Benton sounds like another Varg Vikernes lolllll

Deicide interviews @ http://www.utopia.com.au/intv_deicide.php
Words: ROD YATES.



When Glen Benton says he’s prepared to kill two ex-members of his band, it’s a statement perhaps best taken with a grain of salt. Though patently not a man to be trifled with, it is worth remembering that he’s spent almost every day since his 33rd birthday having to defend the fact that he’s even still alive, after proclaiming that he’d commit suicide the day he reached that age. And yet, such is the hatred Deicide’s bassist/vocalist feels toward previous guitarists Eric and Brian Hoffman that it’s difficult to deny the ring of sincerity in his voice.



“I’ll tell you right now, dude,” he seethes. “If I ever see either one of them anywhere in my vicinity, they better be wearing a bullet-proof vest. I would use deadly force.”



So you hate the Hoffmans so much that you’d be willing to go to jail over them?



“Absolutely. They come near me or my family or anyone in this band in a threatening manner, I would use deadly force to defend anyone or anything in my world. And they’d better know that.”



Though Benton’s feelings for the Hoffman brothers have only truly come to light since they left the band in 2004, the bassist/vocalist asserts that they’d been the weak link in Deicide since they formed in Florida in 1987. Ask him why he put up with them for so long, and he claims he did so in order to keep providing for his family and because of his friendship with drummer Steve Asheim, on whom he would not be willing to walk out on just because of his feelings towards the guitarists. Point out to him that surely it can’t have been all bad – the Hoffmans were in the band when Deicide created some of the most incendiary death metal albums of all time in the shape of Legion and their 1990 self-titled debut, after all – and he states that he and Asheim were responsible for 99 per cent of the songwriting on those albums and, indeed, on every Deicide release, and that Eric Hoffman didn’t even come up with his own lead breaks on many Deicide songs – his recent replacement Ralph Santolla has, Benton claims, been writing the leads since 1995’s Once Upon The Cross. Ask him how all this affected his dedication to the band, and he openly admits this:



“I pretty much gave up a long time ago when it came to putting in, being excited about a record. I didn’t want to be in the studio, I would just show up and do my stuff and leave. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them, and when it’s like that, how can you create?”



For most Deicide fans, this is all old news. They’ll already know why the Hoffmans quit – a new publishing deal saw their royalties reduced to more accurately reflect their songwriting contributions, so they bailed – and they’ll already have read the war of words that’s erupted since: claims by the Hoffmans that committed Satanist Benton got married in a church; that he’s addicted to drugs; that they came up with the Deicide name and logo; and on and on and on.



What is surprising is how much Benton chooses to still dwell on all this, particularly given the success Deicide have enjoyed since the brothers departed. With two new guitarists in the shape of Santolla and ex-Cannibal Corpse six-stringer Jack Owen, they’ve produced their best album for years in The Stench Of Redemption, one that’s been touted as a return to their early-’90s glory days. Despite this success, Benton still delights in focusing on the failures of the Hoffmans.



“Eric’s a mental nutcase where he can’t even function in his every day life,” he starts. “I recently heard he was involved in a DUI and fleeing the scene of an accident and was arrested for that. The guy’s always been irresponsible, down to the fact that he has three kids that he doesn’t even know where they’re at now. I can go all the way down to the nitty gritty with those two. I could go 10 ways of Sunday on them if I wanted to. When they left the band their last words were, ‘We’re Deicide, you guys aren’t even Deicide, without us you’re going to fall apart.’ It’s like, ‘No, dude, me and Steve are Deicide, always have been for all these years, and we’re gonna show you this.’”



It’s perhaps this determination that spurned Benton and Co on to making their best album in years. Certainly Benton isn’t in any doubt as to why it turned out so well.



“For all these years we’ve had that weak link of the guitarists in the band. And now we’ve remedied that whole thing, now it’s polished Deicide to what it needs to be.”



As happy and successful as the new, improved Deicide may be, it hasn’t made them any less of a magnet for controversy. In July this year, a gig in Texas was stopped by police half way through and Santolla arrested after a cop thought that a bottle thrown at him while onstage had come from the guitarist (it was hurled from the crowd).



“You know what, man?” chuckles Benton. “You say the name Deicide and you hear the printers clicking in all the local churches. I never thought I would be doing this at this age and still having success with it. I never thought I would see that.”



Indeed next year marks the band’s 20th anniversary, a landmark not lost on the frontman.



“Who’d ever have thought that hating Jesus would give me a long-ass career?” he chuckles. “Being the church’s number one outlaw, who ever thought I’d have a career based on that? I thought I’d do a few records and go and work at Harley Davidson or something."

“We’re gonna do some anniversary stuff through the merch company, we’ll probably sell some anniversary shirts, set up an anniversary show to commemorate it. Things are looking up, man, we’ve got good things coming up. We’ve got a plug in a new Adam Sandler movie, we’ve got a new videogame, there’s a lot of good things going on. We’ve got a video on MTV at the moment in the States…I say all the time, that after 20 years of eating shit sandwiches it’s about time I at least got bologne!”