Peter Steele: The punk star who faked his own death
“I got a phone call from a number that I didn’t recognise, so I let it go to voicemail,” recalled Type O Negative guitarist Johnny Kelly, reflecting on the day he found out Peter Steele had passed away. “It was Peter’s sister. I called her up and said, ‘What’s up?’ And she was like, ‘We lost Peter’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘He’s gone’. At the time, they didn’t know the cause of death.”
Steele had lived a reckless life in music, abusing alcohol and drugs for a long period, but he was clean when he passed away from a heart condition, atrial fibrillation. It remains unknown how much of a factor those years of abuse had on his body, but the news of his death came as a devastating blow to those who had worked with him and knew him.
“Who knows if he died from all the drugs over the years or something else,” says the band’s keyboardist, Josh Silver. “He was diagnosed with the condition years and years ago, but if you take care of yourself and do the right stuff it’s something you can live with for quite a while. There are plenty of 90-year-olds running around with it.”
Kenny Hickey, another guitarist in the band, said that Steele always said he could feel a flutter in his heart, so he thinks the condition may have been something he was born with. However, these observations come after someone has passed away, and it’s difficult to truly know whether anything could have been done to help Steele.
When news of his death broke, many fans refused to believe it was true. Steele was a rockstar at heart, which meant that acting outrageously was second nature. He never worried too much about the consequences of his actions, and this couldn’t have been clearer than when he pretended to fake his own death five years earlier.
The announcement was subtle but enough for people to think that it might have been true. On the band’s website, they removed most of the content and replaced everything with a photo of a tombstone that read “Peter Steele, 1962-2005.” While it was a confusing moment for fans, the band revealed that they uploaded the photo on the website to mark the fact they were leaving their old record label and signing with SPV Records. The website removed the photo in October 2005, and fans learned that Steele hadn’t passed away.
This wasn’t the only outrageous thing that Peter Steele did throughout his career. He was never afraid to be controversial, regardless of who he might have offended in the process. There was the head-turning moment when he posed for a Playgirl centrefold but said he would only do it if he could be erect for the photo.
“I said to myself, ‘How come these guys are flaccid?’ Who wants to look at this?’” He explained, “So I said to them, ‘I’d like to be hard, do you have any problems with that?’”
