For what purpose? To worship Satan? What do you need the devil for, anyway?
Actually there is a lot more to me than that, but sadly there are always people who see the world in just two colours. They only mention Satan. This is how they use me for their political games.
Before the 2010 Polish presidential election there were whole legions of guys like this. It’s as if some of them suddenly awoke after twenty years in hibernation, just to show a lot of indignation and to mark me as their target. Others decided that they were my buddies, even though I had never met them in my life. But in the background there was always Satan.
But why him?
I suppose because he is very recognisable to Poles. People like songs they know; the same applies to metaphors.
Was he previously any less metaphoric?
He used to smile less. I showed him the way the Christians see him: as a repulsive tool for intimidation. But the Bible never really described his looks.
So the devil might actually be nice and friendly?
If I were to personify him, I would say he’s a handsome, middle-aged gentleman. He wears great clothes, his manners are impeccable, and he speaks many different languages. Black does not necessarily mean ugly. My Satan was perfectly depicted in Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita, or in movies such as Angel Heart with Robert De Niro, or The Devil’s Advocate. Al Pacino is just great in that. I remember his words: ‘I am a fan of man. And a humanist. Maybe the last humanist.’
So you’re like a Satanist-humanist?
Some people think that I painted my house black, that I sleep in a coffin, and that I don’t drink milk because it’s white. But I prefer sunny mornings and a big bed. My devil is colourful.
What about God?
This biblical one seems not to speak or listen, and he certainly does not respond. I can quote The Devil’s Advocate again to illustrate. I don’t remember the quote verbatim, but what it said was more or less this: ‘Who is God? He likes to watch. He gives you instincts and then prohibitions. Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste, but don’t swallow.’ So you can see that he’s a bit of a sadist, this God.
And this Satan of yours seems to be a little simplistic. Don’t you feel a bit like a ‘nativity play’ Satanist?
That’s what Father Boniecki—a former confidante of Pope John Paul II—once called me. He’s a nice man, considering he’s a priest. Maybe that’s why the church started to gag him for defending me.
Is his opinion of you accurate?
Pop culture struggles to tame every rebel, to nail his ass. Has it nailed mine? Well, I don’t feel that I have a muzzle on my mouth quite yet. People still have a tendency to label me or lock me in a particular drawer, though. Some people compare me to al Qaeda; others attempt to make a clown out of me. None of that bothers me. I don’t care what they say, what matters is that they call me by my name.
I read a book called God, Cash And Rock’n’roll by Marcin Prokop and Szymon Holownia. They talk at length about me, but despite that I get the impression that neither gentleman is too sure about how to present me. As the devil himself? As a simple atheist? A clown? That’s for them to work out.
You do put yourself out there for some pop-culture stroking, though.
I don’t baulk at caressing. I smile, I make jokes, but my message to the world hasn’t changed. My records and my lyrics are still radical. I am nice, but I don’t accept compromises.
But you don’t growl at the mainstream, either. Is that a way of broadening your appeal?
I don’t want to limit myself to any particular niche. I have an expansive nature. Why would I alter that? I often talk to people who are not metal fans but just simple people. Sometimes it’s an elderly woman in a post office, other times a saleswoman in a shop—or a cabbie, maybe—and they often tell me, ‘Mr Darski, you are right: we share the same view about a lot of things.’
Maybe they don’t realise that, as a young man, you wanted to burn churches.
They will now. Maybe they will change their minds, maybe not. Regardless, I will still be nice to them. I will still smile.
Anyway, I made my choice a long time ago: the decision to become an artist, not a terrorist. I want to change the world, yes, but I don’t have to burn it down to do that.
But you did burn the Bible?
My fans did. Not me.
Right—you just tore it apart. Why?
At first I did it spontaneously. We were on an American tour in the summer of 2007. We were on the road as part of the Sounds of the Underground festival that took place in quite a few cities.
One of the shows was in Louisville, Kentucky, where we played a notorious venue called the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. It was an old, long-forgotten and closed mental institution. At the beginning of the previous century, there was a tuberculosis epidemic there that caused thousands of deaths among patients. Such places draw people in; they create myths. Today it’s a tourist attraction, and there are people who claim that it’s haunted. This is the first place where I used the Bible as a prop. But I didn’t plan it.
Did the devil make you do it?
I think it was more likely God who provoked me. The format of Sounds of the Underground was quite liberal in that there were bands playing different kinds of music, exhibiting various worldviews. On the day we played, a band called Devil Wears Prada played before us. These guys were some kind of religious freaks. You could classify their music as ‘Christian metal core’, I suppose.
I didn’t actually see their show but I heard their singer went into spasms. At one point he took the Bible out and then started crawling around the stage, reading passages from it. So Chris, our tour manager, came up to me, gave me the B
ible—the same copy that was on the stage with Devil Wears Prada—and said, ‘Here, I think this is for you.’
So the Christian rockers gifted you a Bible?
I don’t know. I didn’t ask, but that’s how I understood it. Were they trying to convert me? OK, then I will express my opinion. If they could use it, I can, too.
I took the Bible onstage. It was a completely natural reaction.
But for them it was sacred.
And for me it’s an element of pop culture. Whether somebody likes it or not, religious symbols, the saints, the content of the Bible—they are all a part of it. Just like Mickey Mouse. Some may love it and some may not. But I tore the book and provoked a shit-storm.
The festival’s audience was very diverse. Some people came specifically to see us and the few other extreme bands on the bill, and some others were Devil Wears Prada’s fans. Half of the audience was ecstatic—they ran amok. Others left the auditorium. There were some who voiced their outrage aloud. There were riots; people fought each other.
You like to make the audience fight?
I like discussion, let’s say that. Some people are able to speak their minds; some have to use fists. This particular provocation turned out to be successful. It stirred shit up. It made people think. That’s what art is about.
Are you intrigued by how people rebel against norms?
It’s about letting them speak their minds. About letting them say ‘NO’ aloud, when the world deserves such an answer.
You mean anarchy?
I didn’t murder anyone; I don’t abuse children or animals. I simply voiced my opinion. Some may see it as extreme, but I make no apology for that.
Did you get in any trouble after the concert, because of the riots?
After we left the stage, we were drinking cold beers by our van, and we felt everybody’s eyes were upon us. Then a few police officers turned up. They stuck around because they were part of the event’s security. They were standing about fifty metres away, just watching us.
I wasn’t sure if their interest was our concert or merely the fact that we were drinking beer outside, but I felt for sure that we were in some kind of trouble.
So what did they want?
‘Are you the band who just performed?’
I nodded. Then one of them smiled, shook my hand, and said, ‘I have no idea what you were yelling; I couldn’t understand a thing, but you put on a great show.’
I breathed a sigh of relief and felt much lighter—as if, suddenly, about forty kilograms worth of burden had dropped off my body. After a while, some other people started coming up to us; they complimented us, too.
Brian Slagel appeared—the guy from Metal Blade, the label who represents Behemoth in the States. He said, ‘I think you’re the only band who makes life awkward for me like this, but at the same time I love it so much when you do it.’
All that started a process in my brain: one that only developed further when a picket appeared before another show on that tour.
Where was that?
Atlanta. We played with Lamb Of God that night. I went to scout the area, and there was a group of young men at the front of the venue—all with short hair, wearing buttoned shirts and ties. All of them wore the same style of braces, too. They looked like a fascist militia group, and they all had banners inscribed with quotes from the Bible. One of them had a megaphone and was yelling some fanatical crap.
John Campbell, Lamb Of God’s bassist, tried to talk to them, but to no avail—they didn’t want to talk. They just came there to manifest their aversion. So I manifested mine during the concert. At that point I already knew that this would become a regular feature of our show in the coming weeks.
After that, we came back from the States and toured Europe. We were promoting the album Apostasy, and everything fell into place because we had also used the Bible in the photo shoot for this record.
How did you get it?
I bought it on one of those auction sites. I paid a few hundred zlotys for it. The world is a small place nowadays. People shared their feelings after the show on the internet. Others read it and showed up at later shows. Lots of them even brought their own Bibles. It often happened that, when we began the show: a few copies would land by my feet. All kinds of Bibles. The fans threw them onstage.
How did they react to what you did?
I remember a particular concert in Marseille. People ran amok there. I threw pages of the Bible at them and they ate them, burned them, or tore them apart. That was crazy. I felt that we had hit the spot. We had focused their anger. If people come to a show and explode with such madness, that happens for a reason. They saw religion and its influence on society as a form of repression, and you could say that our concert purified them.
Nobody in the audience got offended?
No. It was our audience: people who knew what to expect. We have a very specific audience, remember. They like blasphemy. We once played a show at Stodola in Warsaw. After a few songs, the lights went out. When they came back on, I made a joke that apparently God was responsible for Warsaw’s electricity supply. All the people in the room started shouting ‘Fuck God! Fuck God!’ A few thousand throats were yelling. I just smiled.
I do realise that for many people, such demonstrations of non-faith might sound vulgar or iconoclastic, but what can I do? That’s the way it is. I don’t force anybody to come to our shows. It’s like porn—you don’t have to watch it, but you can if you want to. Our fans understand that. That’s why, on the Apostasy tour, they were aware of what was coming, even before we struck up the first notes of ‘Christgrinding Avenue’ or ‘Christians To The Lions’. They wanted it.
How should we interpret that second title? Do you really want to send Christians to the lions?
It’s a metaphor and a quote—an advertisement slogan for the Coliseum, also. You can find its author among the Roman emperors if you look hard enough. That’s how religion works. In Rome, Christians were considered a sect, and they were murdered for people’s entertainment. A few hundred years later, it was they who murdered pagans, for the same entertainment of the common people.
So you’re not actually encouraging people to kill believers?
Not at all. I fight with values, not with people. If I really wanted to exterminate Catholics, I would have to start with my own family, and then move on to many of my friends. That’s an absurd suggestion.
If somebody recorded a song called something like ‘Burn The Atheists’, would that be considered just a metaphor, too?
Sure. I couldn’t care less about words. They can’t hurt me. If somebody feels like it, go ahead and record a song like that. Art is not politics; an artist may say more. If some party leader yelled at a rally that all non-believers should be burnt, or that all Catholics should be exterminated, that could be dangerous. But in a song? In a movie? Everything is allowed here. You can be a fanatic.
Are you one?
I don’t think so.
Maybe not in your private life, but what about in your artistic pose?
I prefer the word ‘aesthetics’ to ‘pose’. It’s like theatre. In Shakespeare’s plays, blood is spattered all over the place. Do you call him a murderer because of that? No.
If it’s just like theatre, then maybe tearing a Bible is just a moneymaking stunt?
If I had known that it would all go down like that, I would have reconsidered doing it, certainly in Poland. Or maybe not. I don’t regret it actually. That’s not my style. In any case, the real problems came many months later. At the beginning, nobody cared.
Besides, don’t try to make us out to be pioneers of tearing up the Bible. Blasphemy has been a part of rock music for years.
There are bands in the underground that make us look relatively innocent. Take Wendy O. Williams from Plasmatics, for example, or G.G. Allin, or mainstream figures like Marilyn Manson or even Madonna. In the case of our band, everything is taking place within a niche, among a handful of fans. We assumed that our shows
would be received in a similar way.
Blasphemy is one thing, but what about the books themselves? Don’t you respect them?
I do. I have quite a collection of books and I care about them. I treat the collection as luxury—almost a fetish. I generally think that one should take care of what he owns.
But you did destroy a Bible. Don’t you see the contradiction there?
No.
You buy a book for a few hundred zlotys and you draw on it with a marker. Is that your idea of respect?
If something is mine, I can do whatever I want with it. If you ask me if I punch people, I will deny it. But if you ask if I have ever punched somebody, my answer will be different.
When you watch a movie and you see that cars are being wrecked, you don’t accuse the director of lack of respect to cars. He destroys them in front of the camera because that’s what his creative vision demands. He sacrifices objects for that. Why shouldn’t I be able to sacrifice a book in order to make my vision come to life?
Because, for someone else, that book is a sacred object.
So I should resign from speaking my mind because of that? Maybe let’s tell people it’s forbidden to say that Santa Claus does not exist, because children love him so much …
Monotheism belongs in the museum. This is what I think, and I say it out loud. But do you see me getting hit by lightning? Despite all that, I’m constantly being dragged around courthouses because I dared to say that the content of a book—a book that told stories about a guy who walked on water, calmed the storms, and turned the dead back to life—is a work of literary fiction. Christians throw accusations at me because I do something they had a monopoly on: I kill golden calves.
Ryszard Nowak of the Polish Law & Justice Party begs to differ.
I’m tired of even talking about him. People say that you always carry your own cross; well, I carry Ryszard Nowak. Literally. This man is trying to enhance his own profile by using me. Had it not been for those endless trials, nobody would have ever heard about him or his committee.
Confessions Of A Heretic: The Sacred And The Profane: Behemoth And Beyond Page 4
