Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “In the beginning it was hardly anything,” Metalion remembers. “There was like a used section with a bunch of vinyls, nothing else. But people would go there to hang out, drink, smoke, whatever… Guys from Darkthrone were always there and Emperor… The socializing was the most important. We used to live in the basement of the store, and as you know the Inferno festival is now organizing tourist trips there… Oh well…”

  “They had a horrible selection,” laughs Apollyon, then of Lamented Souls and later a member of Aura Noir and Dødheimsgard. “They didn’t really have any distribution. I remember when the first black metal thing came out, the A Blaze in the Northern Sky album [by Darkthrone], Helvete didn’t get it. They didn’t have the connections [with distributors]… it wasn’t like a proper shop. There was another shop called Hot Records, and I was there the day it came out… one of these [Helvete] ‘hangarounds’ came into the shop when I was there and when the owner turned his back, or was on the phone or something, he just nicked all the Ablaze albums and ran down to Helvete!” He laughs. “Obviously [the owner] just went to Helvete with the police and retrieved them… that was the kind of things these silly ‘hangarounds’ would do.”

  The shop did indeed attract a lot of new fans, many of whom looked up to Euronymous. Respect undoubtedly crossed over into idolization for some who, having not known him in earlier, less “evil” times, had something of a one-sided impression. With his old friends Manheim and Necrobutcher gone, Euronymous was able to preach an increasingly extreme and rigid manifesto and present himself as he wished to be seen, free of the constraints older contacts might have placed on him.

  “There would be many kids, and I think Euronymous loved it too,” recalls Apollyon, “lots of followers who would do anything for him. There were lots of bands and guys who brought their lunchboxes just to sit there all day and be with Euronymous.”

  Says Necrobutcher, “When I was out of the picture nobody knew who he was. So he could put on this fake thing. Put on this robe, paint his face white and say stuff that had no truth in it.”

  Manheim agrees: “When you are close with people that have been living with you for many years and know what you really are, you just can’t try to be something you are not—”

  Necrobutcher interjects: “—’cos your mates would immediately pick up on it and say, ‘What the fuck are you saying?’”

  “Right,” says Manheim, “you will be exposed. But at the time when Euronymous was very extreme we still had a lot of contact. He could call me, we were talking about music, and all kinds of things, he was normal. The day after he could give you a call and he’d have friends over at Helvete and he’d be talking about burning churches like a different person. He’d be playing a role and he could do that, as there was nobody to correct him.”

  “He was trying to convince himself and people around him that he was purest evil and Satanic and all that shit,” says Snorre Ruch. “I don’t know how many people fell for it, but the media liked it.”

  Outwardly, and most noticeably in interviews, Euronymous continued to propagate an extremely evil image, becoming increasingly cold and heartless in his statements.

  “I have no friends, just the guys I’m allied with, if my girlfriend dies I won’t cry, I will misuse the corpse,” he told Norwegian publication Beat. When asked about the humorous elements within Deathcrush, he explained, “That was then. Now we mean partying is bad. It’s better to sit and cut yourself, than to go out and have fun… It’s many years since I managed to feel love. This is just the way it is. This is a main concept.”

  Despite such comments, Euronymous wasn’t at all the type to sit at home cutting himself or living out an emotionless, friendless existence, even if his comments appear, sadly, to have inspired some fans to behave this way. The regular parties and frequent socializing inherent to the movement alone suggest that the slogan of his label Deathlike Silence Productions (“No Mosh, No Core, No Trend, No Fun”) was at least twenty-five percent inaccurate. In fact, most who met him report that Euronymous was a generally social and friendly individual, an enthusiastic music fan who loved to talk about his passion and enjoyed dealing with others. He certainly had a lot of friends, to whom he reportedly acted with generosity and kindness. One example was Grutle Kjellson and Ivar Bjørnson, founders of Enslaved, whom he not only signed to his label Deathlike Silence but also mentored in their early years. Despite the fact that their interests openly lay with the traditional Nordic Gods rather than Satanism, both men say that Euronymous was only ever supportive and never attempted to preach any Satanic ideas to them.

  Euronymous depicted in the Helvete store, taken from an article in Verdens Gang newspaper, Norway, 1993, after the shop’s closure.

  Grutle Kjellson says: “We told him about our concept and he said, ‘Yeah, someone should do that, that’s cool, to preserve the culture. I’m not into those things, but go ahead.’”

  Adds Ivar Bjørnson, “The thing we spent the most time talking about was musical theory. When he came to visit our hometown—which is a key moment in Enslaved history—he brought his guitar. We had been listening so much to [Mayhem’s] De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas tapes, the rough mixes without vocals. He had his guitar, and I had my guitar, and I could just ask him, ‘How do you do that riff?’ and he would explain it. He would give me a call and tell me that him and the guy from Thorns [Snorre Ruch] had developed this theory on how to record, it was just about sharing that stuff. My guitar style is still seventy or eighty percent those moments, you know, being fourteen years old.”

  In this way Euronymous helped out many younger bands in the scene, especially Enslaved and Emperor, both of whom he personally recommended to Candlelight Records, the label that issued the split record of the two bands. Interestingly, even before meeting Emperor, he’d offered thoughts and advice to guitarist Samoth and bassist Mortiis, just two of many individuals communicating with him by mail at the time.

  “I first got in contact with him by writing to him,” Samoth recalls. “I sent him the Embryonic demo, and he gave us some honest feedback. He didn’t like it all that much, but pointed out good things too, and gave info on Mayhem, upcoming gigs, bands to check out and so on.”

  For those of us who never met Euronymous, it’s very hard to pin down who he was as a human being, perhaps because he was so keen to deny his humanity and was increasingly consumed by the black metal personality he presented to the world, as a now-infamous quote in Orcustus zine underlines:

  “I don’t think people should respect each other. I don’t want to see trend people respecting me, I want them to HATE and FEAR. If people don’t accept our ideas as their own, they can fuck off because then they belong to a musical scene which has NOTHING to do with ours. They could just as well be Madonna fans. There is an ABYSS between us and the rest…. The HC [hardcore] pigs have correctly made themselves guardians of morality, but we must kick them in the face and become guardians of anti-morality.”

  Even Manheim, who knew him better than most, finds it hard to separate Euronymous from the character he created.

  “There was cynicism in it,” he ponders thoughtfully, “how he handled the death of Pelle, that was really shocking, ’cos up to that point things were just image and philosophical discussions. That was probably the breaking point, where we understood that he wasn’t handling this very well. Øystein never changed to me, but the image took more and more space, how far he was willing to take the image was expanding. We had an intellectual discussion once about how far you could take something, and how fun it was to take it far and he found joy in exploiting that. How far can you push people? How far can you push yourself? So in that context that was a part of him. But I’m convinced that the image Euronymous was building up was not Øystein. I don’t think it was real, but I think he might have thought he would go into that level of cynicism.

  “But he was a kind person, he did care about people around him. [But he also believed] that to really explore the extreme, you had to live
the extreme and that’s where he departed from other people. Artists will say, ‘We must go into the extreme to see how people will react to it,’ but to live the extreme, that’s something different and he wanted to do that. He talked about sex and said the evil thing to do is to have anal sex. You shouldn’t have regular, normal, natural sex, you should have anal, so he was very strict, he wanted to explore that, to be this kind of person. So, is this the image, or the personality? I would guess if you spoke to scholarly people they would say it was the image, a role you were playing. But of course it mirrors some of you, because you are not able to live it if you could not mirror some of it.”

  “Euronymous was probably the most extreme guy I ever met,” says Grutle, “he hated Nazism, ’cos he thought communism was much worse. He watched weird movies, he was very misanthropic, but still, he was one of the most friendly people I ever met.”

  A photo of the Helvete store, depicting some of the items (many donated by friends and comrades) that decorated the walls. The dagger on the right was given to Hellhammer by his grandfather when he was eight. Photo courtesy of Samoth, who lived at the shop for a time.

  “What he was advocating very strongly was seriousness in the music,” adds Ivar, “and I think that explains the contradiction with how he was when people met him, to how he was in the media. I think he believed in it on some level, but I think it’s possible to want the world to burn and see everything stop, and then go home and wish the best for yourself, your family, your kids. I think it’s possible to have those two thoughts in your head at the same time. A lot of writers are fascinated with the ‘double life,’ a lot of writers write very extreme books and the thoughts the main characters have, these thoughts have to come from somewhere. Are you a homicidal maniac or sexual deviant yourself? A lot of people claim that everyone has these secret double lives to some extent and I think the only difference in the black metal scene was that these people chose to vocalize that double life.”

  18

  A FIST IN THE FACE OF CHRISTIANITY

  NORWAY PART II

  IT WAS IN 1992 that the events in Norway began to take a more sinister turn, and words began to be replaced by actions. Just as Euronymous appears to have gravitated toward more extreme tendencies after Dead entered the picture, so too did the introduction of another strong personality, Varg Vikernes, also known at that time as Count Grishnackh.

  Born with the name Kristian (later changed due to its religious connotations), Vikernes hailed from the city of Bergen on Norway’s west coast and was something of an outsider in the predominantly Oslo-based scene. Originally a member of death metal band Old Funeral, he had moved toward the black metal scene following the group’s dissolution. Like so many others, he had made some contact with the members of Mayhem prior to Dead’s death (in a bizarre twist, it was he who, as a Christmas gift, sent the shotgun shells Pelle would eventually use in his suicide), but it was only later that he really established himself among his peers.

  From interviews at the time, it’s clear that Euronymous was impressed by Vikernes, in whom he may have seen something of himself. Both men possessed a strong and individualistic musical vision, and Vikernes’ one-man outfit Burzum impressed Euronymous enough for him to not only sign the project to Deathlike Silence Productions, but also invite him to temporarily take over Mayhem’s bass duties in Necrobutcher’s absence. Just as importantly, Vikernes’ ambitions also went some way beyond music, and he seems to have been on a path similar to Euronymous’ in terms of his thinking, echoing a familiar sense of nihilism and misanthropy in interviews such as the one with Orcustus in which he memorably stated, “I use all my wisdom to spread evil and sorrow and hopefully death.”

  “I can understand that Øystein saw a protégé in him,” reflects Manheim. “He was very eager to play his music, was proud of finding him, was talking of this young guy who was a huge talent. I only met him a few times but I thought he was … just dumb. But he was young and I’m not sure if I mixed up ‘young’ and ‘dumb.’ He wanted to go into the image and did so with force—it looked real but this is a kid who really wanted to be a part of something, it wasn’t coming from him, it was he who dressed up into it. He found that in this scene he could be someone and he certainly was, and still is, so full respect to that, but at that point I just found it ridiculous.”

  Probably the two most important—but also highly volatile—figures in early nineties Norway: Euronymous and Varg Vikernes.

  In March 1992 Burzum’s debut was issued on Deathlike Silence, the second Norwegian black metal album to be released, after Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky. But as the black metal scene in Norway began to explode musically, so did the criminal activity associated with the movement. On June 6, 1992, Bergen’s Fantoft Stave Church, an impressive and historically significant twelfth-century building, was attacked by arsonists, the wooden structure soon giving way to the flames and burning to the ground. While Vikernes was never found guilty of the attack, his peers at the time have stated that he admitted to the arson, perhaps an unsurprising revelation given that a photo of the ruins were brazenly used on the cover of his second official release, Aske (meaning “Ashes”).

  The attack would be only one in a spate of church burnings throughout Norway, with around ten other churches targeted before the year was through. As it turned out, Vikernes would later be found guilty of playing a direct part in many of the attacks in 1992, including the one on Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo (burned in August), Skjold Church in Vindafjord (burned in September), and Åsane Church in Bergen (burned on Christmas Eve).

  “Actually we knew about this before it happened,” explains Snorre Ruch of the church burnings, “because Varg does not hold back on his stories. He likes to promote everything and himself and he had boasted to Euronymous that he was going to burn churches and Øystein boasted to me that there was this guy who was going to burn churches and I was like, [adopts disinterested voice] ‘Yeah, whatever.’ Then it happened and I was like ‘Oof… Yeah, whatever,’” he laughs. “Marius [Thorns/Arcturus] and me took some distance from that, we thought it was too silly, for us it was rebellious criminal fascination, especially with Varg, Øystein, and Bård.”

  Indeed, Vikernes was far from the only black metal musician and Helvete regular involved in the spree, though for the most part Euronymous himself had little to do with the actual attacks, something he later openly admitted—and defended—in Kerrang!

  “It would be very stupid if I did things myself—if I was caught the whole organization would collapse,” he explained. “I look after the economic side of things, and my record label provides the foundations. We have a group of militant people, taking care of things that need to be taken care of.”

  While he was perhaps exaggerating his own importance for dramatic effect, there’s no doubt that Euronymous played a major role in setting the scene for the culture of destruction taking place across Norway. The “militant people” he spoke of—along with some aware of but uninvolved in their activities—would become known as the Inner Circle, Black Circle, or Black Metal Mafia, though more recent statements from those involved highlight that this was not as formal or organized a group as such phrases might suggest. Nonetheless, black metal’s anti-Christian/Satanic ethos had, for the first time, been turned into significant direct action, and activities such as grave desecrations and church arson became relatively common.

  Pinning down exactly what inspired this situation isn’t easy, and it’s important to note that the majority of those involved came from untroubled middle-class backgrounds and weren’t involved in other illegal activity. With a few exceptions, drugs were only notable in the scene by their absence, and though drinking was popular with some, it was not widespread at that time. Some members of the circle, such as Mortiis and Vikernes, didn’t drink or use drugs, and the use of intoxicants was criticized by several bands in interviews. Though certainly not true today, the Norwegian scene of the period could actually be quite militant and ev
en puritanical, especially compared to most other youth music cultures, not least within metal itself.

  “We were pretty young and inexperienced at that stuff—drugs were totally alien to us and we drank only rarely,” recalls Mortiis. “During Emperor I just thought drunk people behaved like idiots and I wanted no part of it. In that sense, I was a lot smarter then than I am now! It appears to me that it’s harder to get hold of [drugs] in these parts than it would be in the U.S., the UK, or societies where drug use is more ingrained and maybe not quite as vilified as it is over here. I mean to us drugs was something you saw in movies, it was almost as if they didn’t really exist.”

  Because most members of the scene were from atheist families, this also wasn’t a case of oppressed youths rebelling against overly religious parents. That said, as previously noted, Christianity is a heavily integrated part of Norwegian society, and one has to opt out of the church, rather than choose to be a part of it—something that caused much resentment in the black metal community.

  For some within Norway’s black metal scene, anti-Christian sentiments were an expression of pagan or Viking ideals rather than (or sometimes as well as) Satanic ones. The not entirely inaccurate concept of Norway as a pagan land wrongly conquered by Christianity in centuries past became a popular one, and there’s no doubt that many participants did indeed see themselves as fighting an ideological battle.

  “We all hung out and talked about our hatred for Christianity and how to get the Viking religion back,” Samoth of Emperor (and session bassist on Burzum’s Aske) later commented in Spin while serving time for his part in the arson of the Skjold church.

  “I have always been fascinated by the Viking culture and myths, and also consider it a part of my Norwegian heritage,” explains Samoth today. “I’m however not [personally] connected to it in any ‘religious’ way, like some Asatru groups. It’s just something that is naturally there, and I like the nature aspect of it. Norway used to be a pagan land, but has, as so many other countries, been corrupted by the Christian dogma. This feeling was very strong back in the nineties and there was an urge to make a strong statement about it.”