According the Wikipedia your name has some deep meaning, but according the deathrock.com forum your name was from a burned out movie marquee.
Which one is true? or is it somewhere in the middle, one lead to the other?

Dale: I think it was because John had the hots for this ice skater girl but never did real well with her. Actually no one ever told me. They just said I should shut up and play.

Brent:  Truth is we went thru quite a few name changes the first couple of years.  We started out as the FARMERS CO-OP, glad we didn’t stick with that one, then THE BLEEDING HEARTS, MIRON, finally deciding on THE HAUNTED.  We had a song call "Theatre of Ice" and originally were going to call the first album "Living in a Theatre of Ice"  When we learned there had been so many other bands named THE HAUNTED we decided we needed to change it.  When we found the neon sign for "THEATRE OFFICE" with the second "F" burned out it seemed like a logical choice
for a band name.  I mean we already had a cool sign, why not.

John:  The band began on a ranch out in the Nevada desert.  The nights there are totally pitch black.  At night on the horizon you could see the faint flicker of homes and trailers, bathed in the silvery blue light from their old black and white televisions.  A lot of people out there really had no contact with the outside world with the exception of their televisions.  These people, bathed in the silvery blue light of their televisions, slowly going mad, were living in a theatre of ice.

Brent:  The idea behind THEATRE OF ICE makes more sense taken in context with where we are from.  We really didn’t have any outside contact with the music scene developing or anything else really.  Just dead animal pits, hermits and old horror movies.  Total isolation.  There is a thin line between fantasy and reality out there in the desert.

Dale: I always figured this was an autobiographical piece by one of the Brothers Johnson.

Brent:  I actually can’t remember where the idea for that song came from, but I don’t think it came from any specific event.  I think there are a lot of Miron’s living out there in suburbia.  I remember I wrote the song while driving.   I sang it over and over to myself so I wouldn’t forget it.  I then sang it to John while he came up with the guitar part.

John:  Musically that song has gone thru a few changes.  I remember it once had a real reggae feel to it.  And wasn’t there a trumpet solo in there once.

Brent:  One of these days I’m going to put up a MySpace site with the original demo version, the punker version that was on the flipside of "Kill Your Girlfriend", a live version and the final version.  I think both the live and the "Kill Your Girlfriend" versions have the trumpet solo on them.

Since at the time we wrote "Miron" there wasn’t a defined genre we thought we belonged in, we were free to do what we wanted.  I wanted the song to have a lot of misdirection to it.   It’s pretty snappy, peppy and upbeat --- you have to pay attention to the lyrics.

I remember Crispin Glover had some interest in the song back in the early 80's before he became famous.  He would have made a marvelous Miron

Brent:  I was really disappointed that the thing with Crispin didn’t materialize.  Would love to have worked with him.

I’ve been setting up various MySpace accounts and uploading old songs.  I have one dedicated just to the song Miron.  I uploaded the original demo, a live version and the b-side to the “Kill Your Girlfriend” 7-inch; along with the final version.

Dale:  I like the stuff I hear that doesn't sound overproduced, the real DIY stuff. I think anything that gets too much money sunk into it is being made to please the masses and not the person making it and thereby the politics involved usually neuter it to an extent. That being said there is a neighborhood in Tokyo that Gwen Stephani has pretty much ruined for western minds called Harajuku. Besides the freaky little sex-toy girls Gwenni-poo sings about, there is a sub-genre of kids that hang out there that do amazing stuff with deathrock that I haven't seen much press about- they hang out down the train line at Yoyogi park on Sundays, with their bands set up next to the rockabillies, who are set up next to the j-pops, who are next to the surfers, yada, yada. They have a very unique sound going on, and the kids in that "scene", if you will, go all out, wearing romantic puffy-shirt era goth wear, and pretty disgusting special effect make-up. I find it quite intriguing.

Brent:  In some respects I find a lot of the stuff really watered down.  A lot of bands seem to be too focused on fitting into a specific genre description.  You don’t find many Deathrock bands willing to do a song like "Miron" or "Gallows Dance", those songs are way too poppy.  Back in the day, before all the genre definitions, bands experimented more and felt freer to do more things.

But there a are alot of dedicated individuals promoting the scene and enough good bands to keep it growing.  That can only be a good thing.

John:  A lot of bands in the current movement all sound the same to me.  The ones that are interesting are the ones that defy genre descriptions.

Dale:  I've heard worse bans than the Prids or All Gone Dead- they bring a bit of melody to the table... nonetheless, really nothing new...

Brent:  I’m just now starting to get into the current movement and discovering a lot of cool bands.  I’m in the process of doing more with the old ORPHANAGE RECORDS label.   We took over the label back in the early 90’s but really didn’t do anything with it until I put out the DESADE cd a couple of years ago.  I’ve been talking with Polina Yakovleva from DROPDEAD MAGAZINE about doing series of compilations, hopefully the first one will be finished in time for the DROP DEAD FESTIVAL.

Even though we were lumped into the Gothic and Deathrock scenes I think we were more eclectic than that.  I’m more interested in bands that are adventurous and not tied down to what they perceive as the rules of any one genre.  Maybe I can help inspire a new generation of bands that otherwise would never have heard of us.  Maybe I’ll force some of the cool new bands to do a tribute record of THEATRE OF ICE songs.

John:  We just want to be worshipped.

Dale: Like anything else there is good and bad to it. It's great to see free exchange of music on a global scale and obviously will ultimately lead to, sniffle, world peace. The bad I see about it is it has tended to promote crap generated just to keep up with the most recent crap, if you will people worry more about posting speedy or in volume, rather than worrying about what their posting.

From an artistic standpoint, there are things you can do with analog recording that is tough to duplicate digitally, and those things gave a particular flavor to the brown-market era. I like stuff that genuinely sounds like a distress signal coming from someone chained to a corpse in a basement, rather than a digital approximation.

Sorry,  I’m too dumb to know what RIAA is.

Brent:  The internet has definitely taken the mystery out of the scene.  It was a lot cooler when you had to hunt down that 7" record from that band that you read about in some obscure ‘zine.  It also has flooded the market with tons of crap,  It doesn’t take much effort or any talent to record a song and post it to some internet site.

Without it, however, we would have been a long forgotten band.  One of those groups that more people had heard of then had actually heard.  When MP3.com started up I created a site and posted a bunch of our old songs on it.  It was amazing the response we got.  We ended up with well over 1,000,000 plays and had several songs top several charts for several years. A song like "A Cool Dark Place to Die" was probably heard by a few thousand people before the internet.  It’s been downloaded well over 100,000 times since we put it out there.

I’d probably be more concerned about group like the RIAA if I was in it for the money.

John:  I had to goooogle RIAA to see what it was.

Dale: I’m not sure how to answer that, they're both delicious. I feel you can trust a dog, but never a cat hence I would happily own the former but not the latter. I used to have a great time on dates driving down the freeway and rating the cat-road kill on their aesthetic value. A cat with little visible trauma, nicely bloated with internal gas, with fluffy hair and "facing the audience" would score highest, and there were referred to as prime "puffy cats." I guess you could say that I appreciate both dogs and cats for their own usefulness.

John:  I remember that Dale wrote a song called "If Cats Could Fly", sounded like a bunch of cats being thrown out of a 10-story window.

Brent:  And there is a line in the song "The Dead", that Dale wrote, about eating a cat with maple syrup.

Growing up on a farm we had a lot of both dogs and cats.  Currently I have neither.  I always associated dogs with the outdoors and cats with the indoors.  I’m more of an indoor person nowadays, so I guess I’d be more inclined to own a cat.