JOEY JORDISON

On July 27, 2021, music was rocked by the unthinkable: Joey Jordison, founding member of Slipknot, heavy metal icon, had died at just 46 years old. Hammer writer Paul Brannigan-the first UK journalist to ever meet Joey - pays tribute to a legend, helped by some of those who knew him best

WORDS: PAUL BRANNIGAN

GETTY/STEVE BRIGHT. ADDITIONAL REPORTING:STEPHEN HILL

Joey Jordison liked to tell people that his very first memory found him alone, locked up, in darkness.

“I don’t know if I had conscious thoughts while I was in the womb, but I was in a black cell,” he recalled. “Looking up in the corner, I could see a tiny square window, letting in a little bit of light. That was it.”

The story fed neatly into the narrative constructed around Slipknot in the dying days of the 20th century. Here was America’s worst nightmare: a collective of alienated, isolated, frustrated sociopaths emerging from society’s shadowy margins on a mission to destroy everything pure and sacred, to create and embrace chaos, to unleash hell on earth.

They wore masks to protect their anonymity, dressed identically in barcoded red coveralls to remove all trace of ego and individual personality, and self-identified by numbers rather than names to eradicate personal histories and unshackle themselves from any inhibiting loyalty to family, community, church or state. Terrifyingly, these faceless freaks could be anyone, and now they were among us, inside us.

“Fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything that you stand for”, sang ‘#8’ on Surfacing, the signature liberation anthem on their self-titled Roadrunner Records debut. “Don’t belong, don’t exist, don’t give a shit! Don’t ever judge me.”

On May 27, 1999 this writer became the first UK music journalist to see Slipknot face-to-mask, on the opening date of that summer’s Ozzfest tour, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Their mid-afternoon set on the festival’s second stage was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure, a violent, cathartic explosion of hate, venom and rage that left the audience awed and electrified. Instinctively aware that here was a band like no other, myself and veteran rock photographer Ross Halfin cautiously approached The Nine as they walked offstage. Never easily impressed, Ross demanded to know where the group hailed from. Hearing the response, “Des Moines, Iowa”, the well-travelled photographer sneered, “That place is a shithole.”

“We know,” came the instant reply from within the huddle. “That’s why we formed this band.”

You stick nine guys together who have had no outlet for their whole lives, and you live in Iowa and you come out on a fucking stage, then you have some shit to portray. We were walking around like ghosts, slitting our wrists open saying, ‘Please take a look at this, look at what we are trying to do.’”

With these words, Slipknot member ‘#1’, AKA Nathan Jonas ‘Joey’ Jordison, introduced himself to the readers of Metal Hammer in the spring of 1999. Speaking to this writer more than a decade later, the drummer’s memories of seeing his band in the magazine for the first time were still vivid, and he shared them in excitable, high-pitched, rapid-fire bursts.

“It was an introductory two-page feature with a picture of us down on Santa Monica Pier: we had our red coveralls on, the sky was blue and you could see the Ferris wheel behind us,” he recalled with perfect clarity. “I remember getting the magazine around May 25 as we were leaving Des Moines to go down to Florida for our first show on the Ozzfest, and I was like, ‘Let me see it! Let me see it!’ I remember passing it around the bus, thinking, ‘We’re in Metal Hammer, we’re on a tour bus, and we’re going to play fucking Ozzfest!’ It was like it just couldn’t get any better than that. It was just one of those moments, a really great memory. I was thinking, ‘Holy shit, we have arrived!’”