While everyone knows his name, few know any of his songs - such is the image-driven appeal of the newest "controversial" rock kid on the block, Marilyn Manson. There's nothing like learning the rock'n'roll guide to myths and iconography to kick-start a career - except Manson has gone above and beyond the call of duty by contributing a few chapters himself. Alongside the standard-issue sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle, Manson also does a neat line in self-sacrification, uses whatever Nazi imagery is going and most significantly has declared himself a Satanist. As the moral majority goes into apoplexy and "right-minded" people everywhere try to get him banned from television and radio, the man who is named after serial killer Charles Manson and film star Marilyn Monroe watches his albums going to the top of charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
As myth-making goes, there's some very impressive stuff here: he is the illegitimate off-spring of Manson and Monroe; he has sex with donkeys on stage; swallows cats whole and force-feeds his audiences drugs; he entered into a pact with the devil to make him No 1 in the charts; he had two of his ribs removed so he could perform oral sex on himself; he cut off one of his own toes so he could inject heroin directly into the veins on the stump; he's really a woman; he's really black, etc. All the above is false and feverish Internet rumour-mongering about Manson: the irony is that the truth about Manson is at least as interesting. Now aged 29, he has published his autobiography, with the suitably spooky title of The Long Hard Road out of Hell, and it has zipped into the best-seller lists all around Europe and the US. His fervent fan base and equally fervent critics seek therein some clues as to how the cute, smiling kid from small-town America (as pictured in the book) turned into a rock 'n' roll monster who can sell more records than Madonna and tour Bible Belt America preaching his self-styled doctrine of Satanism.
Born Brian Warner, Manson was brought up in the small town of Canton, Ohio in a dysfunctional family (his father was a war-scarred Vietnam vet and his mother was exceptionally violent). Raised on a diet of bad heavy metal and cheap horror stories, he started out as a music journalist (explains a lot) before staging his own "musical performances" where he first unveiled his goth-meets-industrial-meets-scary-lyrics trademark sound.
As just another plodding underground band, there was nothing to distinguish Marilyn Manson from the less-than-avant-garde pack, until he realised that he was in fact a Satanist. He explains: "Satanism is about worshipping yourself, because you are responsible for your own good and evil. Christianity's war against the devil has always been a fight against man's most natural instincts - usually for self-gratification - and a denial of man's membership in the animal kingdom. The idea of heaven is just Christianity's way of creating a hell on Earth . . . I'm not and have never been a spokesperson for Satanism, it's simply part of what I believe in." As America had a fit of morality, and stories started circulating about what he got up to on stage (sacrificing animals, amputating limbs, hypnotising his audience - the usual), he linked up with a musical heavyweight, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Reznor, who bought the house where members of Charles Manson's "family" had brutally murdered the actress Sharon Tate, signed Manson to his own label, Nothing Records. Manson's first two albums, Portrait Of An American Family (1994) and Smells Like Children (1995) were disjointed Depeche Mode-meets-Bauhaus affairs with little musical merit, but which made waves due to the curiosity factor surrounding him.
He was now followed around by a coterie of strippers, junkies and pimps and had developed a Grade A drug habit. He writes about the aftermath of a typical night out: "I was covered in hash browns and vomit, I had a bag of human bones under the bed, I had a Huggy Bear doll on the table that was filled with cocaine and I had just come to the realisation that I didn't care whether anyone I knew died so long as I didn't have to deal with it. On top of all that, there was a transvestite in a tutu smoking crack on the next bed to me." If nothing else, he can evoke a scene well.
The stage show became more flamboyant and he would make grandiose statements: "The day I became a Satanist also happened to be the day the allied forces of Christianity and conservatism began mobilising against me."
Delusions of grandeur aside, his next album, Anti-Christ Superstar, went to the top of the charts and got him on to the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. In a neat reversal of John Lennon's "bigger than Jesus" claim, he proclaims, "When the album entered the charts at No 3, I felt bigger than rock clubs, rock cocaine and feel-good rock, bigger than back-stabbing, bullshit and shiny and/or happy people, bigger than most of the musicians I used to idolise. To some people, I was even bigger than Satan."
Away from the tedious "good" versus "evil" arguments, he tries to broaden his manifesto somewhat in the book, as in this sub-philosophical rant on the nature of contemporary US society: "The pitiful happiness of people really sickens me. And on TV, do people really live like this? Is this all a joke? Do we raise kids to believe in Baywatch, canned laughter, Jenny Jones? It's blind consumerism. Stupid people deserve what they get. They'd buy shirts that say "I'm stupid" if Cindy Crawford told them it was cool." And possibly buy Marilyn Manson records as well.
With his new album, Mechanical Animals, topping the charts in the US and Britain and an impending European tour, what is most remarkable about Marilyn Manson's ascent so far is how similar it is to that of The Spice Girls - but on the other side of the pop coin. While his fan-base would undoubtedly gag on such a comparison, it remains true that both acts represent a triumph of style over content.
In much the same way that Joan Collins is famous for being famous, Manson is merely famous for being infamous. For all the outward manifestations of shock and horror, the idea of Manson as a dangerous subversive who threatens to undermine the very fabric of society is just a pitiful joke. Anti-Christ Superstar? Dream on.
Mechanical Animals by Marilyn Manson is on Nothing Records/ Universal. His autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell is published by Plexus, price £12.99
