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They don't just have a sordid extreme metal past. Swedish metalists Deathstars are, as David McNamee discovers after 24 hours in their world, a bunch of dirty cunts. Man in a raincoat: Sam Scott Hunter.

"Give me your hard." No. "Come on, give me your hand. It's OK." No! don't know what you're going to do with it. "Close your eyes..." Um this is a bad idea. - I close my eyes and Nightmare Industries, producer, songwriter and guitarist with Swedish cyber-metallers Deathstars, takes my hand and drags it across and up. It feels like a crater of denim, shielding a soft plateaux of fabric. My fingertips scan the surface, mapping out a lump like a soft, fleshy egg. Urghhhl Get it away!!

The assorted Deathstars awake at this hour of the morning on their tourbus crack up. At the end of my fingertips is the brand new Deathstar six-stringer Cat - a beaming Cheshire cat grin on his face - and the gaping, crotch-hovering hole in his jeans.
A raven-haired 18-year-old with a Byronic appetite and bionic cheekbones, Cat looks like a manga-made vision of the ultimate rock'n' roll star. He looks like he should be in Backyard Babies - if they weren't so fucking ugly; or LA Guns, if they were underage vampires with a carefully measured penchant for doing each other. Razor-beautiful and without a shred of humility; incandescently arrogant and utterly in love with himself; young, dumb and ready-to-cum - Cat is a walking weapon. Its just a shame that he's got the cock of a baby. Except smaller.

Deathstars are one of the weirdest success stories in Swedish metal. Their unashamedly bombastic debut, Synthetic Generation, catapulted the group into the pop league in their homeland, though the UK has been slow to catch on to second album Termination Bliss. The first venue of this tour, Kingston's Peel, is a strange and tiny little place hidden in the suburbs. Most of the building is actually a dedicated strip club, linked to the venue by a small bar housing an incongruous mix of teen goths and dirty old men.

Charismatic Deathstars leader Whiplasher Bernadotte emerges from a day of fine wines with "some girlfriends in Notting Hill." He is nursing a smashed wrist bandaged ostentatiously in leopard print. "So, what have-you been doing today?" he questions his bandmates in their tiny kitchen-turned-dressing room. "I have been practicing sex. I actually got better today, but you guys are still the same!
"I do not want anyone reading Metal Hammer to think Deathstars are good in bed!" Whiplasher continues, whirling on your correspondent. "I am very, very lousy at sex. That's why I need as much... practice... as I can get!." Someone's missing. "Where is Skinny?" he enquires of the absent bass player. "Um, I don't think you should go on the bus right now...," someone advises by way of a response.
When Skinny arrives, he's not alone. Oh, man. Harmony Hex. "I walked onto the bus and, suddenly, there's Harmony," Drummer Bone W Machine mimes a frantic downward squatting motion. "Humping Skinny!" Skinny is a gangly, gothic flamingo of a man with an almost preternatural handsomeness. Twirling around his knees and groin, like a darting blonde firefly, is a Kewpie doll in cowboy hat and goth boots - a teeny red dress just covering the region between her arse and boobs.

Harmony Hex is a porn star. She was, Skinny says, "given" to him by Nightmare, after she contacted the group through MySpace. Harmony grinds against and tongues the bass player, before rounding on the nearest convenient band member - pushing her breasts into their face or reverse-crunching her groin into theirs. As Whiplasher sprinkles blue glitter onto his wincing features, in preparation for tonight's show, Harmony plants herself in front of him, bending over and parting her arse cheeks for him to rub glitter into
her no-no hole. She blatantly wants to fuck the whole band and it's making everyone uncomfortable.

Led through the strip club gallery of gyrating girls to the mighty fuck-call of' Welcome To The Jungle', Deathstars arrive onstage. Clad in military uniforms - and sub-corpse paint, they look like a commando Kiss. Whiplasher submerges the pain of his broken hand -
smashed last night on Cat's guitar following a mid-song snog - with fist-pumping audience commands. When one young man yelps in excitement at 'Blitzkrieg Boom', Whiplasher camply indicates him and purrs: 'You didn't scream for me like that last night, little boy. Why is it for you the power of the music must outstrip the pleasures of the flesh?."

It's total Rocky Horror. Just with powerchords and songs about fucking corpses on speed. The agenda is not serious, but the execution totally is - has to be. Stage left, the shirtless Skinny and Cat entwine,their tongues tickling and lapping at each other. Kingston
goes fucking mental.

"Oh my God, Cat looked so fucking sexy tonight," gasps Whiplasher, to murmurs of agreement in the dressing room. "Like he's in My Chemical Romance or something." Cat may be statuesque in his beauty, but in person he has the demeanour of a hyperactive, drooling, attention-deficient puppy. Albeit one with a permanent hard-on that's constantly trying to shag your leg. He is a constant figure of fun for the band who frequently lapse into 'Durr, I don't get it' Cat impressions.

Nevertheless, tonight it's Cat who is presented by one enamoured fan with a thick, professionally- presented folder of photographs... all of himself. Cat lovingly leafs through the pages pointing out particularly hot axe-hero poses. "every one in a while, when we get a hotel room,' Whiplasher reveals, "he masturbates while looking at himself. He thinks he's the most beautiful thing on the planet Earth." "On the bus they only have one mirror in the toilet and it's really hard for to get a hard-on," Cat explains. "But now I have this photo album with all the pictures of myself. Anyone who wants to use it, just ask me!" Cat emits an eardrum-puncturing feline yowl.

Nightmare turns to me and confides how his young protege last vented his sexual energy while on tour. I spit my wine.Cat you did not shag a car. "I did! I did shag a car!" Why did you shag a car? "Because the guy didn't have a pen so I could sign his car. So I thought 'OK, whatever, I will fuck his car instead!'" "He came back to the bus and he said," Nightmare approximates the voice of a mournful little boy who wants his mummy to clean the mud off his football shorts. "'I just fucked a tailpipe! And now my penis
is all black!" "They were playing our music on the stereo inside the car," Cat enthuses. "So, I FUCKED Deathstars! Regularly, apparently, Deathstars are approached post-gig by girls looking to make fuck with the full band. But ever since touring with Satyricon - whose session musicians were held on an erroneous rape charge - a strict 'no girls on the bus' rule has been enforced. Until now.

Next to me, straddling Skinny, is Harmony Hex. Her tongue is lashing in the bass player's mouth and she moans as she rides him. No one is in any doubt as to what they are doing. Certainly not the tour manager and crew who are lifting Harmony's tiny skirt and videoing the action. It injects a sour note of tension in the band dynamic. Nightmare leaps out of his seat and screams at the canoodling pair to get out of his sight. They repair to a bunk, from which we will occasionally glimpse a naked Skinny, scuttling from bunk to toilet.

Gibbering talk turns drunkenly to the relative merits of Kiss and Romanian black metal, vodka is passed around and Hammer's eyelids droop. Only distantly do we hear the click of camera shutters and giggled threats of Swedish prankery.

Nottingham and daylight arrive too soon. With a mouth scorched by bile and distorted memories of offering Deathstars £50 to lez up, I'm checking my face for signs of the threatened retribution for the journalist who, Bone repeatedly tells me, will himself be "reviewed" on the Deathstars website for not knowing his Romanian black metal or being able to hold his drink. "Have you checked your ass?," grins Cat. "There might be some secrets hidden there!" "We are not homosexuals," reassures Whiplasher. "We are just very fond of our feminine sides." OK, who in Deathstars has kissed who? "Everyone has kissed everyone in Deathstars," Nightmare plainly states. "On and offstage." "We don't hide that we have no problems with the says Bone. "I know several persons persons in metal bands that are gay but they can't go out with it because they would be killed," emphasises Whiplasher. "Metal music is so conservative. That's why we make fun of it." "Metal is gay!" laughs Nightmare. "Look at Manowar! They're naked men! muscles all oiled up with leather, spikes, chains? Chaa-AA-INS!!"

Deathstars say it's their only concession to to 'shock rock', that they're confronting prejudice through a kind of post-millenial Frankie Goes To Hollywood schtick. Really though, they could just be mining the truism that girls get turned on by seeing hot goth boys kissing. You're just doing this to get laid. "It's not fun to fuck," purrs Cat. "It's fun to tease the girls." Hey, if you get really good at it then you won't need to get laid; you could just do each other...

Inside Rock City, the band see that their sold-out show is confined to the tiny downstairs stage, when there's a perfectly decent 1,900 capacity venue upstairs. Later this month Deathstars will get to play these large venues, but it won't be on their own tour - it will be as support to Cradle Of Filth. It was not so long ago that Cradle backing singer Sarah Jezebel Deva made an impassioned rant against the suicide of Dissection's Jon Nödtveidt. Citing Cradle's Swedish drummer, Adrian Erlandsson - who is an old friend of Deathstars -Deva depicted Nödtveidt as a sadistic, pathetic individual (Nödtveidt - was a Satanist who was convicted of murder) whose
suicide was 'a bullshit kvlt statement'.

Jon Nödtveidt was Nightmare Industries' brother. Is there not going to be issues between you and Cradle on the tour because of this? "I've been informed of it," Nightmare says carefully. But there's no point in arguing with idiots. There's no point in being angry. She doesn't know what she's talking about." Nightmare is a very sweet-natured and gentle person, with a genuine-love for and commitment to his music - not to mention his family and friends. Now I sense an immediate hostility directed towards me from a band I was laughing and joking with minutes earlier.

Whiplasher attempts to bring the interview to an end, no doubt to protect his friend. You can tell they've been best friends for decades - they even look alike. Bone though, visibly angry, raises the issue of a German interview with Dani Filth, where he echoed Deva's sentiments. "I will not get too drunk and have a fight with Dani," Bone hisses through gritted teeth. "Not at all. That won't happen. Adrian will talk. And we will know."

"I think we've said too much," Whiplasher gravely announces. And the trip is over. Nightmare requests that the band read this feature before it goes to press and I explain why I can't do that. "Of course if you say anything bad then we will put our review of you on our website," Bone says, digging up the joke he had taunted me with all day. But this time no one laughs. And it feels a bit like a threat.

Harmony Hex, who is actually a sweetheart, enquires as to whether she'll be included in the piece. She is. So are a lot of things Deathstars probably wish they hadn't said or done. But this band will survive or fail on their own merits - they live and die by the things they say and do. They're good people, Deathstars. They're hit kissers but they're no sillier than Kiss. They're worth. five minutes of anyone's wanking time.

Article Source: Metal Hammer January 2007