Riddled with maggots fine by Slipknot

Slipknot have an unrelenting groove and say their secret to making people dance is their Ministry-style, trance-like motion.

Some of the guys from mask-wearing metal band Slipknot felt like a spot of golf during their brief stay in New Zealand.

So yesterday a round at the posh Gulf Harbour Country Club was arranged by the band's local record company minder. He had to remind the boys that shirts with collars would be required on the course, which hosts the New Zealand Open next month.

On stage they appear in overalls to soak up spit, vomit and other bodily fluids.

The Iowa band - just as famous for their masks, as their music - are in town for today's Big Day Out. Their bruising riffs and roared vocals will no doubt get the moshpit full of "maggots" - the affectionate name for Slipknot fans - heaving at 6pm today.

The band arrived on Wednesday and two have come down with the flu. But, says drummer Joey Jordison, as he slips on a pair of sunnies to disguise himself from fans lurking in the Stamford Hotel foyer, it's great to be back in New Zealand. He played the 2003 Big Day Out with his other band the Murderdolls.

"It's so beautiful. We feel privileged to come all the way here because we're a long way from home."

Customs at Auckland airport was fine too. Unlike all-girl rockers the Donnas, who got held up for two hours, Slipknot breezed through, although percussionist Shawn "Clown" Crahan was fined $200 for an apple.

"We thought that was kinda funny," smiles Jordison.

The nine-piece band - whose aliases are numbers from "0" to "8" - is made up of DJ Sid Wilson (0), Jordison (1), bassist Paul Grey (2), percussionist Chris Fehn (3), guitarist James Root (4), programmer Craig Jones (5), Crahan (6), guitarist Mick Thomson (7), and singer Corey Taylor (8).

The members of Slipknot are never photographed without their masks on but they do interviews as themselves.

Their masks are an elaborate mix of the ghoulish and the scary, including one that looks like a maggot-riddled face and, most strikingly, Jones' leather mask with 23cm nails protruding from it.

Apparently, Jordison - who wears an Entombed band T-shirt and black wrist bands on either arm - is the most polite and normal of the band. His mask is also the tamest. It looks like him and his pale skin is as white as the mask itself.

"Actually, my mask is not any different from the guy you're talking to now," he says. "All it is, with the mask thing, is that they are a representation of how the music makes me feel."

Will they ever play unmasked, like Kiss did?

"You never say never. But there's never been any talk about removing the masks - they are part of Slipknot live. They are an extension of the way the music makes us feel inside so I don't see us ever taking them off."

Before the recording of their latest album, Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses, there were rumours Slipknot had split up - Jordison had the Murderdolls while Taylor and Root reformed their old band Stone Sour.

But the "maggots" stuck by them. The song, Pulse of the Maggots, probably the heaviest song of the latest album, is the band's tribute to these loyal fans.

"On our two-year hiatus our fans didn't go anywhere. They waited. And the kids were still wearing all the merch'. We think we've got the best fans in the world. They're beyond dedicated."

A couple of years ago - in true maggot style - thousands of the band's fans discovered the website of a British crocheting group, also called Slipknot, and they flooded the members' inboxes with rude and obscene messages. Now that's dedication.

Slipknot started out in Des Moines, Iowa, in the mid-90s and in 1996 they released a primitive-sounding album called Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.

Jordison says it was a "blue print" of what Slipknot would become, since only three members - himself, Grey and Crahan - are still in the band today. He describes their early sound, intriguingly, as "disco mixed with death metal".

"We were mucking round with different styles and it was quirky. But when it really came down to it, it wasn't defined at all so we didn't really know what the sound was going to end up being like."

Surprisingly, that disco vibe continues today. Slipknot have an unrelenting groove to their music. You can dance to it, and we don't mean just jumping up and down.

"There's a secret we have," explains Jordison, "that in a lot of our songs there's a Ministry-style, trance-like motion. Songs like (Sic), Surfacing, and Pulse of the Maggots all have a pulsating, almost trance-like, vibe."

Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) is a more mature album than their previous three releases. There's more singing, rather than roaring, but it still retains the band's grinding, beat-driven noise as its core. On it, Taylor sings about the "opium of the people" rather than blatantly bellowing lines like "people equal shit" as he did on their second album, Iowa.

"All it is, is a progression. It was a challenge for us. We've always been good at writing the real aggro stuff with profanity and we beat the hell out of that and we did it really well. The first record made its mark because we'd been playing those songs for years and we had a very set impression of what we wanted to be. With the next record [Iowa] people thought we were going to sell out so we went even heavier. So with this one we wanted to go into avenues we hadn't done before and still have our fans accept it.

"And it sounds better for it. It made us get a lot tighter, I think. With our other records we were so aggro and so fast-paced, not musically but personality wise, that sometimes we didn't concentrate completely on how good the record could sound because we thought it needed this continuous vibe where it was like a train coming off its tracks. With this we did retain that out-of-control sound but it's tighter."

Slipknot are indeed tight on stage, but refined? With masks and music like that, no chance. And the maggots wouldn't want it any other way.

BDO Performance

Who: Slipknot, the nine-man metal band from Iowa

Where: Big Day Out

When: Today, 6pm, Orange Stage

Albums: Slipknot (1999), Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses (2004)

* If you can't be there in person, join us for continuous online updates throughout the day at nzherald.co.nz/bigdayout