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Deicide's Glen Benton responds to Broken Hope allegations

by Doug Moore

Deicide at the Gramercy Ballroom, 2012 (more by Jonathan McPhail)
Deicide

Though the troubled Deicide/Broken Hope/Disgorge tour has now come to an end, the dust is still settling on the inter-tour drama that soured its last days. If you haven’t been paying attention (and who could blame you if you haven’t?): first, a few fans were stabbed during the tour’s El Paso stop; then, Deicide frontman Glen Benton kicked Broken Hope off of the tour’s last few dates, eliciting a harshly-worded rejoinder from BH guitarist Jeremy Wagner.

Benton has now responded in kind, by way of a MetalSucks podcast interview. If you don’t have the time or ability to listen to the whole thing, here’s what it boils down to: Benton responds to Wagner’s allegations by leveling a number of his own against Broken Hope. By his account, BH were too big for their britches all the way through the tour; they edged the (much more popular) Polish death metal band Vader off the tour, wasted a bunch of money by traveling in a bus with a large crew, mismanaged catering money that Benton entrusted them with, contravened Benton’s desire to avoid fog machines because of his respiratory sensitivies, and stole Deicide’s parking spot (?).

Most of the metal-media reaction to the Benton interview has been positive — he sounds pretty reasonable, and not much like a guy who permanently branded an inverted cross on his forehead and used to swear that he’d kill himself at age 33 in order to complete his perfect inversion of Jesus’s life. (Benton has since reached the ripe old age of 46.) But no matter how reasonable he sounds, the whole situation is still a PR mess for both bands. These he-said-she-said disputes are rarely factually resolved in either side’s favor, and both sides usually end up looking petty and unprofessional. So, if you are in a band: keep your tour drama off the internet.

Wash the bad taste out of your mouth by streaming a song from the new Deicide album, plus the awesome video from the last album where claymation Glen Benton chases claymation Jesus around claymation NYC, below: