“Jail was fun, no big deal,” said Death of Desire singer Morbid of his “four-day weekend” in a downtown lockup in early 2010. He and black metal bandmate Dawn Desiree were walking home from a P.B. bar when “I realized we were being followed, so I stopped, looked back, and saw this dude I recognized from the bar.
“We screamed at the dude so he would back off, but he just kept walking faster toward us,” alleges Morbid (real name Pablo Camilo). Perhaps unsurprisingly, “My screams and threats didn’t stop the dude, so I grabbed my wallet chains — I use three of them — and wrapped them around my fist and hid it from his sight. One second later, he was there in our faces, looking all drunk and spitting.... He grabbed Dawn by the arm in a violent way and shook her for a second. Next thing, my fist wrapped in chains is flying to his face — one, two, five hits, and then the man is down. He fell like a brick wall, the fat bastard.
“We kept walking, and next thing I saw was the police car.” Morbid was arrested for public drunkenness and assault, spending the better part of four days in jail.
“They ended up dropping all the charges,” reports Desiree, who wasn’t charged in the incident. “He only had a couple of beers.... The trouble with living and walking in P.B. is that cops assume everyone is there to party.”
Death of Desire was founded by Morbid and Desiree in Germany, where the duo attended school at a former military base. “We discovered the top two floors and attic were abandoned prison chambers with rusted barbed-wire cells behind big metal bulletproof doors,” says Morbid. “The rooms had a grim, eerie atmosphere, so we recorded our first demos and videos there.... Since then, our main driving force is to capture the morbid sounds of life.”
The band’s debut 2010 album ANTIhuman features drummer Jan Axel Blomberg of Hellhammer and Attila Csihar of Mayhem. The album was recorded at Battlefrost Studios near UTC in La Jolla and at the L.A. studio operated by Fear Factory’s drummer Raymond Herrera.