Tag Archives: Macbeth

Weak Recap: Third time’s a charm

Another week in Metal has gone by, and your favorite Metal site, Dose of Metal, is back to give you an awesome recap of the week. Maybe you missed something, maybe you were too busy having a life and spending time with a real girlfriend to keep up to date. Luckily for you though, there are virgins like myself, that have nothing better to do than spend every waking moment of my life on this site.

So this week, I shall be interviewing Simo. He’s awesome, he’s a place in Finland (According to Wikipedia), and my interview with himself can be found after the jump.

Tuesday Trivia: A curse that went from theater to metal

Have you ever heard of The Scottish Play? It’s a name for William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Why would anyone want to call it the Scottish Play instead of Macbeth? Well, the reason is as simple as interesting: according to a theatrical superstition, called the Scottish Curse, speaking the name Macbeth inside a theater will cause disaster. Actors got hurt and even killed and people attributed that to the curse.

What does that have to do with metal? Well, there’s a German band called Macbeth (there are actually two German bands called Macbeth but I’m talking about the Heavy Metal band, not the Power Metal band) and when you’re reading the band’s biography, it just seems like the poor guys are cursed.

The band was formed in East Germany in 1985. They were one of the first metal bands from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and the authorities weren’t fans of the band, to put it nicely. At a concert in 1986, the band wasn’t allowed to play an encore. Afterwards the authorities forbade the band to ever play again, annulled the band’s tour bus license and terminated the band’s rehearsal room lease contract. Why? Well, metal is evil and all that jazz.

So you could call that bad luck, as probably multiple bands from the GDR had to go through that but it doesn’t stop there. The band illegally reunited several times after that and in the fall of 1989, shortly after singer Detlev Wittenburg was released from jail (for reasons unrelated to the band), they played two farewell concerts. Wittenburg commited suicide by hanging in December of 1989 and Macbeth broke up. They reunited in 1993 to play a couple of gigs, just to split-up again after the band’s drummer Rico Sauermann commited suicide by jumping from a house to his death.

You be the judge if you can attribute that to a curse or simply extremely bad luck. I for one don’t believe in curses, unless you consider Linkin Park a curse, but I can’t help but be fascinated by that coincidence.

Macbeth finally reunited in 2004 and released two albums since. Make the jump for a video of ‘Das Boot,’ a song off their latest release ‘Gotteskrieger.’