1 (Little Miss Scare-All) and Christian Woman helped establish radio rapport for Type O Negative, but most of its members still balked at the idea of committing to the months of touring necessary to capitalise on the buzz surrounding the album.
He would drive us around sometimes in his crazy car that had giant tractor tyres on, rolling into the city like The Munsters!” This was the pinnacle of nightlife in New York, there were a lot of cool bars and clubs we could go to and Peter got caught up in that. "We’d hang out on weekends and go into the city and Peter went in on the whole jet-black hair thing – songs like Black No. “The move into Bloody Kisses made a lot of sense at that point Peter was showing me a lot of the bands you can hear in those later records,” Sal remembers. The resulting album, Bloody Kisses became a landmark for not only Type O Negative as a band, but for goth metal as a genre. In particular, the band focused less on their thrash elements (though didn’t do away with them completely, as with We Hate Everyone and Kill All The White People) and incorporated more overtly gothic elements into their sound. By the time they got to working on their third album (their second, Origins Of The Faeces, effectively just a remix of Slow, Deep And Hard) the elements for Type O Negative’s iconic sound were truly beginning to take shape. The owner of the label came to me with the Repulsion demo and asked what I wanted to do with it – should we let him go, or bring it in to Roadrunner? I thought it was amazing, and we’d have been nuts to let him go!”Īs he would continually prove throughout the 90s (having also worked with Sepultura, Life Of Agony, Slipknot and just about every other major RR signing in that period), Monte’s intuition was right. “At the time Roadrunner was a tiny little label, and Peter wanted out because he hadn’t been happy with how those two Carnivore records were handled – he didn’t realise that even though Carnivore weren’t a band anymore he was still signed to the label as Peter Steele. “I knew of Peter long before the Type O Negative days – I grew up on Staten Island, so I used to go see Carnivore play at L’Amour,” Monte says. Or they were until A&R legend Monte Conner fought Type O’s corner, anyway. While Peter felt unsure about continuing his relationship with the label – feeling they had failed to capitalise on promoting Carnivore – as it turns out, the label were also getting cold feet. During his time in Carnivore, Peter had signed a multi-album deal with Roadrunner Records and while the band had since split, Peter was technically still tied into the contract. The crowd weren’t the only holdover from Carnivore that Type O Negative had to contend with. They didn’t really understand songs like I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else – going from thrashy to half-time suddenly, or following it up with Prelude to Agony which was really slow – they hated it!” The skinhead following still showed up at the early Repulsion shows expecting the wild mosh pits of Carnivore so we were mixing it up and throwing those things in there. “In the early days we’d end up playing three or four Carnivore songs in our set, stuff like Predator, Race War or Jesus Hitler. “Before Bloody Kisses the audiences were thrash-core guys with long hair and hardcore skinheads that made for a tougher audience,” Sal remembers. Though they retained Carnivore’s core thrash/hardcore crossover sound, the inclusion of elements like 80s synth-pop keyboards and glacial doom metal proved challenging for fans who were expecting Peter to continue down the same path. Type O Negative’s early years were often spent trying to extricate themselves from the legacy of Carnivore, as while the band hadn’t made major waves in the wider American music scene they had earned a passionate local following. Initially calling themselves Repulsion, they later changed their name to Sub-Zero and finally Type O Negative. By summer 1989, Peter and Sal had recruited local musicians Kenny Hickey and Josh Silver, working on songs that Peter had written for a third Carnivore album.
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