Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  PURE FUCKING ARMAGEDDON

  In 1986 the three members of Mayhem recorded and released the band’s first demo, the extremely noisy eight-song tape Pure Fucking Armageddon. With its murky sound, there’s long been speculation as to who did the vocals on the tape, an issue the pair quickly clear up.

  “Me,” explains Necrobutcher before continuing. “It was [recorded on] a Portastudio, four tracks, but we never got it to work, that’s why only the first side is with vocals! The quality of the sound got very much lower than without vocals, so we printed the b-side without vocals. It felt like, fuck, people wouldn’t be able to hear the songs.”

  Perhaps unsurprisingly given its raw lo-fi barbarity, the reception to the demo was not entirely positive. “I thought it was terrible,” laughs Necrobutcher, “but that was the good thing. I remember one article—I can’t remember if it was Kerrang! or Metal Forces—but it said ‘This tape has no vocals at all, the bass sounds like [Celtic Frost’s] Tom Gabriel Warrior’s balls in a lawnmower’ and what they were talking about was actually the vocals! But it was [next to] a review of [Thin Lizzy guitarist] Snowy White and the review was just ‘zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’ repeating itself. I thought this review about Tom’s balls was better than this other shitty one, so we felt like we had won.”

  “I’ve seen later,” Manheim adds, “a lot of times when people write about black metal or death metal recordings, they refer to something that is hard to define, they refer to the early ages where they could feel the truth behind something. And that was the point. You were very close to the real thing and I guess that is one of the marks of the early black metal recordings. Darkthrone is the same, it’s poorly produced, but it’s genuine.”

  “The same with the Venom albums,” states Necrobutcher, “the lack of production is the great thing about it. On the sleeve it would say, ‘this was recorded in twenty-two hours blah blah,’ to kind of make an excuse for themselves, and I was thinking to myself that it should go the other way, say, ‘We are proud not to have used any producers or high-end studios.’ And of course these two [Venom] albums are the foundations of extreme metal today.”

  “Actually I met one of my heroes on our last tour, Jello Biafra [singer of the Dead Kennedys], he came backstage and said that … they found it very pure, as it was not touched by anyone else. It was us, it was them and they were proud of the product, which is why [Dead Kennedys’ debut] Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables has this special feeling, the bad production adds to the whole thing. He’s actually a collector and has all our records, he bought the box set.”

  “He was a hero to us in the eighties,” adds Manheim, “the Dead Kennedys.”

  DEATHCRUSH

  Deathrehearsal, the 1987 rehearsal tape for the band’s official debut, Deathcrush, supports Manheim’s assertion, featuring as it does two versions of the Dead Kennedys’ song “California Über Alles” from the aforementioned Fresh Fruit album. When asked about the Dead Kennedys in a 1986 interview with Damage Inc. fanzine, Euronymous explained, “They play some pretty good music, but we couldn’t give a shit about what they stand for.” In an interesting twist, the unusually professional-looking Damage Inc. was produced by one Sven-Erik Kristiansen, better known as Maniac, who would soon appear as a session vocalist on Deathcrush, along with a second individual, Eirik “Billy” Nordheim, who went under the stagename Messiah.

  The original Deathcrush tape, released in early 1987, before the somewhat-delayed vinyl edition was issued.

  “Billy we met, I think, at a Dio concert,” recalls Necrobutcher. “It must have been ’84, ’cos he was singing at our first concert in ’85. Basically we saw a guy with a Venom backpatch so we went straight over and said, ‘Hey man, you have Venom on your back,’ and we were immediately friends. He told me after Maniac left [in 2004], ‘I’m ready! [to sing for Mayhem].’ I sent a message back saying, ‘Twenty years too late’. Because we were begging him to be in the band [back in the eighties], as he was super talented musically.”

  “Billy also had strange priorities,” sighs Manheim. “He had his girlfriend and lots of other shit.”

  “He grew up on the other side of Oslo and was in a band called Black Spite with the friends he grew up with,” Necrobutcher explains, “so he felt he owed them to continue, so he dropped out immediately after the [first] live performance. But we called him as Maniac was not able to sing all the tracks—he was not musically experienced enough to be able to listen to what’s going on and then sing on top of it, he was just singing. We were like, ‘Come in… now!’ Because he was completely out of it, he was just going: ‘Waaaaaaaaaraaaaaaaagh!’”

  “It was effective though,” Manheim smiles.

  “It was effective,” Necrobutcher agrees before continuing the tale. “Maniac had written a letter to us after we released the Pure Fucking Armageddon demo. He had read about us in Slayer Magazine and sent a tape of himself, a one-man band [Septic Cunts]. We had an album and we wanted someone to sing, and we sent him the lyrics. All the music was rehearsed. So Maniac came, did his songs and left, it was too far away from where he lived and everything.”

  “He was a crazy guy back then,” laughs Manheim, “he was a maniac. I remember the first sessions, it was quite remarkable when he started to scream. That was the first time I’d met him.”

  “He had a magazine, so he was into the metal scene,” says Necrobutcher, “and it was a very small metal scene, and he was the only person we knew who sung.”

  In a later interview, Maniac recalled his entrance into Norway’s emerging underground metal scene: “Mayhem and Necrophagia inspired me to record the Septic Cunts tape, which consisted of my vocals and my extremely limited guitar skills. When I recorded that tape my mother was sure I had lost any last remaining fragment of sanity I possessed. It was a horrible piece of noise but the voice was to Euronymous’ liking and very soon he asked me to join Mayhem. I lived a long away from Langhus so rehearsals were quite infrequent. We rehearsed in an old pigpen and I had to sing through a Peavey Bandit amp with a very lousy microphone, but it sounded so good back then. I still remember when Necro’s bass sound hit me in the guts like a wrecking ball and Euronymous’ guitar was more like the sound you get when you cut sheet metal. Electrifying. It was like entering a different plane of existence. When we went into the studio I was primed for the three newest tracks but Messiah helped me out with ‘Pure Fucking Armageddon’ and ‘Witching Hour’ and I just sang chorus on those tracks. The most amusing thing was that the studio technician was ready to record a reggae band if my memory serves me right. Necro had written most of the gory murderous lyrics and I only made small adjustments to them. It was quite an experience.”

  Despite the record’s artistic merits and groundbreaking nature, reception was once again underwhelming.

  “You must remember this,” says Manheim seriously, “everybody around us, musicians, told us—”

  Necrobutcher interrupts bluntly, “—they laughed at us.”

  “Yeah, they were laughing at us,” says Manheim, “saying that we were spoiling our talents, that this wasn’t going anywhere, so why didn’t we play new wave like everybody else?”

  “They didn’t say, ‘Don’t spoil your talent,’” Necrobutcher spits incredulously, “’Cos they didn’t think we had any talent. To give you an example, our first performance was at a rock competition—there were eight bands, and we came in last. The judges put us in last. There were seven other bands and, you know, they never went anywhere, so that gives you an example of what was going on.”

  Though Deathcrush would be more likely to confirm the opinions of the band’s detractors than change them, this exhilarating record was, nonetheless, a definite milestone. Though still unbelievably raw, the chainsaw guitars, distorted bass, steady drumming, and utterly demented vocals were freed from the mire of the demo’s muddy sound to showcase the true barbarity of the compositions.

  Though the first studio release by a Norwegian black metal band, Deathcrush itself is not
generally considered a black metal recording, due partly to both the bloodthirsty gore-obsessed lyrics found on songs such as “Chainsaw Gutsfuck,” but also the music itself, which combines many thrash, death, and punk overtones into what was then a decidedly avant-garde sound.

  Opening with an introduction track by Conrad Schnitzler of German electronic group Tangerine Dream (a coup achieved after Euronymous found Conrad’s home address and sat outside his house until his wife eventually invited him in) and featuring a stripped-down cover of Venom’s “Witching Hour,” Deathcrush is a surprisingly eclectic listen, especially considering that it clocks in at not much more than a quarter of an hour. However, the combination of visceral brutality, experimental moments, tormented vocals, primitive violence, and ridiculously catchy riffs still divides as many fans and critics today as it did when it was released.

  Despite this fact and its limited print run, the mini-album would appear in the top twenty on album charts within Kerrang! magazine. This was somewhat misleading, however, since the magazine took their sales information from one store in particular—the legendary Shades shop in Soho London, a favorite haunt of the band and one of the few stores that stocked the album. In fact, sales at the time were far from overwhelming and it was some years before the initial print run of one thousand copies had sold out.

  Deathcrush was undoubtedly far more abrasive in sound than most people were used to hearing or prepared to accept, even in the wake of the success of thrash metal albums such as Slayer’s Reign In Blood, released late the previous year. That included those involved in the music industry. Indeed, while recording in a studio was a step up for the band, they soon discovered that they were somewhat on their own in terms of actually capturing the songs.

  “When we arrived at the studio, they said, ‘Where is your snare drum, you’re a reggae band right?’” Necrobutcher recalls with a shake of the head. “We said, ‘No, we’re not a reggae band.’ They said, ‘Well what sort of music do you play?’ We said, ‘Well it’s better if we just rig up and you hear it.’ Because there was no definition for that sort of music at that time. I think the guy was used to pop rock.”

  “He even told us,” laughs Manheim, “this was something he didn’t know how to record.”

  “Yeah, he had no clue,” sighs the bassist, continuing the story, “so he just set the settings and we recorded. That was it—no mix, before or after. That’s why people can feel it nowadays, it’s not been tampered with. There were no overdubs—bass, drums, and guitar are live and then we recorded the vocals after. Maniac was originally supposed to do everything but there were two songs he couldn’t do, so we called Billy. But I had forgotten the lyrics I wrote back home, so he just sat down and wrote new lyrics for ‘Pure Fucking Armageddon’ in the studio. And then of course it became a bit political, with Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, so I rewrote it afterwards back to what it was before.”

  Despite this the punk overtones continued, since by accident or design, the sleeves for the initial run of records were printed in a lurid bright pink, rather than the intended dark red. The sleeve also had text missing, which meant that Euronymous had to ink the back of the sleeves personally with his name under his picture. Whether in pink or red, the record sleeve remains striking, with over half the cover dominated by the then-new Mayhem logo, a truly iconic design that came courtesy Maniac’s friend Nella (designer at Damage Inc.), and whose sinister and symmetrical qualities would be hugely influential on many of the band logos that followed. Sitting beneath this was a black-and-white documentary photograph of two severed hands hanging on ropes, the overall aesthetic proving similar to the one used by punk bands such as Dead Kennedys—albeit with perhaps a different effect in mind.

  “We had set the color codes and everything, so I think they did it on purpose, to make it pink instead of blood red,” opines Necrobutcher. “When I opened the first box, it was like, ‘What?!’ Then we were thinking they did us a favor, this is even worse now, so we accepted, rather than sending back. Also we had been waiting for this moment for many, many years, to hear the stylus come down on the vinyl, your own product, we’d never experienced that before. We just wanted to grab it and put it on. We sent everything through a Norwegian company. They had a printing company in Holland and first they didn’t want to print it ’cos [they thought the cover] was ‘racist,’ ’cos it was two black hands hanging. It was two hands hanging in a marketplace in Mauritania on the Ivory Coast of Africa, as a warning to thieves to say, ‘okay, here you don’t steal.’ We actually never thought about it, we were like, ‘Racist? What the fuck? It’s just two hands.’ We didn’t think about what color the hands were, it was just so fucking cool.”

  “It’s a press photo,” explains Manheim, “we went to the Norwegian Telegraph Company.”

  “We had an idea to find a picture that could define the music,” continues Necrobutcher. “First I went to the torture archive to see if there were any cool torture pictures. I didn’t find that, so I went into some other places, then that picture popped out. We thought it was a humorous thing as well, bizarre things going on, this defines the music pretty well.”

  At this time the band were still known for their humorous undercurrents, and in fact Necrobutcher and Euronymous had recently recorded a cassette called Metalion in the Park with Checker Patrol, a one-off joke project they created with members of Assassin and Sodom during a visit to Germany the previous year. Some of this humor was evident in Deathcrush: as well as the cow adorning the central sticker on the record itself, there were the ads that appeared in Slayer Magazine featuring Necrobutcher playing the piano surrounded by images of the cartoon cat Garfield. Then there was the minute-long unlisted final track—unsurprisingly removed from later pressings—which captured the band repeating the lyrics to a composition entitled “(All the Little Flowers are) Happy” in an increasingly demented fashion.

  The Deathcrush EP, released in 1987. A milestone in Scandinavian metal, and a release that led many of Norway’s young metal fans and musicians to begin making contact with the band.

  “That [ad] had nothing to do with us,” clarifies Necrobutcher, “that was to do with Metalion’s bizarre form of humor. I think that all this just adds to bad taste though. The song was spontaneous in the studio, I don’t know exactly why. Bizarre humor at the time. You play with stuff that’s going on at the time and that was the joke that week.”

  “It was actually a Young Ones and Cliff Richards thing,” adds Manheim, “they had a single out [‘Living Doll’] with that song on the b-side and we thought it was ridiculous and funny. And it still is. We’re all singing on that song. Even Metalion.”

  “We were all into Monty Python as well,” smiles Necrobutcher.

  “We liked English humor, it’s sarcastic and dry,” Manheim continues. “But all that disappeared. [At that time] it wasn’t that serious. It was ambitious, but it wasn’t that serious. In the early nineties I must say it was kind of scary to see a lot of people going into that and how serious they were about it. What Øystein was talking about; sitting together with him and hearing this extreme thinking and everything was so serious, you know—where’s the humor?”

  Just as Maniac and Messiah became estranged from the Mayhem camp before Deathcrush was released, so too did Manheim, who decided to move on from Mayhem shortly after the recording was completed. He would later return to making music, focusing on projects with electronic and experimental elements, most interestingly working with the aforementioned Conrad Schnitzler in an outfit called Big Robot.

  “I was together with a girlfriend then and was eager to get out of my parents’ house,” recalls Manheim, “so I was eager to get a job and get my own place and I didn’t have an ambition to follow through with a tour. So I think that was just a pragmatic decision.”

  “We put more hard pressure and said, ‘Now we are going to tour,’” Necrobutcher states, “He was on the way out and that was our way of saying, ‘Okay, either you are in or you are out.’ De
athcrush was recorded in February and released in August but after the studio Manheim was out.”

  “What I do remember is that Øystein was really mad at me,” says Manheim, “’cos it meant that leaving the band was destroying the tour plans, as they had to replace me and that sets a band back, and he was probably right about that. But it was a shift in life, that’s how things are. My uncle is a musician and he told me, ‘If you are going to be a musician, be prepared to eat flatbread a lot. If you’re prepared to eat flatbread, and do all that, then go ahead. If you’re not, do something else.’ And that was a turning point, I knew that I was good at other things.”

  “And yes, we were broke for many, many years,” Necrobutcher sighs. “I had to turn to crime, selling drugs and shit for many years to support myself. I couldn’t take a job ’cos it would take away the focus.”

  “I think all bands will confirm,” Manheim concludes, “unless it’s a very corporate band, everybody’s got to be in it one hundred percent. And I didn’t have that. I think it was correct and the right decision to make, though Øystein really was pissed and said a couple of things to magazines. But that’s fair enough.”

  16

  MAYHEM

  PART II