Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  WITH MANHEIM, Messiah, and Maniac departing from Mayhem even before the band’s official debut was released, Euronymous and Necrobutcher were forced to set about the task of replacing them. They began by looking to a local extreme metal band called Vomit, and recruited two of its members: drummer Torben Grue (now an opera singer) and vocalist Kittil Kittilsen (now a devout Christian and retired from music). However, the lineup they formed would end up lasting only until the end of the year.

  It wasn’t that the two were without merit. Indeed, in 1997 Necrobutcher and the latter two musicians regrouped under the name Kvikksølvguttene (“Quicksilver Boys,” a pun on Sølvguttene or “Silverboys,” a prepubescent Norwegian choir), an outfit Necrobutcher describes simply as “Mayhem, but under a different name.” Going so far as to tackle a “cover” of the first Mayhem song written, “Ghoul,” the project would prove just as provocative, making use of artwork featuring the band’s stash of drugs and illegal live weapons (Necrobutcher would later serve time for possession of both) and a photo of a deceased woman in a mortuary taken by a trespassing friend of the group.

  However, in 1988 two notably more suitable musicians had entered the scene, namely drummer Jan Axel Blomberg, better known by his apt pseudonym Hellhammer, and vocalist Per Yngve “Pelle” Ohlin, otherwise known as Dead. Hellhammer’s entry into the group proved fairly straightforward. Impressed with Deathcrush, he learned that the band were looking for a drummer and managed to arrange a meeting through mutual friends, bringing with him a tape of his recordings. So obvious were his talents that he received a call the very next day to tell him that he had been accepted as a member of Mayhem, a situation that still stands over two decades later.

  Amusingly, his hell-raising antics appear to have caused Euronymous some concern in the early years. In a letter to Morgan “Evil” Håkansson of Marduk, he complains that the drummer “has disappeared again … he’s hanging out with glamrockers (!) he seems to find it more important to drink with them than rehearse.” The letter ends with a note explaining that if the recipient is to organize a concert for the band in Sweden, he “MUST take care of one thing: Hellhammer is only thinking about getting drunk, and then he can’t play. So there must be NO access to any alcohol for him before a gig, preferably not even twenty-four hours before a gig.” No doubt Euronymous put up with such concerns because of Hellhammer’s incredible speed and proficiency, which have led him to become a cornerstone of the Norwegian black metal scene and a contributor to countless other big-name acts, including Dimmu Borgir, Thorns, and Arcturus.

  Euronymous, Dead, Hellhammer and Necrobutcher. Despite the small recorded output, for many this is the definitive lineup of Mayhem. Photo courtesy of Nihil Archives.

  Dead was—to put it mildly—a rather more complicated character. Hailing from Sweden, the eighteen-year-old (a year younger than Euronymous and Necrobutcher and a year older than Hellhammer) had already provided vocals for the Stockholm-based band Morbid, which also featured in its ranks Uffe Cederlund and L-G “Drutten” Petrov, who would later appear in the pioneering death metal bands Nihilist and Entombed. As it turned out, “morbid” was a pretty good description of Pelle himself, something that was obvious even from his unusual method of application, as Necrobutcher explains.

  “Metalion told Dead we were looking for a singer,” he says shaking his head, “and he sent a tape—the December Moon demo by Morbid—with a letter to our mailbox. I was the one who opened the letter that day and inside was the tape, the letter, and a crucified mouse. The mouse was starting to disintegrate, it was really rotten and stunk. I had a pickup truck at the time so I put the letter on the back and the tape in the cassette player. Now, of course, this letter flew off the back of the truck. This was the first time he had approached us, so I called Metalion and said, ‘Shit, this letter flew away, give me his address.’ Then Dead came to Oslo and it turned out he didn’t understand what we were saying… people who are Swedish don’t always understand the Norwegians and people from Stockholm are the worst. So he didn’t understand shit, and we didn’t understand shit that he was saying, so we had to speak English for the first week.”

  Per Yngve “Pelle” Ohlin, otherwise known as Dead, performing live with Mayhem.

  Manheim: “He was a pretty depressing guy. The first time I met him I started being polite, and ended up being really angry. But later I got to know him. I didn’t spend too much time with him but he was a nice guy, but he had this strange, depressive way to look at things, so you just got annoyed.”

  Necrobutcher: “Normally if you talk to someone, they will reply [to] you, but he was like, if he didn’t know you, why the fuck should he even care that you were talking? And of course people like us who are normal… I mean that’s why [Manheim] got pissed off, ’cos you couldn’t communicate with the guy. I knew how to get into his frame of thinking and after that we were best friends. He was into horror movies, we found the stuff we had common interests in and found each other in that and then he could open up. [He was a] really fucking great guy, loads of black humor, the smile on his face… he was smiling more than anything else, big, fucking, happy smile.”

  Manheim: “But he had issues.”

  That is something of an understatement. As well as his impressive vocals (which were equally demonic but notably clearer, more aggressive, and less tormented than Maniac’s contributions), the deathly pale Swede brought to Mayhem a new level of grimness, plunging the band into even blacker depths. Though some of it was theatrics, there’s little doubt that he was a genuinely melancholic, introverted and, in all probability, clinically depressed individual—something that became even more apparent when the band moved into a shared accommodation.

  Previously, the members had lived in their parents’ homes, although Dead lived in a variety of places, including the band’s rehearsal space, a cabin, and supposedly even some woods on occasion. But in 1988 the group began renting a deserted house in a forest near Kråkstad, Ski, far from civilization. The dwelling soon acquired such a dubious reputation among locals that children were warned not to go nearby, and residents in the nearest town began to avoid the band members, perhaps not surprisingly given their strange attire and behavior.

  “People there were very superstitious,” Hellhammer explained in an early 1996 issue of Spin. “When we went into a shop, all the old ladies would run out. In Sunday school they told the children that our house belonged to the devil.”

  Of course, living in close proximity with an eccentric like Dead was a challenge even to his bandmates, especially Euronymous. The two would sometimes come to blows, their fights even including knives. In one instance Dead stormed outside to sleep in the woods because Euronymous’ music was keeping him awake, only to find the guitarist further disturbing his peace by coming outside and firing his shotgun, a situation Dead reacted to by hurling a large rock at the guitarist, causing minor wounds to his chest. Much of the time, however, Dead would simply stay in his room, drawing or writing lyrics and generally keeping to himself. He shared very little information about his life, though he did speak frequently about his feelings of not being human, and recalled a near-death experience that had occurred after he fell in freezing water as a child.

  Necrobutcher: “He heard music and saw colors, and when he discovered some other people also had a similar thing and wrote books on it, he became super fascinated: read all the books, saw all the films, got in touch with people who had similar experiences, and based on that, came to the understanding that there was something more, a three-dimensional thing. I mean he really believed that.”

  “He was very obsessed with this,” explains Snorre “Blackthorn” Ruch, a later Mayhem member, “he felt he ‘belonged’ to the other side. I was there when Dead came over for the first time from Sweden. We had the same references and we got along, we both liked to draw, we made perverted drawings together. I noticed he was very out there with his depression and stuff. Euronymous lived with him and I can really say that he did not give
any positive contribution, so it was a downward spiral.”

  Dead claimed to have been obsessed with death and dying since his preschool years, but by the time he moved to Norway his behavior was bizarre to say the least as Necrobutcher recalls:

  “He used to collect dead animals that he found on the roadside—birds or squirrels that were hit by cars—and took them home because of this fascination with decomposition, the smell… everything to do with death, that was his interest. He kept this picnic basket under his bed and when something happened, like studio or live work, he would bring some of these animals in bags and inhale them between every song, to get this feeling of death. He was getting into the character of ‘Dead.’ He’d also bury his clothes in the soil several days before the gig so that they were smelling of decomposition. I felt it was a little bit weird, but he had this black sense of humor around it and that made it all right. We were all laughing a little bit about it, but we didn’t mind, you know?”

  Dead, undoubtedly one of the most iconic figures in black metal history and the man generally accepted to have created, named and popularized corpsepaint.

  Manheim: “[Necrobutcher] knew him much better than me but I remember I was at a party and he was there hammering spikes into his skull.”

  Dead’s frequent self-mutilation was something he brought to the stage, combining the desecration of his own flesh with that of animal parts, most notably pig heads, which would become something of a trademark for the band.

  “We haven’t had a real gig yet,” he explained in Slayer zine in 1989. “Three shows in Norway, but only one with parts of our stage show. We had some impaled pig heads, and I cut my arms with a weird knife and a crushed Coke bottle. We meant to have a chainsaw, but the guy who owned it had left when we came to go get it. That wasn’t brutal enough! Most of the people in there were wimps and I don’t want them to watch our gigs! Before we began to play there was a crowd of about three hundred in there, but in the second song ‘Necro Lust’ we began to throw around those pig heads. Only fifty were left, I liked that!”

  “Something I study is how people react when my blood is streaming everywhere but that’s not why I do it,” he told Battery Zine the following year. “I like to cut, in others preferably, but it’s mostly in myself. That I can’t do too often which makes me a bit mourning [sic] …”

  “At New Year’s Eve he almost cut up his artery, but he don’t remember anything himself,” Euronymous once wrote in a letter. “I do. We had to put handcuffs on him.”

  It seems slightly odd to say that Dead “introduced” self-mutilation to the scene—the theme being explored extensively by later bands such as France’s Antaeus and Sweden’s Shining—but he was certainly the first black metal musician to visibly indulge in it. One thing he certainly did introduce that had a phenomenal impact on the black metal aesthetic was the use of face paint. As we’ve seen, face paint had already been used by earlier black metal bands such as Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Master’s Hammer, and Sarcófago, as well as older groups such as Kiss, and these were all undoubtedly an influence upon Dead.

  Nonetheless, it was surely Dead’s use of what he described as corpsepaint (combined with the influence that Euronymous was beginning to have over the scene) that caused the technique to be adopted so widely. In fact corpsepaint has probably become the most identifiable aspect of the black metal aesthetic, even if the approach has evolved.

  “Corpsepaint we invented,” Necrobutcher states unequivocally. “That term, Dead actually came up with that from the days when he was in Morbid. The name corpsepaint was never used by the bands who used paint like Celtic Frost, King Diamond, Alice Cooper, Kiss or any other bands that used this sort of makeup. They weren’t painting themselves to look like they were dead, just to look evil or cool. With corpsepaint today, I don’t see any corpse … it’s to look cool or evil … [With Dead] it wasn’t like dark, it was green, decomposition colors, snot coming from the nose…”

  Sadly, in his three years with Mayhem, Dead recorded only two tracks in the studio: “Freezing Moon” and “Carnage.” Originally recorded for the compilation album Projections of a Stained Mind and later released separately, they have earned an iconic status among fans and even some ex-Mayhem members.

  “I was in the studio when Dead recorded his only studio vocals for Mayhem and I will never forget it,” recalls Maniac. “His dedication was something that was very hard to come by even then, let alone these days. I had to hold a bag of dead crows for him when he was singing so he could sniff it for the right atmosphere. These crows had been in the ground for quite some time when he dug them up. His voice was really of another world. Those two are still my favorite Mayhem tracks.”

  A late 1990 flyer for Mayhem’s show at the Eiskeller (‘Ice House’) club in Leipzig, Germany. The recording of this show would be released a few years later as the legendary Live In Leipzig album. The flyer also highlights just how long the debut album title (and even its intended font) existed prior to it actually being recorded and released.

  Despite a limited recorded output—later bolstered by the release of the Live in Leipzig album—there’s no doubt that Dead had a huge impact on the band and the movement as a whole. While it’s still hard to say if Pelle felt the need to live up to the “Dead” character, or whether the band gave him an outlet for his extreme tendencies, it does appear that his unbalanced outlook helped shape the direction Mayhem was taking, with the extremity of his behavior certainly appreciated by the rest of the band.

  “Weird is not the right word,” Euronymous explained in an interview with Morbid zine. “I honestly think DEAD is mentally insane. (He knows I am writing this!) Which other way can you describe a guy who does not eat in order to get [a] starving wound? Or have a T-shirt with funeral announcements on it? I’ve always wanted to have a guy like that in the band.”

  Thanks largely to Dead and Euronymous, who appear to have spurred each other on, the humor apparent in the band’s early days was quickly disappearing, and the tongue-in-cheek approach to over-the-top gore subjects was replaced by a more straight-faced exploration of evil and Satanism, along with more nihilistic offerings.

  Unfortunately it wouldn’t be long until Pelle actually was dead, consumed by the depression that had plagued him for so long. His fragile state of mind was probably not helped by the fact that the band he had moved to Norway to participate in was continuing to struggle. Euronymous had been discussing a forthcoming album entitled De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas for some time, but things were progressing extremely slowly, gigs were rare, and without other work the group often found themselves going without food, due to a lack of finances.

  Live in Leipzig would be the only official album to include Dead and features the vocalist on its cover.

  Increasingly isolated from the world, Dead committed suicide on April 8, 1991, first slitting his wrists and wandering around the house before shooting himself in the head with a shotgun Euronymous owned—ironically the same one that had kept him from slipping into unconsciousness previously. Euronymous discovered the body after returning to the house to find the front door locked and climbing in through Dead’s bedroom window, where he found the vocalist lying dead on his bed, his head blown open and his brain lying beside his body.

  In an episode that has become part of black metal folklore, Euronymous delayed contacting the police, instead heading back into town to purchase a disposable camera before returning to the scene to photograph the body, even apparently rearranging the knife so that it lay on top of the shotgun—an obvious impossibility in the normal chain of events—for dramatic effect. Unsurprisingly, when the police were eventually informed, the rest of the band fell under instant suspicion. They were eventually able to satisfy the authorities that the death was a suicide, although it was widely believed for some time within the metal world that Euronymous had a hand in Dead’s demise.

  These days it’s generally accepted that the death was indeed a suicide, and Hellhammer has b
een quoted as saying that he thought at the time that such a thing was likely to happen eventually. Dead had made “open insinuations” about killing himself, and the last time he saw Hellhammer, he told him that he had just bought “a very sharp knife.” Hellhammer had gone to stay with family at the time of Pelle’s death, and Euronymous was also away, pointing to the possibility that Euronymous might, at the very least, have been aware of Dead’s imminent demise.

  Manheim says, “The weekend Pelle killed himself Øystein was spending the weekend at my place, we were good friends at that time. When he left my house, he went home and found Pelle dead. He was calm that weekend but they had talked about Pelle killing himself, so I guess we will never know what happened before he came to my place … whether they had planned it at all.”

  Whatever the truth is, the event would prove cataclysmic to the emerging black metal scene, both in Norway and eventually beyond.

  17

  (RE)BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

  NORWAY PART I

  IF MAYHEM VOCALIST Pelle “Dead” Ohlin had been influential in life, then so was he in death, and many active participants have commented that his premature death provided a turning point for the Norwegian scene, which from then on moved toward even greater extremity. Black metal was now becoming a matter of life and death—or at least was being portrayed as such by Euronymous. Far from grieving, Euronymous appeared to be actively capitalizing on Dead’s death, something that disgusted Necrobutcher, the only member who traveled to Sweden for the funeral.

  Infamously, Euronymous considered eating parts of Dead’s brain, but claimed that he changed his mind due to its condition. As he stated in The Sepulchral Voice zine, “I have never tried human flesh. We were going to try it when Dead died but he had been lying a little too long.” Instead he and Hellhammer fashioned fragments ofv Dead’s skull into necklaces, with further pieces sent to other friends and contacts of the band, including Morgan of Marduk and Christophe “Masmiseim” Mermod of Samael. More controversially, the pair developed the images of Dead’s body that had been taken by Euronymous, who openly planned to use these for Mayhem artwork.