In 2020, his views on COVID-19 even prompted the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate to issue a 25-page report on Icke's beliefs, saying he was using the pandemic "as an introduction to his antisemitic superconspiracy." But if The Quietus pressed Pike about his associations with Icke, they didn't print that part. And as he's done off and on since at least 2010, Pike then leaned into a longtime inspiration: the conspiracy theories of writer, firebrand and laughingstock David Icke.įor more than a quarter-century, Icke's outlandish ideas about people descended from aliens and Israeli criminal networks have frequently been associated with global antisemitism - that is, very broadly, a prejudice against or hateful perception of Jewish people. In that interview, he spoke about making the album during lockdown and the future of his more famous enterprises. After 30 years as one of metal's most riveting guitarists and adored characters, first in stoner-metal trio Sleep and then in High on Fire, Pike, now 49, had finished the unruly and uneven Pike vs the Automaton. "Can you believe it?"Īctually, I could: Two days earlier, the British music website The Quietus had published an extensive interview with Pike. "They canceled me on Bandcamp, dude," Pike said from his home in Portland, Ore., not bothering with a greeting.
He answered with something like a gruff whimper. In early February of this year, I called Pike to continue a conversation we'd started a few weeks earlier about his debut solo album. A rebel to love, Pike has supplied a rare link between metal's sprawling underground and what's left of its mainstream, between its past and present.īut the same sense of underdog insurgency that long made Pike so compelling, as an opening act and eventually as one of metal's marquee performers, has recently gotten much more complicated - and the conflict could come to define Pike's career as much as his music. In the 14 years since, without changing much of his style, sound or the substance of his songs, he has risen from that undercard to become one of modern metal's bona fide icons. A year earlier, High on Fire's Death Is This Communion had suggested a trompe-l'oeil rendering of ancient warfare, with Pike hemming and hawing about epic battles, quarreling gods and Mesopotamian religion above the band's sculpted racket. That was the first time I'd ever seen Pike play, and to me, that night, he seemed heavy metal incarnate. If Opeth's set was a river winding down an elegant rut, High on Fire was that same river beyond flood stage, cresting its banks and roaring. High on Fire felt dangerous, mean and urgent. The Opeth devotees were swept up in Pike's energy, grinning up at his wild-eyed guitar theatrics. Then Pike lifted off again, unleashing another splenetic electric solo above the band's churn. Shirtless, sweat dripping from his broad tattooed frame, Pike tossed back his light brown hair, which cascaded far below his shoulders, and spit at the stage, as if cursing the very gravity it evidenced. Poised at the lip of the broad stage, he moved in perfect time with the band's mighty rhythm section, as relentless as some gargantuan engine's pistons. Pike, then in his mid-30s, met that less-than-welcoming party with trademark aplomb.
One night near the middle of the tour, inside Raleigh, N.C.'s Lincoln Theatre, fans - a sea made up mostly of men clad in black Opeth shirts - greeted High on Fire with impatience, their arms folded in frustration.
In the fall of 2008, Pike's heavy metal trio of nearly a decade, High on Fire, was slotted as the warm-up band for Opeth, a Swedish prog-metal institution on a three-month sweep through the United States and Europe for which they had recruited a select cast of au courant American acts. Matt Pike has always seemed to relish his underdog status. Photo Illustration by Estefania Mitre/NPR Getty Images Over the last decade, however, he's found inspiration in the conspiracy theories of David Icke. In the metal bands Sleep and High on Fire, Matt Pike has always looked to esoteric sources. Check arrest records, social media profiles, business records, work history, places of employment, public records, resumes and CV, photos and videos and skilled experts. View contact information: phones, addresses, emails and networks. Matthew Banks Found 609 people in California, Florida and 48 other states