Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (82 page)

KING DIAMOND:
When the early Mercyful Fate stuff was written I had a lot of experiences with the supernatural, especially in this apartment in Copenhagen. One time me and King Ross, the drummer, were waiting for the other guys in Mercy to come by and my brother’s beer glass rose two feet in the air and came down very slowly. The song “A Dangerous Meeting” is actually a warning not to mess with the occult. If you don’t have someone in there that can really interpret things the right way, it is way too dangerous for young teenagers to fool around with because you don’t know what’s speaking to you. And if it feels mocked or disrespected, it can give you answers back that will ruin your life. After my first experiences with the supernatural, I went to the library and read a lot about the occult and I realized that most of those books were written from one specific viewpoint, where Satanism was always depicted as these maniacs sacrificing virgins. That’s insanity.

CRONOS:
I believe in nothing. My philosophy is this: you’re born and one day you’re in a box, and what you do in between is your own choice. And to live by a dogma that tells you that you can’t do this and you can’t do that is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard.

KING DIAMOND:
I would be stupid to say, “I don’t believe in anything, so there is no God.” I would be the last to say there is no God. There might be fifteen, there might be a hundred, there might be none. No one can say.

The seeds of black metal spread across the world in the eighties. The antiauthoritarian and antireligious views of the genre’s pioneers struck a particularly strong chord in the rural youth of Norway, who felt stifled by small-town conservatism and Christian ideologies. By the end of the decade, a second wave of black metal, initially bred from the bowels of thrash and death metal, expanded upon the rhetoric and blasphemous lyrics of the genre’s forefathers. Venom may have coined the phrase
black metal
, but the first band to create a misanthropic, macabre, chaotic aesthetic for the music was Mayhem; they were followed shortly thereafter by Darkthrone, Burzum, and Immortal.

JORN “NECROBUTCHER” STUBBERUD (Mayhem):
I was coming from a place in Norway called Langhus, and I went to a town called Ski five kilometers from the center of the county in 1984 to try out for a band. There was this guy who was going to meet me at the train station who was going to guide me to the house of this band, and this was Øystein [Aarseth], this was Euronymous. Walking there, we realized we liked the same music: Venom, German electronica, punk. We were both seeking the extreme, and we were amazed that we could have been living so close together without already knowing each other. Since I had another band and a rehearsal space already, I asked him to join my band immediately, even before we got to the audition. Me and my drummer [Manheim] had a band called the Musta, which is “black” in Finnish. Euronymous had come up with the name Mayhem for a band that he put together to play songs for his [high school] graduation ceremony. The name was taken from the Venom song “Mayhem with Mercy” from the
Welcome to Hell
album, and we decided to keep that name, because we felt it was better than Musta.

ØYSTEIN “EURONYMOUS” AARSETH (ex-Mayhem):
I’d like to think that we would have been the first evil band if the older bands wouldn’t have existed. Venom was our first and major influence, later Bathory, Hellhammer, Sodom, and Destruction. I’m sure [if it weren’t for them] we would sound very different.

NECROBUTCHER:
We were into dark music and horror movies, especially ones by the Italian directors [Dario] Argento and Lucio Fulci. We liked the splatter, the thinking about death, anti-Christian, anti-religious, antisocial lyrics. But we were not religious in any way. Many people have misunderstood us. They called us Satanists, but we were so far from that—as far as you could possibly be. Satan is mentioned in the Bible, so if you’re a Satanist you’re also a Christian, and we are
anti
-religious. Religion is for weak people who need something to explain the bigger picture—why they are living. We didn’t need any help from any religion to be able to cope with reality.

EURONYMOUS:
I will never accept any band which preaches [Anton LaVey’s] Church of Satan ideas, as they are just a bunch of freedom- and life-loving atheists, and they stand exactly the opposite of me. I believe in a horned devil, a personified Satan. In my opinion, all the other forms of Satanism are bullshit. Satanism comes from religious Christianity, and there it shall stay. I’m a religious person and I will fight those who misuse his name. People are not supposed to believe in themselves and be individualists. They are supposed to
obey
, to be the
slaves
of religion.

FENRIZ:
Lyrically, I was influenced by Danzig and writings from the Church of Satan as much as anything else—although I knew distinctly that affiliation with the Church of Satan was out of the question. We formed our own aesthetic. We all had a contempt for organized religion since we were mere toddlers, combined with a natural interest for the
opposite
of that—and a morbid hunger for the sickest sounds of underground metal. Sounding angry or aggressive was also important, but the bands we got the black metal vibes from were original and had evil atmospheres and sounded twisted—they certainly weren’t overproduced.

The first wave of Norwegian black metal bands shared similar influences and perspectives, so their music had common threads. The bands were almost all fast and frantic, and their songs were more minimalistic and atmospheric than most extreme metal. Many emphasized repetitive, minor-key riffs and eschewed traditional start-stop metallic crunch, opting instead for a monochromatic, mesmerizing buzz.

BRANDON GEIST:
These guys were trying to one-up what was previously the most extreme style of metal. Death metal seemed like it was as extreme as it could get, and black metal’s like, “That’s bullshit. You’re wearing sweatpants and your production’s too good. We’re gonna make this way more evil and way more extreme.” One way they did that was by making the production more low-fi and genuinely disturbing in this visceral way that’s a little more mysterious.

TOM CATO “KING ov HELL” VISNES (ex-Gorgoroth):
The American death metal scene was going on when the Norwegian black metal scene started. So as the [American] death metal scene got more and more attention and [the playing became] more technical and the albums were [more sonically polished], the Norwegian scenes relied not so much on playing as fast as you can, but more on presenting a lot of atmosphere [in the music]. [Low-fi] production in the beginning made the music more ugly sounding, and the attitude got more real and brutal. Euronymous said it very precisely; he said, “What Venom talked about and used as a shock factor, we actually mean.” The Satanic part got more real.

As the bleak, morbid ideologies and raging, despairing sounds of Norwegian black metal started to congeal, so did the look. Inspired by the theatricality of Alice Cooper, KISS, and King Diamond, Norway’s outcasts painted their faces white, with jagged smears of black encircling their eyes. The first band to adopt this horror-zombie look was Norway’s Mayhem, whose singer at the time, Per Yngve Ohlin (aka Dead), had already worn corpse paint in his old death metal band, Sweden’s Morbid.

NECROBUTCHER:
The term “corpse paint” was actually not introduced before Dead. Back in Morbid, he was very fascinated by death, and wanted to look like he was dead, so he would paint his face like he was a corpse. But he didn’t join Mayhem until 1988, after we had already worked with other singers and released our first record [
Deathcrush
].

COUNT GRISHNACKH (Burzum):
The corpse paint thread [dates] back to KISS and further, all the way to Alice Cooper. . . . [But] when you look at it from a different, non-metal perspective, you need to follow a completely different thread all the way back to antiquity. In European cultures it was custom to see the world as being for all beings: man, spirits, and later, deities, too. However, only the initiates could see the spirits, and in order to do so they needed to put on a mask. We know from the older traditions, from sorcery. On certain festivals, the sorcerer hung his clothes in the holy tree, so that it looked as if he had hanged himself. He then covered his entire naked body and face with ash from a sacred fire. When he did [this] he was able to see [the spirits and deities], and thus communicate and interact with them. The ash was the mask. The ash was the “corpse paint.”

NERGAL:
The costume, the mask, the spikes help me express the inner strength I feel. So I might be fucked up or tired or want to go back to sleep, but when I put the shit on it empowers me.

SVEN ATLE “SILENOZ” KOPPERUD (Dimmu Borgir):
I’m sure it would be nice to not put on corpse paint and spikes every night. But we’re so used to it and it’s such a huge part of our look that it would be totally wrong to abandon it. We got a new guitar tech and he thought the spikes weren’t real and scratched himself pretty bad. Now he stands a few feet further away from us. Some stagedivers have gotten hit in the head and the neck with the spikes. It’s anti–stage diving regalia.

The first Norwegian black metal band, Mayhem, didn’t stop with corpse paint, decorating the stage with animal heads on stakes and engaging in dangerous acts of self-mutilation. Capitalizing on all the chaos and hysteria was Euronymous, who embraced his role as figurehead of the emerging movement. As much a salesman as he was a Satanist, the guitarist hyped drama and barbarism to promote his band and scene.

NECROBUTCHER:
Øystein first painted his face in 1985. Then we wanted to do another gig and we were going to rent the community house for cultural events in Ski, the town we came from. We wanted a scary, dramatic stage show, so we went to the butcher shop and got ourselves four big pig heads, but the community center canceled us. They didn’t find out about the pig heads, but they didn’t want a heavy metal concert at a place where they held bingo for seniors. We were living at home at the time, so we had these pig heads in our mom and dad’s freezers, and of course mom and dad didn’t like that. They were saying, “When the fuck are you going to get rid of these pig heads?”

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Black metal [as a movement] was a name given by [Mayhem guitarist] Euronymous to the music of Darkthrone and Burzum in 1991, to describe our revolt against the trendy death metal scene, and he used it because he knew the term from a Venom album, a band he, for some incomprehensible reason, cared [too] much for. The term quickly became popular, and after a while a lot of bands were using it to describe their music—for all the wrong reasons, of course, and not knowing what it really was all about.

GRUTLE KJELLSON:
Everybody was talking about death metal in the late eighties and the first one to say, “Okay, we don’t really play death metal, we play black metal,” was Euronymous. He painted his face, he inspired loads of other bands to quit playing death metal and start this new thing that would later become a huge trend.

BÅRD “FAUST” EITHUN (ex-Emperor, ex-Thorns, Blood Tsunami, Aborym):
Euronymous was very articulate, very calm, and you always had the impression everything he said was thought through many times before he expressed it. His philosophy towards music inspired many people. The Mayhem lineup with Euronymous, Necrobutcher, Dead, and Hellhammer was unbeatable, and the two songs they recorded for a [1991] Swedish compilation
Projections of a Stained Mind
, [“Freezing Moon” and “Carnage”], the [1993]
Live in Leipzig
live album, and [1994’s]
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
are among the most fierce and powerful black metal there is.

NECROBUTCHER:
Euronymous was a visionary, for sure. I don’t want to take anything away from him, but I was more the bandleader. I invited him to my band. He didn’t even have a rehearsal space, and I already had been playing in a band for four years. When we started out, he was the one who got our music out and built the network. Right after we recorded the demo
Pure Fucking Armageddon
[in 1986], we bought rail tickets which let you go wherever you like in Europe, and we went out to establish contacts with other bands, record stores, and magazines. We went to Germany to see Kreator, Sodom, Assassin; in England we saw Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror; Aggressor and Monumentum in Italy. We found the markets for our music to build a network and he got more and more into that over the years, and we started our own record label [Posercorpse Music].

AUDREY EWELL (director):
Euronymous was like the advertising executive of the movement. He took a businesslike approach to the whole scene and saw a marketable element, and really tried to advertise based on those elements.

In addition to being the first band to perform, Mayhem was also the first to release an actual record—1987’s
Deathcrush
. The album was rooted in thrash and death metal but featured the shrill vocal howls that became a blueprint for black metal and sparked the development of the nascent scene.