An amazing singer, her voice, her range... not that I stand up for the viewpoints on their Witchcraft record, which was like good old Christian Satanism. But they had something about them that I liked...10
ENTER THE BLACK POPE
As integral to Satanic popular culture as any of the aforementioned music groups was Anton Szandor LaVey himself. Following years of observing the seamier folds of life as a carny, police photographer, burlesque organ accompanist, and occultist, LaVey made headlines when he founded the first official Church of Satan on the dark evening of Walpurgisnacht, April 30, 1966. The fundamentals of the Church were based not on shallow blasphemy, but opposition to herd mentality and dedication to a Nietzschean ethic of the anti-egalitarian development of man as a veritable god on earth, freed from the chains of Christian morality. LaVey’s Church was tailor-made for unending media attention, which soon made it a household word around the globe. In 1968 he released a Satanic Mass LP, which also broadcast a “Black Mass” from its grooves. Not centered on the medieval imagery found on the Coven album, it functioned instead as an exercise in the rejection of Christian doctrine. LaVey explains:
I don’t think it was originally released as propaganda, but rather to set the record straight as to what a Satanic Mass is, opposed to a Black Mass, the latter of course just an inversion of a Christian rite. It was also an opportunity to reach a certain element at that time. There was no such forum for performance art at that time. The recording was done live with different tracks—it was recorded as performed. But I guess you could say it turned out to be propaganda ... it was subsequently distributed by Lyle Stuart [the publisher] and Howard Hughes funded some of that. He was quite sympathetic to what we were doing.11
ANTON LAVEY
Looking back today on the relevance and influence of the Satanic Mass, LaVey notes, “I can see and appreciate it more than I could for years. For awhile I thought of it just as a documentary, similar to the LPs that came out in the early ’70s like The Occult Experience. But now I realize it was a first for the kind of visuals which you’re seeing all over today. It really was twenty years ahead of its time in many respects.”12 Following the “mass” ceremony, the B-side of the album also contained a number of Satanic declarations by LaVey, recited over the strains of Wagner and other bombastic scores. These texts were gleanings from LaVey’s essays that would later form the framework of his infamous book the Satanic Bible which appeared in 1969. The only openly Satanic manual of thought to be widely distributed to the masses, it is impossible to accurately gauge the impact LaVey’s book has had on society since its appearance almost thirty years ago. Readily obtainable, the book inevitably influenced the more prominent Rock musicians exploring themes of demonism and the occult in their personas, songs, and stage shows. In the heyday of such experimentation, a bizarre LP of entirely electronic synthesizer pieces devoted to the Devil even surfaced in 1971 on MCA Records, entitled Black Mass Lucifer. By the end of the ’70s only a few of the major Metal acts were paying homage to sinister forces, and this was usually done superficially or with tongue in cheek, as on Sabbath albums like We Sold Our Souls for Rock and Roll, and AC-DC’s Highway to Hell. But it was LaVey’s Satanic Bible that ensured the Devil a permanent place on hundreds of thousands of bookshelves the world over. With a decade of mainstream coverage for Satanism as a religion, and many of Hollywood’s rich and famous converting to the new creed, others would be quick to follow.
BLACK MASS LUCIFER LOGO
THE NEW WAVE OF BLASPHEMY
The most discernible roots of the modern wave of Black Metal arising in Norway and elsewhere in the beginning of the 1990s can be clearly seen in the pioneers ten years earlier—Venom, Mercyful Fate, and Bathory. In tracing this lineage we have already stepped onto subjective territory, and others would argue for the inclusion of Slayer, Hellhammer, and Sodom alongside the above triumvirate. These bands made their undeniable mark as well, and will be noted in the next chapter. But by dint of chronology and primary impact both in terms of music, appearance, and philosophy, our focus concentrates on the former three.
THE UNHOLY TRINITY: VENOM
Venom began in 1979–80 in Newcastle, England, the result of three Metal fans and musicians deciding to take things one step further than their contemporaries. Even their mortal names were not intimidating enough to reveal, thus Conrad Lant, Jeff Dunn, and Tony Bray respectively adopted the more evil-sounding noms de guerre of Cronos, Mantas, and Abaddon. Their music was to be as over-the-top as their stage names, with equally abnormal lyrical content. Their beginnings and influences go straight back to the earliest Heavy Metal bands such as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, as Abaddon explains:
I was about nineteen. We were all into the older stuff—Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Motorhead, Black Sabbath. Mantas has always been a huge Kiss fan. We were drawing inspiration from these bands. We’d take some of the diabolical content of Black Sabbath and we’d mix it with some of the stage presence of Kiss, and with the originality of Deep Purple. That’s where we got Venom from. Venom was never meant to be a blacker Iron Maiden or anything, it was really based on older bands and what little pieces of those bands we wanted to emulate.13
Venom took the heaviness and dark mysticism of these progenitors and gave it their own youthful punch-in-the-face to bring it up-to-date, as by this time the original Metal bands had settled into lavish lifestyles resulting from their success, losing most of the rawness that had once made them exciting. On close analysis, Venom was still playing fast Blues-based Rock, but with the primitive aggression which at that time was generally considered the property of the Punk bands. “Our music was born on the back of the Punk explosion in England,” states Abaddon, “if you drew back Venom’s influences I guess you’d find bands like Deep Purple and the Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.”14 Thus it was not surprising that an array of their early fans were drawn from areas beyond the standard Metal crowd (many of whom considered Venom pointlessly offensive and untalented noise-makers). Abaddon remembers:
We played to skinheads and punks and hairies—everybody. Where some guy with long hair couldn’t come into a Punk gig, all of the sudden it was really cool to go to a Venom gig for anybody. That’s why the audience grew really quick and became very strong; they were always religiously behind Venom and they’ve always stayed the same.15
VENOM
CRONOS OF VENOM
In America indeed a large percentage of Venom’s early fans came out of the nascent Hardcore Punk scene which was gathering momentum contemporaneously with the release of the band’s first singles. Old Venom standards like “Die Hard” echo the caustic, violent sound of early ’80s Black Flag more than any of the band’s fellow English Metal acts, although if you discount the low-fi recording, overly distorted guitars, and barked vocals of Cronos, one realizes Venom is arguably not much more than classic Sabbath warp-speeded to 78 rpm.
Besides pioneering a dirtier sound than any other extant Punk or Metal band in Europe, Venom’s notoriety was doubly assured with their elaborate endorsement of Satanism to a degree which would have caused wet dreams for medieval inquisitors. Given the level of blasphemy they made their trademark, it is not surprising the band could be embraced as panacea for the soul by kids brought up in stifling Christian environments, and looking for any possible way out. Whether or not Venom’s members really practiced such rites in private was altogether irrelevant for listeners who could revel in the statements found on their album sleeves:We drink the vomit of the priest
Make love with the dying whore
We suck the blood of the beast
And hold the key to death’s door16
Such polemics struck a chord with their fans, and the vintage Venom albums Welcome to Hell (1981), Black Metal (1982), and At War with Satan (1983) have gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies over the years. With the title of their second album, Black Metal, a future style of Satanic music had found a name. The record also carved in stone some of
the genre’s essential features. Primary among these would be an open policy of violent opposition to Judeo-Christianity, endless blasphemy, and the abandonment of all subtlety in favor of grandiose theater which teetered over an abyss of kitsch and self-caricature. The magnitude of Venom’s overwrought image was tempered considerably by some of the songs which wound up on their early LPs. Despite the Satanic trappings, they were still a Rock band after all, and numbers like “Teacher’s Pet,” “Angel Dust,” and “Red Light Fever” are little more than shockingly low-brow paeans to sex, drugs, and cheap thrills.
MANTAS OF VENOM
Early interviews with the members of Venom make it clear they themselves were beer-swilling Rock and Rollers out to have a good time. The Satanism projected in their presentation and lyrics was primarily an image they stumbled upon, guaranteed to assure them attention and notoriety. There is no real philosophy behind it, beyond the juvenile rebellion of presenting anti-Christian blasphemy in the most lurid manner one’s imagination can muster. Abaddon’s reply to the question of whether he considers himself a Satanist is honest, but at the same time demonstrates it was probably never a real concern for him:
I certainly have in the past. I haven’t spent a lot time on any one religion for quite a few years. It’s something that I’m getting back towards, and I get a lot from people like LaVey. I’m a firm believer in all religions. Religion has become money now, and it’s a very dangerous area because people can become very persuasive. We’ve always tried to make Venom as powerful and as loud and unmissable as we possibly can, but without preaching to people. We’re very conscious about that. All the fans are called Legions and we are at their behest, but we don’t want to preach. It’s quite a difficult thing. We don’t want to be seen as some kind of organized religion whereby you have to buy the T-shirt or the album to keep funding the thing that is Venom. If you don’t want to listen to Venom anymore, so be it.17
In a 1985 Kerrang! interview, Cronos was even more blunt: “Look, I don’t preach Satanism, occultism, witchcraft, or anything. Rock and Roll is basically entertainment and that’s as far as it goes.”18 If one were to reduce Satanism simply down to the credo of “doing your own thing,” then Venom may be “Satanists”—but by that criterion the Beach Boys probably are as well. After At War with Satan Venom diluted much of its image, and personnel changes wrought havoc on the integrity of their later recordings. Still, the band’s vintage albums had caught the ears of thousands of feisty kids, and their (fabricated) image as vehement desecrators of the holy set the stage for the next generation to carry the newly lit Black Metal torch forward.
A MERCYFUL KING
The bands from the early 1980s who would have the most profound influence on the development of Black Metal as a genre have all on occasion acknowledged their familiarity with LaVey’s Satanic Bible, and in the case of King Diamond and his band Mercyful Fate, it served as powerful inspiration. After stumbling across it in an occult bookstore, Diamond recalls:
I read the book and thought, hey, this is the way I live my life—this is the way I feel inside! It’s not like it was a major religion or anything like that, it was a lifestyle that I could relate to 500%. And it’s just nice to see your own views and thoughts in words, in a book. It comforts you in some way. And that is how I felt. ... and you’ll see it reflected in our early lyrics with King Diamond and Mercyful Fate. I used the word Satan at that time, and it had a very specific meaning for me—not the one that other people had.19
Drawing musical influences from the godfathers of Heavy Metal such as Sabbath and Deep Purple, combined with King Diamond’s trademark operatic vocals, Mercyful Fate debuted with an eponymous mini-LP in 1982 which featured the anthem “Nuns Have No Fun.” This was followed by two more advanced albums, Melissa (1983) and Don’t Break the Oath (1984), brimming with stories of magical rites, nightmarish fantasies of the consequences of broken pacts, and declarations of Satanic allegiance: “If you say Heaven, I say a Castle of Lies / You say forgive him, I say revenge / My sweet Satan, You are the One.”20
MERCYFUL FATE’S KING DIAMOND
Adding a cleverly conceived stage presence, King Diamond sang out such blasphemous provocations under a mask of theatrically sinister black-and-white face paint, his microphone lashed onto a cross fashioned of two human legbones. In many respects the records of Mercyful Fate would exert the same influence on their fans that groups such as Black Sabbath had commanded on Diamond’s own musical beginnings. Diamond received occasional tabloid attention and much criticism for his promotion of evil subjects through his music, but he was always willing to declare his personal dedication to the LaVeyan brand of Satanism. He points out that the outlandish and gruesome imagery in some of his lyrics was nothing to be taken seriously:
I make pretty sure that nobody can come and say, hey, you are trying to influence people into doing this or doing that, or you want to convert people and so on. No way. I raise a lot of questions, definitely. But I try not to give—in straight words—an answer of what I feel about it... You’ll never see me doing things like that. People have got to make up their own minds. And if people are not interested in getting anything deeper out of words on an album, that’s fine too. We are entertainers—we’re not priests. I have my way of life and of course that will influence my music and my lyrics. I put all my feelings into both.21
MERCYFUL FATE
Diamond represents one of the only performers of the ’80s Satanic Metal who was more than just a poseur using a devilish image for shock value. Between his openness about his personal commitments and the masked theater of his stage persona, his influence would be apparent when Black Metal was resuscitated with new blood in 1990–91. It’s difficult to imagine King Diamond causing anyone to commit atrocities in emulation of his down-to-earth philosophy. The required stimulus would come in the more overt blasphemies of bands who pushed the themes to further extremes, and provided a vastly more volatile cocktail for teenage fans to imbibe.
THUNDER GODS: BATHORY
The Swedish group Bathory, along with Venom, are torch bearers in the evolution of modern Black Metal. Bathory takes its name from the “Blood Countess” Erzebet Bathory, a Hungarian noblewoman in the 1700s put on trial for the murder of hundreds of young girls, in whose blood she alleged bathed to maintain her youthful beauty. It is highly probable that an early Venom number, “Countess Bathory” on the Black Metal album, may have provided the direct inspiration for the name, as Bathory owes much of its initial sound and look to the English founders of Black Metal. The driving force behind the group is a man who uses the stage name of Quorthon (although, in point of fact, Bathory have never in their career played a live concert before the public). He describes the band’s first efforts:
At that time I must have been 15, and I was helping a record company out with listening to new bands because there was some kind of Metal wave going on, I believe due to the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal.” At that time I found out they were going to put together a Metal compilation album with five or six Swedish bands, and I asked, “Please can you listen to my band, because we play a really exciting type of new Heavy Metal.” That was January, 1984.
BATHORY’S FIRST ALBUM
I never thought we’d be able to enter a studio again after that because we were really dirty sounding. But it turned out that 85-90% of all the fan mail that came to the record company from that record [the compilation was titled Scandinavian Metal Attack] was about our songs. So the guy from the record company called me up and said, “Hey, you really need to put your band together again and write some songs, because you have a full-length album to record this summer.”
BATHORY GO VIKING
I thought we’d be selling two or three thousand copies; that album is still selling like crazy nine years later. I’m still really amazed about it, especially since when it was recorded it cost me about two hundred dollars and was recorded in fifty-six hours in a twelve-track demo studio south of Stockholm. From then on we jus
t recorded every album on more or less “borrowed time” because we didn’t really have any ambitions whatsoever, up until Important Records asked us to come over and do some kind of tour together with Celtic Frost and Destruction in the summer of ’86. While all this was happening I of course didn’t have a line-up together because, if you know anything about Swedish music at that time, the musicians were bound to look like the band Europe [an effeminate Hard Rock band popular in the mid-80s]! So when I’d drag a drummer down to my rehearsal place and play him the first record of Bathory, he’d go, “Oh no, oh no!” There just wasn’t any atmosphere or tradition for Death Metal at that time, as there is today. ... Everybody seems to think that I’m a megalomaniac with a big head or something, but it wasn’t really my fault—I should have been born in some place like San Francisco or London where I would have had a real easy time putting this band together.22
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