Slayer: Entrevista ao jornal inglês Guardian

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“Slayer: 'You do wonder if you've grown together or apart'”

Rob Fitzpatrick, Guardian.co.uk, 29 Oct 2009

Nearly 30 years into their career, Slayer are still touring the world, playing five nights out of seven to big crowds. They are still releasing huge-selling albums of extreme music.(...)

I meet bassist and singer Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King at their label's offices in west London.(...) Araya and King both look wildly out of place, though I suspect King, wearing rolled-up camouflage trousers, with a red-brown beard reaching down to his chest, his head shaved clean, his skull, arms, legs and hands all tattooed extensively, and locked behind sunglasses, would look out of place anywhere other than on stage with Slayer.

(...)

Araya talks of preparing his material at home with just an acoustic guitar and three chords. I ask if there's a sensitive singer-songwriter aching to get out.

"No! Not ever! No cheesecloth shirts!" he yells. "I don't want that at all. We must never, ever disappoint. Bands have disappointed me and it's a terrible feeling."

Recently there has been talk of this being Slayer's last record, that they've had enough. "Seeing a 50-year-old man headbanging on stage would make me cringe," Araya said recently. He smiles a decidedly small smile when I ask if this is it for the band.

"We don't know yet," he says. "I know this much: being away from your family so much doesn't get any easier. I've been married for 15 years. I have a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son and I want to make up for the all the time I wasn't there. I have nieces and nephews I've barely seen. This life demands so much of you, personally and physically. I honestly don't know how I did the first 15 years of Slayer. How did I get so fucking wasted then play every fucking night? Then, immediately after playing, do it all over again. How the fuck did we all do that?"

(...) Kerry King seems a perfect case study. He's like a profoundly unpopular schoolboy who has never quite got used to having people listen to him. He's not sullen, not unpleasant, just utterly disengaged. "I like playing," he says. "The rest is bullshit."

As a child, King and his dad kept birds – hookbills and cockatiels – now, rather appropriately, he "does" reptiles. His latest favourite is his carpet python. "They come in a variety of colours and they look tough," says the tattooed man in the big black boots.

(...)

In a stab at lightening the mood, I ask King what he thinks is the greatest record ever made.

"That's a real sit-down-and-a-cognac question, isn't it?" he says, yanking the cap off a bottle of vodka and – surely for my benefit – filling a large glass almost to the brim before stirring in a tablespoon of juice. "Van Halen's first record is amazing. Sure, it's rock'n'roll, but it introduced the world to what the electric guitar could do. Sabbath's Sabotage is very, very heavy. AC/DC's Powerage, Judas Priest's Stained Class, some Maiden too …"

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

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