Slipknot percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has revealed he deliberately designed their new stage lifts so that they’d scare him.
The platforms are hydraulic rather than electric, like their previous ones, meaning they move faster and more dangerously.
Clown tells Rolling Stone: “They go 15 feet up in the air, and they can spin around forever because the cables are down the middle. They jerk left and right. They slam up and down. And I designed these things because I’m scared of heights.
“That’s total Slipknot mandatory thinking – to create something I’m scared of, because it will bring something out of me. So I just get up there and fucking cross my fingers and go to a happy place and it’s scary.”
He adds: “You’ve got to hold on to your life sometimes. You get dizzy. Your sweat collects by your feet and you can slip. It’s something you have to respect because it will shit-can you in a moment.”
And he insists that the band’s downtime, brought about after the death of bassist Paul Gray in 2010, was bad for the music industry as a whole.
Clown says: “This business is pretty boring without us. You can look for something that’s equivalent to Slipknot – and you’re going to fail miserably.
“We are still something that people require and still something that people love. When you reconnect with your fans, it helps you recall the first mission, and that is to conquer the fucking world with our disease and our art, and leave everything behind.”
And he states: “We’re still well beyond everybody else. I know every other band and fuck them all, man. I’m in the greatest band in the world, period. We’re the best.”
Slipknot – who launched latest album .5: The Gray Chapter last year – headline the Download festival at Donington later this month.
