“I got carried away with a sense of Old Europe”
How Nugent’s song “Empress” was inspired by a murdered monarch and psychoactive mould
“ISAW this documentary about Empress Sisi of Austria. She was a very unusual monarch in that I think she was quite rebellious to the court, and beloved by the people. She didn’t really play the game the way she was supposed to. But she ended up being murdered by an Italian anarchist, who stabbed her in the heart. He was a damaged person and he took it upon himself to assassinate a monarch as a political statement. But there was a tragedy to it, because he chose a monarch who was a victim of the monarchical system herself, rather than a representative of tyranny. I suppose I felt like there was an interesting shared experience between the two of them. He’d been a soldier and he was poor, life hadn’t gone the way he wanted it to. And in her own way, she was controlled and entrapped into this system herself. Then I think I just got a bit carried away with the sense of Old Europe!
“I also got interested in this thing called ergotism, also known as Saint Anthony’s fire. It was from a mould that appeared on crops in the Middle Ages, like a poisonous psychoactive substance that people would eat without knowing, and they’d die having these delusions that their whole body was on fire. People think that it affected a lot of creative thinkers throughout the ages who didn’t know that their brain was being influenced by this chemical. You know Hieronymus Bosch the painter, and his crazy scenes of fish eating people and stuff like that? There was a good chance he was having psychedelic mushrooms, but some people think he was affected by ergotism from the crops – the “blackened rye” in the song. It seemed to fit thematically, so somehow that all got mushed together.”