All images by Harry Steel

When Slipknot first landed on British soil in December 1999, the Millennium Dome in London’s Docklands was being prepared to host its Millennium Eve opening party. The Dome's exhibition, aspiring to be like the World's Fair, was perceived as a white elephant – an incoherent mess of British culture and values. It housed an exclusive episode of sitcom Blackadder which could only be viewed at a cinema onsite; the “body zone” comprised supersize anatomical models that included a terrifying beating heart; and there was a display of diamonds – the object of a foiled heist by a gang in late 2000.

Built on derelict land contaminated by toxic sludge from a former gas works, the Dome was saved from ignominy when it was transformed into The O2 arena in 2007. Opened with a gig by Bon Jovi, the venue saw a now-legendary 21-night residency by Prince and ended the year with a one-off performance by a reformed Led Zeppelin.

Twenty-five years after they played the London Astoria (which closed in 2009), Slipknot’s clown is ensconced in his dressing room at The O2, waiting for the first of two nights in the 20,000-capacity venue on the weekend before Christmas. 

After I give him the backstory, he smiles: “So they built it for us.”

Slipknot are hot on the heels of Paul McCartney, who just played two nights at the arena, even inviting Ringo Starr onstage to perform two songs with him. In the smaller Indigo venue housed under the dome's vast glass-fibre fabric canopy, King Crimson founder Robert Fripp is playing a covers show with his wife Toyah Wilcox. Their live show as a duo was inspired by their streamed lockdown kitchen performances, including a rendition of “Psychosocial” in 2022. 

“What I like about ‘Psychosocial’ and Slipknot is that the ethos of the band is closer to the ethos of bands in general,” Fripp later commented in a 2023 interview. “Which is essentially, the music comes first and the band comes first before the members themselves.”

Though he’s happy to be playing here, describing the two nights ahead as “perfect”, clown is evidently fatigued as this tour, and Slipknot’s 25th-anniversary year, comes to a close.

“I'm just ready for it to be done,” he concedes. “It was enough twenty-five years ago. Looking forward and living in the day, it's definitely a time capsule, the whole thing, so it's worth it.”

The South America tour that preceded this one took a toll on the band and touring party. Everyone seemed to come down with respiratory or stomach illnesses. Or in clown's case, both. He barely recovered from the sickness and severe jet lag from all the time-zone-hopping on that run before setting out for Europe in early December. Fripp’s comment about putting the band before members rings true tonight.

“I tried to say ‘Hi’ to someone [in the band] earlier, they didn’t even fucking talk to me,” says clown. “So it's just regular Slipknot fucking thought process.”

Slipknot have worked hard to be sitting where they are tonight. But the work comes with trying to stay in the moment and recognise it for what it is. 

“So am I surprised I'm here?” asks clown. “No, I better be here. It's been a whole lifetime working to be somewhere. Why not be here two nights in a row, as opposed to one night, which we did last time [in early 2020].”

It’s fascinating watching the band over the Friday and Saturday nights. Though it contains the same material, the show is far grander and more stop-start than the ′99/′00 period. Songs come in furious flurries, not least openers “(sic)”, “Eyeless” and “Wait and Bleed”. Then the stage cameras focus on Sid at his decks and New(ish) Guy on samples, conjuring sickly ambience between the sections. They come across as puppet masters of the whole experience. It’s a little jarring at first, but becomes more impactful as the show goes on – a stark difference from the rolling cluster-bomb effect of the band’s first arrival in the UK.

“I didn't pay attention too much in the early days, because I was focused on the day, living in the present to hopefully make a difference for tomorrow,” says clown. “I still work on living in the present, but it's not decisions for the band, it's more to open my own eyes. And I didn't do a lot of that in ′99 and 2000 because it was always naysayers and just a bunch of morons talking about the dumbest things.”

He still bristles at how Slipknot was treated like a circus in 1999, as if they were “throwing darts at balloons to win shithole prizes”. In metal, the phenomenon of their rise was compared to The Beatles. Now, they’re matching a former Beatle’s touring schedule. I sense that the armour that they had to wear to fight for a Friday or Saturday night slot at a given venue is hard to dispense with completely, even twenty-five years later. clown describes a restlessness that manifested in insomnia on the tour bus. On their 2000 European tour, he took 5am walks with Brian “Yap” Barry from support band One Minute Silence. They emerged from their buses in the middle of nowhere, picked a direction, and just walked and talked. 

Before Slipknot takes the stage at The O2, “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright plays over the PA, a seemingly incongruous soft-rock song that was picked as “a tribute to potentially realizing one’s dream”.

“I really like that romantic version of believing in a dream and adhering to it,” says clown. “There was a lot of discipline back in the early days, and a lot of discipline that probably wasn't merited. We probably could have been a little less militant on ourselves. But we believed in that, we stuck to it, and it made things work. We were able to get it done.”

clown admits he doesn’t really recognise a lot of the audience out there any longer. There’s many younger faces that he needs to align himself with now as a 55-year-old man. That’s where the masks have their special magic – they may change, but they make Slipknot timeless. 

“Well, this is the real mask, man,” he says pointing to his face. “Yeah, I'm not telling lies up there. There's no mask up there. That's the real shit. I'm just conveying the real shit to the people that need to take off their fucking masks.”

Both nights, as the band emerges during the screech of “742617000027”, clown slowly walks the width of the stage, like a tiger prowling in his cage. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking up there. He treats that persona onstage as something outside himself that he’s not really accountable for: “the clown is the clown is the clown”. 

On the first night, his wife Chantel is watching from the mixing desk. She is often his harshest critic. They laugh backstage about her having accused him of doing nothing onstage, while he’s had one kind of near-death experience or another. 

And sometimes he does do nothing, as he told me last year about set closer “Scissors”. It now features an extraordinary four-minute drum solo by Eloy, the other members improvising along, which is the closest Slipknot has come to the sophisticated fusion of a band like Mahavishnu Orchestra. By the end of it, clown is slumped against his keg, as if he’s in a trance, or asleep. Dreaming of all the things that have happened and are yet to come.

Beyond his efforts as a creative force in Slipknot, and in many ways overseeing the band, clown struggles when it comes to (lack of) recognition of his contribution as a member. He tells a story about breaking into tears when he picked up Tool’s Lateralus CD in the summer of 2001 and discovered the booklet used transparent pages. He had wanted the same for Iowa’s booklet, with each member on a different page, amassing into one giant monster when looked at from the front. He’s always cared – sometimes too much.

“I've had a hard time with the art things,” he says. “It's been harder for me to generate interest and honest desire.”

The way he sees it, there’s been a hesitancy for others to really go inside what he does. With a guitarist and drummer, the output is viscerally understood – there’s a vibration and there’s a beat. Everyone knows where they’re at when Corey comes onstage and starts performing his vocals.

“Then clown comes out,” he says, picking up the thread. “If you know what the clown is, you're like: Where we at? Where are we at tonight, clown? We happy? We in-between? Feel like breaking everything? But it's not easy to understand what you're dealing with. So I've had a rough twenty-five years trying to reassure myself that anything I do is really important. Because I don't have people asking me about my album covers. I never have people ask me about my videos. Eloy is up for drummer of the year. No-one in twenty-five years, including Modern Drummer, has asked me about the keg.”

Throughout our interview, a steady succession of people knock at the door of his dressing room to find out where the clown’s at tonight: tour manager, manager and band members. 

“I don't know what benefit talking to people is anymore,” clown says, with only the faintest hint of irony. “I'm not really concentrating on all that noise anymore. You know, I like going on stage, and that's about it.”

Later, he puts it more bluntly: “I’m anti-life for 22-and-a-half hours.”

clown would like the whole Slipknot operation “to be a cult”. But life isn’t playing ball. Back in the day, he’d observe a venue’s security giving themselves a generous amount of space when they set up the barricade. clown would wait until they’d done the whole thing before demanding they push it closer to the stage, enraged they’d taken a foot off his culture to be more comfortable.

For someone who says he doesn't believe in perfectionism, he clearly wants to get as close as possible to perfection. He shoulders the burden of wanting “to make the machine hum beautifully”.

“So I try to get up there and love what I'm doing enough that I won't let anything that I'm struggling with affect what they [the audience] love,” he says. “And that's the real challenge, is to give, and it can be tough when everyone's fucking taking.”

But he has at least one New Year’s resolution.

“2025 I'm going to work on ‘No Complaining’,” he asserts. “Just not going to do it anymore. I realized my expectations are never going to be met. So I need to give myself a break. It's probably the last part of ego I need to work on. That way I can just float. Nothing will bother me. I can just work on positive potential. We got a new album. We're gonna start at some point. I just want to roll into that with an energy like it's all starting again. That's how I want to approach it.”

The chances of new Slipknot material emerging soon seem to be high. As everyone who’s been to one of the 25th-anniversary shows can attest, it seems there’s a fire under the band. There’s been numerous mentions this year of writing in a rehearsal space together like the old days.

“If we got our room and our shit’s going, someone's gonna pop, everybody's gonna join in. And if we go, ‘Oh, that's good,’ that fucker will be done by the end of the night and then massaged over a month. And that's the best way to write fucking Slipknot music,” says clown.

But he wants to make one thing abundantly clear about the Look Outside Your Window album that has cropped up in interviews during the last year.

“It was never a Slipknot album,” says clown. “Not while it was happening, not while I've held onto it for ten years, and certainly not fuckin’ when it comes out.”

Recorded concurrently during the All Hope Is Gone sessions in Iowa, Look Outside Your Window is the project name given to eleven songs written and performed separately by clown, Corey, Sid and Jim. They loaded recording equipment into a house up from the studio and used it as a place to escape to and jam. clown even pilfered Joey’s drum mics so he could lay down his drum tracks. As things stand, it might see the light of day in the first quarter of 2025.

“We'd see them before they'd see us,” clown remembers from the sessions. “We were already there jamming, and here'd come somebody down the road, and we'd be like, ‘Fucker’. It might be the producer [Dave Fortman], and then we’d shoot ball rockets at him. It was a lot of fun. And we just did what you should do. We made music. Now, if any of that music could have been Slipknot, it would have been brought down [to the studio]. But that's not where Joey wanted to go. It's not where Paul wanted to go. It’s not where Corey wanted to go. It's not where anyone wanted to go. We had All Hope Is Gone. So I just need people to know it's not Slipknot at all, not even close.”

clown intimates that the lyrics reflect what was going on at the time, but won’t be drawn much further than that. I ask whether any of it was about Paul.

“It's just a hard one to explain,” says clown, speaking more quietly. “We have a very close friend who's struggling, and it's unpredictable. And if you're working on yourself and you need to be solid, it's hard to depend on unpredictability. So you end up shutting the door a little bit for love purposes.”

Did Paul ever try to get involved?

“That's a tough one,” says clown. “I don't know, because where I would have been was: If you want to be a part of this, you have to be a certain way. And maybe he wasn't being a certain way. So it's easy for me to go, ‘No, you're being the other way. Don't be that way. That's not what this is about. This is about just relaxing and fucking being an artist without all this pressure. You put pressure on.’ But then again, I didn't tell anybody to be or not to be, you know – you just found your place. Paul's one of my best friends.”

One of the songs clown and Jim wrote at the time ended up on All Hope Is Gone: “′Til We Die”. “My Pain” from We Are Not Your Kind also purportedly evolved out of the material. There was another song that Paul wrote at the time which isn’t part of the project.

“Of course, he was going to come up and want to do some shit. He had a song called ‘Bella’, and I’m not sure exactly who it was directed to, probably his wife,” remembers clown. “But he took it down there [to the studio]. They wouldn't touch it, so he brought it up [to the house]. That probably pissed me off. It's like, you should have brought it here first. But Jim and I went down. We jammed with him. I have that on video. We made a song. He came up and he jammed a little bit, but there wasn't a focus there. It wasn't that I didn't try. It's just that you can't focus unfocused things, especially unpredictability. I don't want to be around that. I don't want to. It's danger, actually, bad things happen by just being whatever. It was a tough time for sure. But nothing but love.”

The novelist William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But people die. As I make my way home from the second night at The O2, news filters through that Casey Chaos, inimitable former frontman of Slipknot contemporaries Amen, has passed away. According to Corey, Chaos cutting himself was partly responsible for the booth he recorded Slipknot's vocals in smelling like “a wretched hive of death”.

The Slipknot time capsule of 1999 within 2024 has come to a conclusion. The second night at The O2 is the last they will play that particular setlist. Who knows when we’ll get to hear “Scissors” again, if at all. 

We end our conversation reviewing clown’s injuries: neck, wrists, tendonitis… Even today, he never warms up. But he wouldn’t have minded a post-show massage gun back in 1999. In 2021, when he tore his bicep from his keg recoiling, with what he suspects was supernatural force, he describes the recovery of his arm as like melting and cooling an elastic band to repair it. 

“I've been full-on the whole time,” he says. “I've been full-on. I've been eighty pounds heavier. I've been through it all, but I've always been physical. I can attest to a core. Slipknot’s a core. It's in here [pointing at his chest]. I don't feel anything but in here. It's how I judge the whole show. It's this burning furnace, and it can burn too hard, and you can start feeling it when you're too much. Literally burning, popping. You're like, ‘Oh shit, I'm burning too much coal!’ Too quick, the breathing, all of it. But then you just make that motor purr, like you're taking a long-distance flight. Then afterwards, man, just look in the mirror and I’m like, ‘Fuck, I did something today.’ No matter what, whether I like the show or not, I really did something. I stepped up and I did something.”