“The first time I met Lemmy, he said: ‘How do you sit down with that sawblade codpiece?’ I said, ‘You don’t!’”: WASP frontman Blackie Lawless’s strange journey from shock rock to God

WASP posing for a photography and pulling faces.

In the early 80s, Blackie Lawless was one of the most infamous figures in rock’n’roll. His band W.A.S.P. were the new kings of shock rock. Their title of their debut single, Animal (Fuck Like A Beast), was so controversial that their record company EMI declined to release it in the UK, leaving that to indie label Music For Nations. The band’s stage show was equally outrageous: they threw raw meat at their audience, and had a naked woman tied to a torture rack. The name, it was said, stood for We Are Sexual Perverts. And most alarming of all was what Lawless had between his legs – a codpiece mounted with a circular saw blade.

He’s come a long way since then. Born Stephen Edward Duren on September 4, 1956 in Staten Island, New York, he is still the leader of W.A.S.P. But the man and his band are much changed, not least due to Lawless’s conversion to Christianity. It is an unexpected and ironic twist in the story of a man whose band once put the fear of God into Middle America.