“I’M NOT a crazy bastard! I enjoy watching horror movies and doing some other odd things. But I don’t go around killing people and I’ve never been to jail or been picked up for drugs.”

Kerry King, guitar player with Los Angles based thrash-metal outfit, Slayer, rejects outright the notion that his chosen brand of rhythmic noise is performed by cynical, manipulative types and followed by dysfunctional, degenerate adolescents. “The fans are just kids who are into the music,” he says. “They relate to it. They really are fanatical and the important thing is their parents hate it! Even my parents don’t like what I do but they are proud of me.”

Death Metal, Speed Metal, Thrash Metal, call it what you will, has, along with gansta rap, drawn most of the flak from the moral majority and concerned parents brigade in the US. Song lyrics are regularly cited in court cases as provoking acts of violence, vandalism, murder and suicide, and albums are invariably stickered with a “Parental Advisory” warning. Predictably, King shrugs off the criticisms and is breezily dismissive of accusations that, just maybe, the kind of message the band sends out might just tip some vulnerable kids over the edge.

“It seems to me that every era has its scapegoats,” he says. “People don’t want to accept responsibility for what they do so they look to the easiest thing to blame so they can get some money out of it. I take no offence at that, because I think anybody would have a hard time proving anything. Violence, murder and aggression has been around for a lot longer than Slayer or any other groups for that matter. All the court cases have been thrown out. Even in the Beavis & Butt-head one where the kid set fire to a house – it subsequently turned out that the people who brought the law suit couldn’t even get cable TV – so they couldn’t have even been watching the programme.”

TIPPER GORE’S WORST NIGHTMARE

King also pours scorn on a recent case in Norway where a death metaller had been found guilty of murdering a rival musician by stabbing him twenty-five times and bizarrely confessing to the killing in a Kerrang interview: “I just heard about that one – they must have been a pretty awful band to need to bring that sort of attention to themselves,” he laughs. “It’s going a little too far. You don’t need to be a criminal to be credible.”

Once described as Tipper Gore’s worst nightmare, Slayer are uncompromising in their embrace of the trademarks of the genre – furiously fast drum-beats, relentlessly riffing buzz-saw guitars, tuneless screeching and song titles like ‘Mandatory Suicide’, ‘Reign in Blood’ and ‘Necrophobic’. Their latest opus, Divine Intervention, the first studio effort in four years not counting the live Decade Of Aggression, maintains that standard with charmingly titled ditties like ‘Serenity In Murder’, ‘Killing Fields’ and ‘Racist’.

While other bands trading in trash, have grown and developed their approach into a more mainstream mode, Slayer remain true to their original inspiration and King is adamant that they will not change. “The early bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, they’ve all moved on or up or whatever you want to call it – become more mellow or tried to expand their audience,” he says. “Their intensity has faded off. That’s never been an option with us. I’m happy doing what I’m doing. It’d be nice to make more money though but who’s to say anybody would like it if we changed.

“Basically I’m a fan,” he adds. “If I wasn’t doing this sort of music I’d be a fan of it and this is what I would want my favourite band to sound like, I guess. When we first got together I was into rock bands like Boston and stuff but then I got into AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest. The heavier it got, the more I liked it. It wasn’t a case of me rebelling against my parents, they were good to me and I didn’t need to rebel against them. I just liked heavy music.”

And what about the song titles and lyrics – surely a track like ‘Serenity in Murder’ is bound to cause a fuss in some quarters?

“Yeah, It’ll probably come under attack but I say ‘just bring on the critics’. This whole blame thing is ridiculous. That song is just another one of Tom Araya’s (bass player with Slayer) murder stories but it’s not based on a real case like some of his songs – it’s just a fantasy thing about what it would be like to have someone with their throat slashed, die in his arms. It’s definitely not condoning it.”

But can he see that the title might be construed as suggesting that, somehow killing someone is not necessarily a bad thing?

“Yeah, I could see where somebody could suggest that,” he says. “But I’ll always shoot it down. If somebody wants to know, I’ll spend all day explaining it to them but if they want to accuse us of anything without understanding it – then I’ll throw them out the window! (thank Christ for telephone interviews! – CH)

“It’s the same with the music,” he continues. “People don’t understand it, they think it sounds repetitive. I was listening to a Whitney Houston album the other day and all the tunes sounded the fucking same to me. If you don’t understand or like the music, all you’ll hear is a fast drumbeat and razor guitars going on.”

MACHO POSTURING

Many would say that all this gratuitous macho posturing and courting controversy is just good old-fashioned publicity-seeking. Would King not agree?

“Yeah, sure it is,” he concedes. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Some of the wrong people will review our albums and say stupid things about it – everybody’s entitled to their opinion and it doesn’t hurt me at all, I can handle that just as long as some of the right people review it as well.”

And does he think there still an enthusiastic audience out there for Thrash Metal?

“It remains to be seen whether the audience is still there,” he says. “The market has changed. I think some of the original fans will have moved on – they might think they’re too old for us or whatever but we’ll get some new ones. It’s mainly a word of mouth, underground thing anyway. We’ve sold a lot of records with very little radio play and the reaction to Divine Intervention from journalists we’ve spoken to has been great so far.”