MICHELE MADDEN - A Vulgar Display of Power
WARNING: The following featuring contains curse words, boobs, and a Vulgar Display of PANTERA. If you have a faint disposition, or are easily offended, I advise you to deal with it like the grown-up you are and read on, because this interview is amazing. But you have been warned.
Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media
Michele Madden has walked into the doctor’s office and shut the door behind her. The GP raises his eyebrows when he sees his new patient – a 6’3” former model with tattoos on both forearms – lock the door behind them. She walks over to his desk, and he shifts nervously in his chair as he watches her reach forward and take his phone off the hook.
It’s just the two of them. No interruptions.
She stares him dead in the face. “You’re going to get me into hospital. Today.”
He goes to say something.
“Shush,” she says, cutting him off. “Pipe down. You’re going to put that phone back on the hook, and you’re going to call the hospital, and you’re going to get me in, for a mammogram, now.” Michele is too tired to realise it, but she has tears running down her face.
Something clicks in the doctor’s head as he looks at the bags under Michele’s eyes. She is visibly exhausted. “Has no one been listening to you?” he asks. She shakes her head. He makes the call, and she is admitted to hospital that night.
A few months ago, SENSE reported on a GoFundMe for Michele, the Amazonian heavy metal warlord who has stalked our stages for almost two decades, most famously as the snarling front-woman for Sydney noisemakers TOURETTES. The funds were being raised to cover the surgical costs of an operation Michele needs to tackle “aggressive complex cystic masses” (in layman’s terms, her breasts are currently trying to kill her). The target was $30,000, and we are happy to report that it has been exceeded. Michele – acid-tongued hermit and “Rollins with a Rack” – is scheduled for surgery on December 3rd. The famous boobs, which helped land her modelling work amongst her musical projects, are coming off.
She spoke to us from her beachside home – the “Convent of Amazonian Belligerence” (population: one), in None of Your Damn Business, Australia – and described how she first knew something was seriously wrong.
“About two years ago I went up a cup size,” she explains. “I had to fight really hard. With the medical profession, a lot of the time they don’t believe women, and you have to fight and fight to get diagnosed, and nobody was listening to me … I went to this medical doctor at the end of my shit – I knew I wasn’t well.”
When they inspected her breasts, they quickly realised the gravity of the situation. “They said, “Wow! These are like billiard balls covered in marbles covered in gravel!” I said, “Try carrying this shit around!””
Michele has been physically fit for most of her life, so she compares this condition to waking up one day in Eddie Murphy’s fat suit from The Nutty Professor. What’s her day-to-day life living with this?
“It’s actually pretty pathetic, and it annoys me a lot. I left the world five years ago, so this whole isolation thing is nothing new to me. I decided to chuck it in and become the world’s youngest retiree, and I founded the Convent of Amazonian Belligerence five years ago – one member, me. No TV, no flatmates, no pets, no kids, I don’t have any partners. Total rural isolation on the beach, and it’s been fucking amazing. So my day-to-day used to be jump out of bed, grab flippers, grab surfboard, grab everything, strap it to the side of my pushbike that I found in a Marrickville Council clean-up before I left Sydney. [Laughs] And go! That was what I wanted after all these years of being on the road. This is my first proper home. I have all my books around me, all my writing around me – it’s brilliant. So I would fang it down to the beach, surf to exhaustion, sleep on a rock, come home, do my writing, go for a run, whatever. That was my whole day-to-day thing. So now it’s just lots of naps. My back is shattered [laughs]. I’m trying to work out what it wants to teach me. Is it to slow down? Is it a humility thing? To be grateful for what I have?”
Rural isolation must have been an interesting vantage point to watch the world grind to a halt with the COVID pandemic. How does she feel about the collapse of touring? “I love how there’s so much support for the arts, as always,” she answers, sarcasm trickling out of my phone speaker. “Everything that runs the world … without the arts, there is nothing to aspire to, nothing to hope for, nothing to do a soundtrack for your wedding, your kid’s birth, your funeral … We’ll just let them rot on the vine like we always do. We’ll be the last generation who moshed. It hits me all the time. I fell on one of the great loves of my life, stage-diving in front of Kerry King at SLAYER when I had green hair. I fell on this dude, and we fell in love. The friends we met! The universal energy that rises off the steam of the pit.” She lets out a defeated sigh down the line. “Was that it? Are we done?”
Well, if we do get a vaccine, that’s great, but there’s a whole subculture of people who won’t fucking take it.
“Well that’s cool, they can all eat each other’s fucking dick-cheese in Byron Bay, and let their parents support them on those crusty baby boomer trust funds that they’ve been sucking on for years while they’ve been rolling their dreadlocks. Like, fuck off!”
Did we mention Michele has a way with words?
****
Michele’s adolescence reads like an Australian take on Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van. If she does write it one day, it’ll probably start with getting kicked out of school at fourteen. “I was done for suspected arson. As funny as it is, it’s not, because they wanted to cut me loose, and what they did was highly illegal, and I fell through the cracks. You couldn’t get on benefits until you were sixteen, and I was fourteen, so it could have gone very fucking wrong for me … I’ve always fallen in with the right angels. I’m very, very lucky.”
Were the parents not on the scene, or not much help?
“My mother is fantastic. I was not fantastic – I was not a good kid. My mother is actually a fucking saint. She is the closest person to me, we speak four times a day – I’m not even kidding. We are up in each other’s shit hardcore, but I was unstoppable.”
As someone who was the tall girl, was that an awkward part of being a teenager?
“Horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. Children are pure evil, and that’s why I decided to create myself.”
Pictured: Michele Madden, Neil Fallon (CLUTCH), Matthew Young (KING PARROT) + Michele’s Mum
When did she first get into music?
“I had always sung – I’d always been musical. I remember when I was really little, probably about five, I kept grabbing Mum’s head and putting her ear on the top of my head and saying, “Can you hear it? Can you hear it?” Because there has always been music in my head, and she thought that was great … I’m not one of those liars who says, “Well, when I was in utero, I was listening to IRON MAIDEN.” Go fuck yourself! Lies! I, like everyone else, raided my parents’ records, and that was really heavy singing stuff actually. I can still sing all of Bat Out of Hell by MEAT LOAF. BEACH BOYS, Best of … BEE GEES … I’m obsessive about the BEE GEES. We could just ruin this whole thing with BEE GEES stuff. STONES over THE BEATLES, for me, just because they had Merry Clayton on Gimme Shelter, and that’s who I decided I wanted to be. I said, “I want to do that.”
“I lied in a radio contest when I was eleven years old and scored tickets to HUNTERS & COLLECTORS. I also went to P.I.L. when I was ten – PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED. I grew up in a pretty heavy band culture … My grandmother was a humongous jazz groupie, and she was the president of the Canberra Jazz Club, so I was coming up around Don Burrows and all kinds of incredible shit when I was a kid. I was the only third-grader I knew who was into Edith Piaf … I didn’t know what “cool” was, so I think that really saved me.”
“I grew up in a military family as well … All boys. I was very genderless, and just a person, so I didn’t have the gender roles, or many expectations of me, it was just like “show up.”” She tells SENSE about her family’s expectations of her when they would go bow-hunting as kids (before adding that having to skin her own kills was probably what made her a vegan). If she wanted to come hunting with her brothers, she had to get herself out of bed, and make sure her kit was squared away. That drive and self-motivation would inform her life as a musician. “I have a lot of tenacity, and I think, when I got into metal, that was the energy that I had inside of me.”
At the turn of the millennium, female metal vocalists – particularly ones capable of roaring – were few and far between. Nowadays, there seems to be heaps of them. “They can all be kissing my trail-blazing arse. I took every motherfucking arrow for those corset-wearing moles!” She laughs down the phone. “No, I love them all – good on them. Everyone has someone who comes before [them], and pioneers always cop the most arrows. The thing for me was, I knew I was going to cop it … You’re going to cop it if you’re a 6’3” chick, you know? I knew from a very young age I was never going to be cute. My old man said that to me – “You ain’t never going to be pretty, honey, so you want to be funny and fast.” I didn’t take that as a bad thing … I think that’s why I went so androgynous, so early. I’m not oblivious to the way I look. I hate false modesty. We live in a visual age now, more so than ever. I can scrub up, but I paid my dues before I ever decided to go into looking that feminine all the time.”
Online, Michele has described herself as “Trailer Park Angelina [Jolie]”, and I’ve already mentioned my personal favourite, “Rollins with a Rack.”
“My thing was, “I’m gonna getcha. I’m going to fuck with you. And I don’t care if you like me or not – you’re not going to be able to forget me.” … Jason [Fuller – BLOOD DUSTER] was like, “Michele, you were too early. You were too much, and you were too early.” Like you said, there are a lot of people doing it now, and I applaud them all and wish everyone well … But I was. I was stuck in Australia, and we were too much, and a lot of the guys absolutely hated me because I out-sang them, and everyone was like, “She uses pedals”, and I would scream in their fucking faces. I’d drop the mic – I had no shame. I changed my look a couple of times over the years, then when I moved out to L.A. and joined MELDRUM, I was just like, “I’m going to be hot as fuck, and everyone can pick the peanuts out of my shit, because I earned this!”
Did you cop “Show us your tits” a lot?
“No, they were too scared, because I’m a known brawler … There were a couple of incidents where I got into humongous violent altercations and came out on top, and I don’t advocate that …” She laughs. “Who am I kidding? I fucking loved it. The thing is, in our scene, if you get beat down by a 6’3” chick, you’re never going to get a boner again. Your friends are going to fry you for the rest of your life. Would you be willing to take that chance? The answer is “no” … You remember what I looked like back then. I didn’t give a fuck. I wasn’t going to shave under my arms, I wasn’t going to shave my legs, I wasn’t going to wear shoes, I was a big advocate. I walked out of a lot of interviews, because if they opened with “Who is your favourite female singer?” I’d go, “Would you ask Chris Cornell who his favourite male singer is?” We didn’t play the game.”
I mention the word “sexism”, but Michele is resistant to calling it that. “I’m not going to say it was sexism. I’m going to say that I was a threat. I’m not going to bring my cunt into this argument, you know? I wanted to be the best front-man I could be, and I came from the bottom like everyone else does. My first album was a nightmare. I sound like a fourteen-year-old boy getting skinned alive, but I worked and worked and trained and trained, and by the time the band broke up … we were a machine. We were living in Germany, on the record company’s dime, like animals, but we were doing it. It was fucking fantastic. Ross and I would eat healthy. I would run around the red light district every night, and my favourite hooker’s name was Daisy. She was awesome. She was like, “Have we gone platinum yet, Michele?” I was like, “Working on it babe!” It was fucking brilliant.”
Pictured: Michele Madden + Chino Moreno (DEFTONES)
When I ask who some of her favourite front-people were, she mostly lists men. Axl Rose of GUNS N ROSES. Phil Anselmo of PANTERA. Mike Patton of FAITH NO MORE. And, of course, Henry Rollins of BLACK FLAG. I mention that one of my first pieces of writing for SENSE was a review of Rollins’ book Get in the Van. “That thing was my bible!” She laughs. The conversation turns to the many mentions of skinheads at punk shows. For someone my age, it’s hard to imagine someone getting around a gig with a swastika on their arm without copping a beating. “I got the shit kicked out of me by neo-Nazis when we were in Germany. That was fun. [Laughs] I’m very mouthy about being a Jew, and me and my bass player Ross, who is still one of my dearest friends … When we were living in Hamburg when we were signed to Armageddon Records, we were sitting downstairs from where we lived in this beer garden … There were a couple of crusty punks, and we talked to them, and I said something to Ross … We were railing on each other. And one of these supposedly forward-thinking punks goes “du bist jüdisch?” [“You are Jewish?”] And I [said yes], and they all got up and left, and I was like, “Wow, there is it. 1938 was not that long ago people.” That was an experience. I got into it with this neo-Nazi dude one night, and I said, “Seven million and you missed one, you fuck. Let’s go!” And Ross was like, “Oh my God, Michele, not now! We don’t have health insurance!”
“I don’t go looking for anything, but if it comes to me … I was shit-scared. I hate people who say stories like that and make out that they were Captain Blood. I wasn’t – I was pissing myself, but I wasn’t going to back down.”
Why did TOURETTES break up?
“You know what? We never even announced that we did. Isn’t that funny? We just did that last show on New Year’s Eve, and I walked away.” Wikipedia still lists TOURETTES in the present tense. “You know what? Maybe in some alternate universe, it’s still going. I walked away, and I’ve never spoken about why. It’s in my writing if people really want to dig deep enough. It was the right thing to do at the right time. Six weeks later, I was on a plane with Gene Hoglan and Michelle Meldrum, and I moved back to California [to join the band MELDRUM]. To have done three Big Day Outs, Wacken … we were the first Australian band on Bloodstock in England. We had our own record company – we were real DIY punks. We did all of our own t-shirt screen printing, all of our own posters, stickers, a DVD, four or five albums. I’m really proud of that legacy, it was really cool.”
Michele has been a constant writer her whole life. By her estimate, she fills anywhere from 120 pages on a bad month to 280 pages on a good month, longhand. “There’s a whole wall of my house that’s sponsored by Spirax,” she laughs.
****
It’s 1996, and Michele is in a pub in Sydney, with a fake I.D. and a smile. The barman – who she can’t stand – motions to a group sitting over at a nearby table. “They look like your kind of people over there,” he sneers. She looks over, and sees a couple of guys with long hair, camo pants and wallet chains. Turns out, the dickhead behind the bar wasn’t wrong about this one.
“Back then, you couldn’t get IRON MAIDEN shirts at K-Mart,” Michelle tells me, almost twenty-five years later. “If you saw people [wearing them], it was like a secret handshake. If I got on a bus when I was a kid and saw someone in a SLAYER t-shirt, odds-on, I would be sleeping on your floor, in a band, smoking all your bongs within three days. That was how we met!”
The guys at the table look like fun, so she buys a round of shots and takes it over to them. They introduce themselves as Kat, Aaron, Vinnie, and Dimebag. She doesn’t know it, but Michele has just bought shots for Vinnie Paul and “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, drummer and guitarist for groove metal titans PANTERA, one of the biggest metal bands of the 90s, who were in Australia touring The Great Southern Trendkill, and were out drinking with drum tech John “Kat” Brooks and sound engineer Aaron Barnes. This gesture would change the course of her life. “I was like, “Hey guys! How are ya? My name’s Michele. You’re obviously from out of town. I just wanted to say hi! I love your POISON IDEA t-shirt.” Dimebag immediately took a liking to the gangly teenager. They would stay up talking most of that night, in a park opposite the Kings Cross police station, where the famous party animal got yelled at by the cops for banging on a corporate sculpture.
“One of the other things that I loved about Dimebag was … I didn’t know that these guys were notorious for getting people fucked up. I was dead-set clueless. These were just a bunch of cool yanks that I met, and I was hanging with these cool dudes. No one put a move on me. Everyone knew I was super fucking young. I went to the toilet when we were at this bar, and I came back, and there was a glass of apple juice, orange juice, Fanta, Coke, lemonade, pineapple juice, milk and everything else, and Darrell just goes, “Oh, I didn’t know what you were drinking, so I got you one of everything.” That melted me!”
Dime was like, “We’re in this band. Do you want to come to our show tomorrow night?” I was like, “Oh fuck yeah, that’ll be ace.”” She agreed to meet them at their hotel, and even brought a six-pack of Budweiser because she wanted to “be a good Australian friend,” much to Dime’s amusement. Michele boarded a van with the band and travelled to the Sydney Entertainment Centre. She was not ready for what she saw. “I looked up … It was like Beyond Thunderdome. There were kids hanging off this parking garage, shaking these fences. I’m like, “Fuck!” Darrell said, “What do you reckon?” I said, “I reckon I could get used to this.”
Fast forward to later that night, and Michele Madden is standing behind the lighting desk, watching giant green pot leaves projected up onto a screen in front of the stage, as thousands of rabid fans cheer in the darkness. The sombre country twang of Suicide Note Part One fill the air.
The atmosphere is electric. This is the calm before the storm.
Then, the screen drops, and PANTERA rip into the warp-speed savagery of Suicide Note Part Two – a maelstrom of screaming feedback, squealing riffs and strobe light. She had met the guitarist and drummer barely 24 hours ago. Now, she was seeing who they really were, and what they were capable of.
“I went and watched the second half of the set by the side of the stage, and it was so endearing.” She found herself watching with a busker Dime had met in Chinatown, who he had also invited to the show. “He just wanted everyone to feel good, and what he planted … I ended up out in Arizona, hanging out with Val ["Big Val" Bichekas – PANTERA’s head of security] a month later, at Christmas. You just wanted to orbit around these dudes. I remember sending Dime my first album, and he was so kind. Fast forward to ’04, I’m in Calgary making this album, and the news came over the wire that he was gone.”
Pictured: PANTERA The Great Southern Trendkill + Michele Madden + Dimebag Darrel (PANTERA)
Over the phone, I hear Michele start to cry, and I don’t blame her. Following the ugly dissolution of PANTERA in 2003, Dimebag and Vinnie had gone on to form DAMAGEPLAN. They were playing a show at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio, when a crazed fan and ex-Marine, who allegedly blamed Darrell for the breakup of PANTERA, walked onstage with a 9mm and shot Darrell in the back of the head. Five people, including the gunman, would die that night, triggering an outpouring of grief from the metal community and sparking massive overhauls in concert security around the world. Michele immediately got Dimebag’s birth and death date tattooed on her forearms, and the circular CFH Cowboys From Hell logo on her back. She still keeps an old answering machine with his voice messages on it.
Life has a way of coming full circle. In 2019, almost fifteen years later, her friends KING PARROT were playing Canberra as part of the Thrash Blast Grind tour with PHILIP ANSELMO & THE ILLEGALS, coming on every night to help Phil belt out PANTERA classics. Michele wound up onstage at The Basement alongside KING PARROT’s Matthew Young and PALM’s Toshihiko Takahashi, bellowing the fist-pumping Walk in her hometown. “I’m in six-inch heels and a cocktail dress … Phil just comes up and throws his arm around me, and Matt comes up and throws the other arm around me, and I was just like, “It was all worth it.”
“If I ever write an autobiography, it’s going to be called, How Did I Get Here? I’m From Fucking Canberra!”
