Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  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.

  FENRIZ: Deathcrush was insanely inspirational. It could be bought on tape under the counter at Hot Records in Oslo in early 1987. The vinyl came out later that year. It was by far the rawest band in Norway. Just looking at the logo was godly. After I heard it, I got in touch with them, and even though I was a greenhorn they took some interest in me. I had my own crew to build in Darkthrone. So my contact with Euronymous and Necrobutcher between 1987 and 1990 was sporadic, but memorable. But there wasn’t a scene. Everyone was just pen pals, more or less. I think Mayhem showed a lot of us that we had to fend for ourselves, DIY-style.

  SHAGRATH: I really liked Deathcrush; it was so raw and heavy. It was Euronymous who introduced me to it. I wanted to buy it from him and I couldn’t. It was a limited edition—that’s before it was reprinted.

  FROST: Mayhem would say [1994’s] De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas was a much more important album, and of course it was. But to me, Deathcrush was really significant, and especially that saw blade guitar sound. It’s the first proper release by a really extreme Norwegian band, and that gave Mayhem cult status.

  FAUST: Many people were directly inspired to make riffs the same way as Euronymous did. For example, Snorre Ruch from Thorns was very inspired by it, and, in fact, he did it so well that his kind of riffing in turn inspired Euronymous again, and it eventually became the trademark riffing of what became known as Norwegian black metal. Today, Thorns is a well-kept secret from the more super
ficial black metal fans, and little do they probably realize that this loner from Trondheim influenced bands like Darkthrone, Dimmu Borgir, Burzum, Emperor, and even Mayhem. I didn’t leave Thorns as such, but we more or less decided to put it down [in 1992] since Snorre joined Mayhem and I joined Emperor.

  EURONYMOUS: Most people hated us. It was something so raw and evil [that chills ran down your back], and you really got a kick from listening to it [if you were into black metal]. Now death metal is commercial, and bands like Cadaver have even played gigs for their parents. This is not good. This does not help the underground. Real death metal should be something normal people are afraid of, not something mothers listen to.

  Darkthrone, launched under the name Black Death in 1986, evolved into one of the most influential bands in Norwegian black metal. Unlike some of their peers, the band began as a death metal group, as reflected in their 1991 debut, Soulside Journey. But it was 1992’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky that marked their transformation and became a landmark for the genre. Chilling and evil—and so tinny-sounding the songs seemed to be playing on damaged speakers—the music resonated with the lunatic conviction of a group dedicated to darkness and determined to sign a pact with the devil.

  FENRIZ: We started out as a band that [just] tried to play. Inspired by the primitive riffs of Celtic Frost and the [sloppiness] of [crossover punk band] Cryptic Slaughter, I thought, “I can start playing as well.” Then in the autumn of ’87 I formed Darkthrone and our sound developed into trying out anything, from Napalm Death’s crusty grind/punk with Celtic Frost riffs thrown in for good measure to softer, epic acoustic bits probably inspired by Metallica instrumentals. So we were a metal/punk band in ’87 and ’88, just as we have been since 2005. But in ’89 we turned into death-thrashers, and by the end of the year we were fully fledged technical horror death metal fiends with a record deal to match. I had been listening to death metal since I discovered Possessed as early as ’86, and in the underground, death metal riffs flourished. In those days, thrash, death, and black were often mixed together, as there were luckily no real niches yet. It was when death metal became streamlined that I didn’t feel it anymore. Plus we had been rediscovering blacker vibes since 1989, hearing our old Destruction albums, for instance, in a new way. And we were worshipping Bathory and Hellhammer combined with Motörhead and Black Sabbath. Of course, in 1990 we were a technical, evil death metal band, but this had to change. In early ’91 we decided to start rocking out the black metal vibes and tone down the slinky death metal stuff.

  KORY GROW: One reason Darkthrone is so important is because [1992’s] A Blaze in the Northern Sky was the first record that got across the whole idea of taking back Norway from the Christians. They were saying, “A thousand years ago you invaded Norway and you raped us of our religion and our culture. So why are we continuing to follow these rules that the English brought to us when they took so much from us?”

  Darkthrone followed up A Blaze in the Northern Sky with two more harrowing and hellish black metal releases—1993’s Under a Funeral Moon and 1994’s Transylvanian Hunger—before Mayhem finally released the seminal follow-up to Deathcrush: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. That album’s creation was, to say the least, fraught with complications, including member shifts, suicide, and murder, which explains why it took six years to complete. Going into the project, Mayhem wanted a more dramatic front man than either of their former vocalists, Eirik Nordheim (aka Messiah) and Sven Erik Kristiansen (aka Maniac, who returned to the band between 1994 and 2004). So they recruited Per Yngve Ohlin (aka Dead), whose volatility and aesthetic made Mayhem’s performances visceral and terrifying. The band also replaced drummer Manheim with Jan Axel Blomberg (aka Hellhammer), who remains one of the genre’s fastest and most aggressive players.

  NECROBUTCHER: Dead really took his role in the band seriously. He buried his stage clothes in the ground so they would decompose and smell. He also collected dead squirrels and roadkill and kept them in this cooler bag without cooling elements, so the stench was very foul. He always took that in a plastic bag to gigs or to the studios, where he could open up the bag and smell it before he sang to get the right feeling of death.

  JAN AXEL “HELLHAMMER” BLOMBERG (Mayhem): I joined Mayhem in 1988. I took my name from Celtic Frost’s previous project Hellhammer, and I thought it was a shame that such a good name had to disappear. My friends introduced me to Euronymous and Dead. Soon after [I joined] we got into the dark side of life and Satanism. I would always like those things in spite of the fact that I was born in a Christian family. Only years after, I realized how weird and how harmful it was for us. But I was too young to resist my temptation for darkness. I found some books where different rituals were described. Later on, we put our knowledge into real life practice. Euronymous was the most deeply involved. He was our teacher. Now I realize he went too far. And Dead followed his lead. Frankly speaking, I didn’t completely understand Satanism. I was attracted by the dark, sinister imagery, but I didn’t feel any anger for Christianity. Euronymous and Dead hated it. “Christianity is evil,” they used to say. But I asked them: “Ain’t it evil what we are doing?” I never got an answer.

  NECROBUTCHER: One of the reasons we had dead animals onstage was because Dead liked that kind of image; it fit with his stage show. The first time we used it was in late ’88. I’d say 50 percent of the people at the show liked the visuals and thought it was cool—like performance art. The other 50 percent of the crowd were disgusted. But Dead always said he’d like to take it a step further. His dream was to play in Stockholm and slaughter a goat with a chainsaw onstage, but we never got to do that.

  DEAD: My mum told me when I was a baby I slept so deeply I turned white. She had to check me all the time to see if I was still alive. Maybe the whole thing started there? And maybe it started before that. My great-great-grandmother was a sorcerer but only practiced white magic. I have never been into fuckin’ white magic. I have always hated Christianity, and when I discovered Satanism I became insanely interested in that.

  HELLHAMMER: When Dead entered the show he just became Dead. I don’t know why he was cutting himself, but he did it a lot. He cut his arm so bad with a bottle once that he almost fainted onstage.

  NECROBUTCHER: For [Dead], the stage was the place where he could live out everything you couldn’t do in normal life. You don’t cut yourself when you’re in the supermarket. But when he performed he could really show off his bizarre ideas about this character, Dead. He was an antisocial guy, more into being alone and reading books and drawing. When we met, he was smiling. He had a great sense of humor, black humor that we shared. Other people didn’t know him. He didn’t open up easily, so people thought he was depressed. But he wasn’t at all. He just was not interested in interacting with new people, or listening to other people’s opinions.

  HELLHAMMER: In the beginning of the nineties we rented an old deserted house in the forest to rehearse. Everybody [in town] hated us, but we enjoyed it. Dead would lock himself in his room, permanently depressed. Euronymous and Dead didn’t get along. Dead didn’t trust Euronymous. The verbal fights turned into real bloody beatings. I got tired of their quarrels and moved to my grandmother’s, coming back mainly to rehearse. One day I decided to go to Oslo with my friends. Before the departure, I met Dead. He was grim and depressed: “Look, I bought a big knife. It’s very sharp.” Those were the last words I heard from him.

  NECROBUTCHER: We had a lot of plans, but things weren’t moving so fast. Tours were canceled, the songs for De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas were more or less finished, but we didn’t have a budget to enter the studio. We had some setbacks. On top of that, all of Dead’s friends were still in Sweden and that depressed him a little bit. And his family was constantly on him about the choices he had to make in his life, pushing him all the time to go back to school and get a real job. Ultimately, after living together for a while, he and Euronymous were no longer friends. Also, he was morbidly [obsessed with the] afterlife. All his lyrics were
about this, and I think that came from an episode that happened to him when he was ten years old and he was ice skating and he fell on the ice. His [spleen] sprung open and he was rushed to the hospital, and then he had this vision. What he told me was that he was actually dead, but they got him back to life. And [while he was unconscious] he heard some music and saw a tunnel with a light at the end of it, and then when he found out that people had similar visions after near-death experiences he read all the books on the subject that he could get. He [felt that] there was an afterlife, and fuck anyone who didn’t believe in it. It was not religious; it was a spiritual thing. His solution [to proving there is an afterlife] was just to kill himself. So he did.

  HELLHAMMER: Euronymous was leaving with me that day. He went to town on some business for his label [Deathlike Silence Productions]. Several days later, when he came back, the house looked deserted. The front door was locked and there was no key in our secret place. Euronymous went round the house and noticed that the window to Dead’s room was opened. He got to the house and saw Dead lying on the floor: a part of his head was blown away by [a] gunshot. Euronymous hitchhiked to the nearest town to buy film for his camera. Then he returned and made a shot of Dead’s corpse. When Euronymous called me, he was not talkative. “Dead went back home,” he said. “Back to Sweden?” I wondered. “No, he’s blown his head [off].” Then I realized that Dead was dead. Police took Dead’s body, and we lived in the house for a few more weeks. Dead’s blood and pieces of his skull were all over the room. Once I looked under his bed and found two big pieces of skull. I took one piece and Euronymous took the other. We made amulets out of them.