At first, it looked like a poor prank. On April 14, 2010, reports surfaced that Type O Negative’s hulkish frontman, Peter Thomas Ratajczk (aka Peter Steele), had died.It was impossible to believe, and for more than simply the obvious reasons. Steele had a notorious morbid streak and was no stranger to defying death.
Steele, who formed Type O Negative in 1989 from the ashes of crossover metal band Carnivore, had attempted suicide, overdosed, and even faked his own death in 2005 with a message on the band’s website.
He resembled a gothic metal Keith Richards, a man who would tempt fate repeatedly and live to tell the tale. Steele died on April 14, 2010, at the age of 48, after being unwell in bed with the flu for a few days. His death was initially attributed to an aortic aneurysm, but it was later determined to be the result of diverticulitis-induced sepsis.
Steele had been struggling with drugs and alcohol on multiple occasions and was lying in the hospital, This wasn’t on the verge of expiration, though. Just days before his death, he was proud of finally being clean and sober, and he was looking forward to moving to a location near Staten Island to begin work on the follow-up to the band’s seventh album, Dead Again, released in 2007.
Type O Negative guitarist Kenny Hickey and drummer Johnny Kelly were about to begin rehearsals for their doom metal side band Seventh Void when Kelly received awful news. “I got a phone call from a number that I didn’t recognize, so I let it go to voicemail,” he jokes.
“This was Peter’s sister. I called her up and asked, ‘What’s up?’ She answered, ‘We lost Peter.’ I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ She replied, ‘He is gone.’ They have no idea what caused the fatality at the time.” YouTube: Roadrunner Records Kelly drove the remaining short distance to rehearsal and informed Hickey of what had happened.
“He began yelling at me, ‘How come you didn’t call me?!?'” remembers Kelly. “I said, ‘I was going to see you in five minutes!'” I did not want to inform him over the telephone. We were both completely shocked.
It seemed like the end of an era, man. “The end of an era.” While Steele was clean and sober when he died, he abused alcohol and narcotics — notably cocaine — for years, despite being on medication for a heart ailment known as atrial fibrillation, which is effectively an irregular heartbeat.
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