Type O Negative lead singer and bass player Peter Steele has died at the age of 48. Mike Renault, the band’s manager said:
“Peter passed away last night. As of now it appears to have been heart failure. That’s all the details we have right now.”
Steele (Petrus T. Ratajczyk) was born in Brooklyn in 1962. He was loved for his self deprecating dark, dead pan humor. He lived and played hard, In the 2006 DVD Symphony for the Devil is an interview in which Steele briefly mentions his incarceration in Riker’s Island and “the psych ward at Kings County Hospital,” both stints apparently caused by his heavy substance abuse, for which he also served time on probation.
He appeared in Playgirl magazine in 2005, but regretted the decision after finding out that approximately 75% of the subscribers were male. As was his way he later made light of the whole thing on the album Life is Killing Me with the song “I Like Goils.”
In Steve Huey’s review of the band’s 3rd album Bloody Kisses which received 4 1/2 out of 5 stars he writes:
“Bloody Kisses was Type O Negative’s major step forward, maintaining the long, repetitive song structures of albums past, but adding more atmospheric synths and left-field Beatlesque pop melodies. The quantum leap in songwriting is what really drives the album, but it also coincides with a newfound sense of subtlety. Aside from a couple of smart-aleck rants, Peter Steele’s dark, melodramatic songs address heartbreak and loneliness in what sounds at first like deadly serious overkill. But not far beneath the surface, he’s also satirizing his own emotional excesses, and those of goth rock in general.”
Fans of the band are extremely loyal and have been flooding Type O Negative’s Myspace page with comments. The 6’9″ Steele was an imposing figure physically and in the world of goth metal. He is going to be missed. Here is a live clip of Steele and his bandmates performing “Christian Woman.”
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