Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (86 page)

DANI FILTH:
Before that happened, no one outside of a small following in Norway knew who Mayhem were, and then suddenly he went from Anonymous to Euronymous all over the world.

KERRANG!
MAGAZINE (August 1993): Euronymous, 25, died from multiple stab wounds. He was found dead on the staircase outside his Oslo flat at 5:15 a.m. on August 10.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Euronymous had begun to plot against my life. He wanted to kill me. In his view I was the problem, so by killing me he believed the problem would go away. His problem was that he included a few metal people in his plot to kill me, and they told me. He had told them because he trusted them, but obviously they had warmer feelings for me than for him. At one point he phoned Snorre [Ruch], who lived in my apartment, and Snorre let me listen to what Euronymous had to say. He told Snorre, “Varg must disappear for good” and similar, confirming the plans others had told me about earlier.

TOM ARAYA:
For a lead singer of one band to kill the leader of another band—where does that come from? They’re in another mind frame. They’re tapped into something else and everything they see is different. Those people have issues.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
A lot of people claimed that I overreacted because Euronymous was such a wimp and didn’t have the guts to kill me. Sure, he was a wimp, but I took the threats seriously in this instance because instead of telling everyone like he usually did, he only told a very few people he trusted, his closest friends—or those he believed were his closest friends. On top of that, he’d been convicted of injuring two people with a broken bottle because they had “looked at his girlfriend” at a bus stop and was about to go to prison for four months. With his back against the wall he was capable of executing his plans. If scared enough, even the biggest cowards become dangerous.

LEE BARRETT (head of Candlelight Records, ex–Extreme Noise Terror):
Euronymous’ death was harsh and brutal, which reflects perfectly on his life. He will be missed by some, but remembered by all.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
The same day [Euronymous] told Snorre about his intentions to kill me, I received a letter from him, where he pretended to be very positive and wanted to meet me to discuss a contract I had not yet signed. This was the only excuse he had to contact me, and it seemed like he was trying to set me up. According to his friends, the plan was to meet me, knock me out with a stun gun, tie me up, and put me in the trunk of a car. He would then drive into the countryside, tie me to a tree, and torture me to death while videotaping everything. My reaction to this was naturally anger. Who the hell did he think he was? The same day I decided to drive to Oslo, hand him the signed contract, and tell him to fuck off, basically, and by doing so take away all the excuses he had to contact me ever again.

KERRANG!
MAGAZINE: Police suspect that Euronymous knew his killer or killers, and had admitted them into his apartment. Euronymous’ body was found dead only in underwear.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
[Snorre and I] went to the front door of the building block and I rang his doorbell. Euronymous was sleeping. You might think that visiting people in the middle of the night was a bit strange, but it was perfectly normal for us. A lot of people in the metal scene were nocturnal creatures. He said, “I am sleeping. Can’t you come back later?” I said, “I got the contract. Let me in,” and he buzzed me in. His flat was on the fourth floor and I began climbing the stairs. Snorre wanted to have a cigarette, and since he couldn’t smoke in Euronymous’s apartment or my car, he waited downstairs to have one.

KERRANG!
MAGAZINE: According to police, the act of murder began in the victim’s fourth-floor apartment. Blood tracks began in Euronymous’ hallway.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Euronymous was waiting for me in the entrance looking very nervous, and I handed him the contract. Of course he was nervous. The guy he planned to murder showed up at his doorstep in the middle of the night. I then asked him what the fuck he was up to, and when I took a step forward, he panicked. He freaked out and attacked me with a kick in the chest. I simply threw him to the floor, and was a bit stunned. I wasn’t stunned by his kick, but by the fact he had attacked me. I didn’t expect that. Not in his apartment, and not like that. He had just started to train in kickboxing, and like all beginners, thought he had become Bruce Lee overnight.

FAUST:
That’s bullshit. There’s no reason why Øystein would attack Vikernes after he’d just woken up, still in his underwear. He wouldn’t do it. I can understand [the self-defense claim] though, because Vikernes wanted to get away from a twenty-one-year first-degree murder sentence. It’s a natural move—it was the same with me in court. [When I committed murder] I tried to get away from it by claiming self-defense.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
He jumped from the floor and dashed for the kitchen. I knew there was a knife lying on the kitchen table. I jumped in front of him and managed to stop him before he got his hands on it. He ran for the bedroom, and I figured he was going for another weapon. He had some weeks earlier told people he would soon get the shotgun back from the police that Dead used to shoot himself, so I figured he was going for that or his stun gun. I gave chase and stabbed him with my pocketknife with an 8-centimeter blade. I was a bit surprised when he ran out of the apartment. It made no sense to flee, and it made me angry to know that he had started the fight, but the moment it didn’t go his way he decided to flee instead of fighting like a man.

KERRANG!
MAGAZINE: Several of the victim’s neighbors were awakened by the sound of a struggle at approximately 3 a.m. but had dismissed the noise as a drunken brawl.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Outside, we ran into Snorre, who had finished his cigarette. All the doors looked the same, and Snorre was pretty absent-minded and ended up one floor up by mistake. Confused, he had gone back down and used his lighter to try to read the door sign and figure out if this was the right apartment. As he was doing so, Euronymous came running out in his underwear, bleeding and screaming like a madman.

SNORRE RUCH (Thorns, ex-Mayhem):
[I think one reason Varg killed Euronymous is because] he was envious of Bard [Faust] because Bard had killed a man and Varg hadn’t. Varg was saying that what Bard had done was uncool, but inside the scene, Bard’s actions commanded respect. . . . The Count said it was no big deal to kill someone.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Euronymous ran down a flight of stairs and stopped to ring the neighbor’s doorbell. He quickly realized that I had come after him, so he continued to flee down the stairs, knocking on the walls, trying to ring the doorbells as he ran past them, screaming for help. I stabbed him three or four times in his left shoulder as he ran—that was the only part I could hit while we were running. He stumbled and broke a lamp on the wall and fell into the glass fragments in his underwear. I ran past him and waited. Snorre was so surprised and terrified he looked like a ghost and as if his eyeballs were about to fall out of his head. He had a blackout and didn’t remember anything until I later asked him if he was okay. By then Euronymous was back on his feet. He looked resigned and said, “That’s enough,” but then he tried to kick me again, and I finished him off by thrusting the knife into his forehead through his skull, killing him instantaneously. His eyes rolled back in his head and he moaned as his lungs emptied and he fell to a sitting position with the knife still stuck in his forehead. I held him up as I held on to the knife and when I jerked it out he fell forward and rolled down a flight of stairs like a sack of potatoes, making enough noise to wake up the whole neighborhood. He had intended to kill me, and I did not feel bad for killing him. His cowardice made me angry and I saw no reason to let him live. Had I, he only would have made another attempt on my life later on.

HELLHAMMER:
On the day of Euronymous’s death I called him at the office. Nobody picked up the phone. Then I called his parents, hoping to reach him there. I was told that Euronymous was murdered the night before. I was shocked. I didn’t know who did it, but I was sure it could be the Swedes. There were constant conflicts among Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish clans. Dead bodies were found everywhere. My friends and I got knives and guns and prepared to defend ourselves. We were waiting for the worst to happen. But soon we learned that Grishnackh had murdered Euronymous. That shy boy turned out to be a killer. The police had their suspicions. They watched him and watched him, and one day while he was walking down the street in Bergen with some friends they arrested him.

SILENOZ:
The day Euronymous was murdered I went to the post office to pick up a package he had sent me with some T-shirts and a new CD. As I’m walking into the convenience store I see the story all over the front page of the newspapers. It was kind of weird to experience that at age seventeen.

FROST:
Lives turned upside down, and it was a while before I was able to take in what had happened. But I had started to go down a pretty dark alley of my own, and it was impossible to really shock me at that point. As a young person, I felt such an affinity for darkness that I wasn’t able to separate what was constructive and what was destructive.

MORGAN HÅKANSSON:
One of the basic ideas of the Inner Circle was that we should send a message that we were not like them. There are no limitations when you have an enemy. Why should you limit yourself from doing certain things? If you have to commit murder as part of your ideology, then so be it. To Varg, it was an internal problem that got solved.

HELLHAMMER:
For all the new bands, it was kind of sad because they didn’t have Euronymous to lead them anymore. And that was a shame. When Euronymous was alive it was his duty to see that all the bands coming from Norway were authentic. Posers were told to quit, and a couple of bands did. The Norway scene has been blown out of proportion. There are hundreds of black metal bands coming out of Norway made of sixteen-year-olds. I laugh about it, but Euronymous really had done something to keep the music pure. The positive thing about it is it’s clear that he got Mayhem very much attention, PR-wise. It was the same thing when Dead died. Euronymous said band-wise it wasn’t so great, but the hype for us was cool. It was the same with Euronymous. We were friends, but I wasn’t upset when he was killed. I think that death is only natural. I don’t think death is sad or anything to be upset about. I was thinking about it after he died and I think he maybe didn’t have that much more to give, so maybe he just died at the right point.

Count Grishnackh and Faust weren’t the only black metal musicians to commit murder. In July 1997, the front man of Swedish death/black metal band Dissection, Jon Nödtveidt, was convicted of helping to kill thirty-eight-year-old Algerian Josef Ben Meddour, a gay man, and of possessing an illegal firearm. The story of the murder was chronicled in the movie
Keiler’s Park
. Nödtveidt was released from prison in 2004 and relaunched Dissection, but committed suicide in August 2006, claiming he had accomplished all he set out to do with the band and had nothing left to live for. It would be easy to dismiss Nödtveidt as a sadistic, homophobic Satanist, but like Count Grishnackh and Faust, he was a musical pioneer, creating a fiery hybrid of melodic, symphonic black metal on two highly influential albums: 1993’s
The Somberlain
and 1995’s
Storm of the Light’s Bane
.

JON NÖDTVEIDT (1975–2006) (Dissection) [2006 interview]:
My lifestyle was always about breaking boundaries and reaching beyond a normal level of existence. I always put the emphasis on Satanism, since that’s the reason why I’m playing music.

ANDERS BJÖRLER (ex–At the Gates, Haunted):
Dissection were really close friends. In the mid-nineties they moved down to Gothenburg [Sweden]. Jon was a good musician and a really nice guy. He was like the prankster in the class. The image that’s being presented doesn’t fit because he was so friendly. There was a shimmer of darkness somewhere inside of him, especially when he was writing and listening to music. You noticed that side sometimes, but overall he was very positive and very bright. He loved to make prank calls—picking up the phonebook, pointing at a name, and pretending to be from the electric company—just stupid, funny stuff. I didn’t think he was homophobic. I think they were high on amphetamines and drunk. I don’t think [he would have committed murder] if he was sober. Never. It was like 4 a.m. and they had been up for 24 hours partying, and one thing led to another. Of course, the reports said they had planned this sort of ritualistic murder, but I never knew that side of him.

JON NÖDTVEIDT:
No matter how you twist and turn it, [what I did] can’t be undone. I must move forward with my life. I have taken responsibility for my actions by having served my time in prison. I’m not proud of the fact that I have to watch my mother cry, but I’m working with new strength and looking ahead.