“We were influenced by Extreme Noise Terror, Heresy and Napalm Death,” says Klopf, a native of Klagenfurt, located about 500 miles from Vienna. “But I’d say [we were influenced] mainly by Repulsion, old Master, Slaughter, Massacre, and a lot of old Voivod.”
“More and more friends got interested in these bands, and some other blokes started tape trading, and slowly, but somehow, a scene got under way,” says Wank. “Back then we used to listen to all these English grindcore bands, like Heresy, Ripcord, Concrete Sox, Doom—even from the older punk bands, like Chaos UK, but then early Earache stuff, of course. I played before in a band from ‘86 to ’87, and they already tried to sound like these bands, or at least use a couple of influences.”
In early 1988, Wank elected to combine those earlier grindcore influences with the death metal sounds emanating from the States in a new outfit he dubbed Pungent Stench. Equally important to the drummer was the band’s lyrical concept, which delved deep into taboos such as sadomasochism, albeit with a healthy dose of humor in the generally furrow-browed underground.
“If we write something with extreme content then it must be hilarious for ourselves,” Wank states. “If I have a good laugh when I finish something, then I think it’s perfect and we use it. I think it’s always been more serious in the States than it was in Europe for fans of death metal. It’s aggressive music and it makes people even more aggressive. People were very, very serious about the music in general, which is okay, but they shouldn’t take everything so serious.”
Not quite as seriously, however, as they took things in Communist Poland in the early 1980s, where a small but passionate underground was beginning to evolve. Finding money and personal liberties in the final years of Communist rule was difficult, but getting heavy metal records from behind the Iron Curtain was nearly impossible.
“The only source was friends who had families outside of Poland or the ‘black market,’ but it was very expensive,” says Piotr “Peter” Wiwczarek, who grew up in the city of Olsztyn, about a two-hour drive from Warsaw. “I usually traveled to Warsaw or Bialystok to tape some demos or vinyls. That was the only source for me. We would travel hours just to watch three Slayer tracks played from a videotape.”
Wiwczarek gravitated toward the aggressive metallic sounds of Slayer and Dark Angel, but identified equally with the political stance taken by English punk bands like The Exploited and Antisect. Such interest eventually led the guitarist to form his first band, Vader, in 1983.
“It was a metal band, but not death metal,” says Wiwczarek of Vader. “There was nothing like this at that time. We were among those who started extreme metal in our country, I guess. Some people were in shock [over what we were doing]. We were wearing pretty heavy armor, like spikes, chains and leather. For many, it was just funny, but the newborn metal generation loved that. Then we called Vader ‘thrash black,’ and that was extreme.”
Communist metal wasn’t limited to Poland, of course. Still under the strict rule of the Soviet Union, aspiring musicians in the country that was then known as Czechoslovakia had little opportunity to assemble any kind of rock band, much less some form of extreme metal.
“Our kind of music was a little forbidden, because the government felt that this kind of music is something from the west side of Europe, and they didn’t like that,” says Christopher Krabathor, a native of the South Moravia section of the country. “Not so many bands from the past here still exist, and if they do they just play in [what’s now the] Czech Republic and Slovakia. They rarely get to play their music in foreign countries.”
Krabathor, who adopted his surname from the metal band he founded in 1984, had nearly as much difficulty finding suitable musicians for such metal bands.
“We got lucky,” Krabathor explains. “We were three friends in the beginning that wanted to play the same kind of music—something hard. Of course, people started to get older and they developed some other hobbies, too. I’m the only one from the old lineup. We have had a lot of people in the band. I guess that from ex-members we would be able to do four or five bands.”
Vader seemingly had the opposite problem. “About 20 to 25 guys tried to play in Vader, but not too many knew what ‘metal’ meant,” says Wiwczarek. “We had to wait about two years to fill up the lineup, and we were a five-piece band then. By then, in ‘87, we were not the only band [in Poland] playing this kind of metal. The others were Imperator, Slashing Death—where we found our drummer Doc—Merciless Death and Dragon. But nobody else survived.
“That was a different world then,” Wiwczarek continues. “Shows, record stores, metal magazines, this was in short supply in our home country. But the passion was great—handmade t-shirts, self-painted patches. I remember, when Doc and I were in Stockholm, Sweden, and we got a chance to see a show with bands like Entombed, Carcass, Dismember—that was a real shock for both of us—so great! We only had one big metal festival in Poland once a year—Metalmania—and very few underground meetings.”
In Czechoslovakia, however, actual recording studios wouldn’t even accept the rapidly developing death metal sounds of Krabathor. The band managed to record a trio of demo tapes—Breath of Death, Total Destruction and Brutal Death—on a friend’s homemade mixing board in a small rehearsal room, but only after Christopher was forced by the government to enlist in the Czech army for 10 months and 22 days in 1989.
“I was supposed to be there two years, but after the regime fell I signed a paper and went home,” Krabathor states. “Instead, I had to go to the civil service for nine months. It was a bad break for the band—just wasted time. But we wouldn’t let any of that stop us.”
5
Success?
DESPITE THE DEPARTURES of both Justin Broadrick and Nick Bullen, Mick Harris was determined to keep Napalm Death alive. In search of a guitarist, Harris turned to another Mermaid regular, Shane Embury, who only a few months earlier had started his own high-velocity project with his friend Mitch Dickinson. From the remnants of thrash act Warhammer, the pair formed Unseen Terror with Embury not only playing drums but also writing a great deal of the music. After much deliberating, however, the young multi-instrumentalist turned down the invitation to join his favorite band.
“I totally chickened out,” Embury admits. “At first, I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do it.’ But then I just sat back and I didn’t say anything. It was approaching Christmas and I just went quiet on everybody. And they said, ‘Do you wanna do it?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t think I’m quite good enough to play guitar yet.’” Frank Healy was the next local musician drafted to be Napalm’s guitarist, but the union was both short-lived and unproductive. “We tried for like two or three months and he did two gigs with us—one at the Mermaid and one in Liverpool in front of Bill Steer and in front of Jeff Walker, who was singing with Electro Hippies at the time,” Harris says. “It was disastrous, fucking disastrous.”
“It was hysterical,” recalls Steer, an eyewitness at the Liverpool club called Planet X. “They played this gig, and of course they didn’t have a singer. A guy kept getting up and doing a little bit of vocal here and there, but it just wasn’t coming through the PA. I think that was Rich Militia who would later join Sore Throat. But all I knew was there was a guy getting up on stage, lurching out with the microphone and there was no sound coming out. It was in shambles, but it was just fun because I got a kick out of watching people play that fast. I remember later that night I was talking to Mick and saying, ‘Look, if you need a permanent guitarist, I’d be happy to do it.’ So I think that’s what started it off. He knew I was really into the band. I had met him before and he knew I was into the same kind of music. It was a big thing if you met somebody and they liked Death or Repulsion. You had a bond there straight away.”
“Bill was about to start University, and he simply said to his parents, ‘I wanna do this,’” Harris explains. “Basically the same as me. I had come out of a job and I didn’t wanna continue with catering or go through the whole c
hef thing, so I think it was the same with Bill. So he asked his parents and they said, ‘Well, look, the guy can come down here to practice.’ So that’s what we did. I taught myself—you’re gonna love this—how to play guitar. I got myself a guitar, took all the strings off but the E and the A string, taught myself how to tune the A and the E to a bar chord, got myself a distortion pedal, plugged it through the stereo, and that was it. I still have my fucking notation to this day. It was a simple thing—Bill would come over and he had it down in one fucking rehearsal. He had the A-side of Scum—the demo—for so long. He knew the songs back to front. I still have the rehearsal tape of me and Bill—a classic see-through TDK D-90. I still have got all of those from my tape-trading days. They were my preferred choice of tape. They were a good brand back then. And that was it—Bill was in.”
With the addition of Steer, a vocalist was the only missing piece from Harris’ ferocious puzzle. Coventry native Lee Dorrian was the next familiar face the drummer reached out to. Regularly promoting hardcore shows at a Coventry youth club called the Hand & Heart, Dorrian had booked Napalm Death several times over the previous year.
“Before I joined Napalm Death I must have seen them 50 or 60 times,” says Dorrian. “Whenever they would go in a van to a gig somewhere outside of town, I would always jump in the van and go with them. I was just a fan of theirs, really. Mick and Jim just asked me if I wanted to join, and I was like, ‘Well, yeah.’ I had no intention of ever being in a band in my life. I just always loved the music and the scene.
“In fact, the first ever show I did with Napalm Death, I was promoting the show myself,” he continues. “It was Antisect, Heresy, and Napalm Death opened. I remember one minute I was sitting at the door, the next minute I was on the stage, absolutely shitting myself, just staring at the ceiling and growling my head off.”
With Napalm Death successfully resuscitated, Harris elected to do double-time in another band, accepting the drummer position for punk grinders Extreme Noise Terror.
“The addition of Mick came about as a result of original drummer Pig Killer turning a tad, shall we say, prima donna-ish, on us,” says Extreme Noise Terror guitarist Pete Hurley. “He was seldom available to rehearse, let alone turn up to actually play gigs. He basically tried to hold us ransom, knowing that he would be hard to replace. Micky was a regular at the Mermaid and was a great drummer; unfortunately his personality was a different matter entirely.”
Though Hurley sometimes clashed with Harris, the newly instated drummer soon became good friends with ENT vocalist Phil Vane, who nicknamed Harris the “Human Tornado” due to his hyperactive behavior. Such enthusiasm propelled Harris to make the four-and-a-half-hour trip by train from Birmingham to ENT’s home base of Ipswich every other week.
“I used to wait for my unemployment check and buy my ticket,” says Harris. “It started off that they’d pay my fare and then every other week it got less and less and less. But it was good fun, too. And whatever time wasn’t spent with ENT at that point was spent with Napalm.”
The newly assembled Napalm Death lineup, however, imposed certain limitations on the band. Above all, it effectively ended Napalm’s days as the “house band” of the Mermaid.
“The way Mick put this band together, suddenly everybody was spread out,” Steer explains. “He and Jimmy were living in Birmingham, Coventry was where Lee lived, and I was still up north. In fact, I’m certain we didn’t do a gig together until we went to Europe.”
Undeterred by geographic difficulties, the drummer continued to move Napalm—both figuratively and literally—at an accelerated pace. In May, the quartet returned to Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham, where they had recorded just a few months prior, albeit with a much different lineup. Soon, however, their untried musical union faced another problem.
“Going into the studio, we hadn’t rehearsed,” says Harris. “Me and Bill had rehearsed. Jimmy knew the songs. Lee had only just finished writing some lyrics with Jimmy. So Lee brought all of these papers with him and wasn’t quite sure where to sing.”
“I had one rehearsal, and that was the night before we went in the studio, and I didn’t know what I was doing, really,” says Dorrian. “Mick had to cue me when it was time to come in and sing. I only kinda knew a few parts that I should have been doing on time and the rest was totally new to me.”
“We just blasted the B-side out in a one-night session,” states Harris. “Mitch [Dickinson] came along. Shane [Embury] came along and the Head of David guys came along. It was a confidence boost, because it was a few friends that had been into a studio—it certainly worked.”
Although copies had been widely circulated throughout the underground tape-trading network, Digby Pearson still possessed the master tapes from Napalm Death’s previous August recording session at Rich Bitch. When Justin Broadrick bequeathed him the recording in the fall of 1986, Pearson’s bedroom distribution center/flexi-disc label Earache Records was still not a suitable means to properly distribute the music.
“I kinda spent the first year of the label in 1986 doing nothing, really, apart from research,” says Pearson, who officially launched the Earache Records label at the age of 25. “Initially, it was a way to get off the dole in England. Back then, in the ‘80s, when you were unemployed in the UK, you had to go to visit the unemployment office every two weeks, and I didn’t fancy doing that. If you start a company, you get the same amount of money and you don’t have to visit the unemployment office every two weeks. You’re not unemployed anymore, so it’s a method for the government to reduce the jobless figures. It was called an ‘Enterprise Allowance Scheme.’ They didn’t care what business you did, as long as you did something, and that meant that you were no longer unemployed. And it was an excuse to say, ‘Wow, I’m a record company!’ But the truth is I had no plans, nothing really.”
By the time Napalm finished recording again, however, that had changed. Pearson had already released a pair of legitimate records—an album from speedy California thrashers The Accused called The Return of Martha Splatterhead, and a split LP with British speedsters Concrete Sox and Heresy—under the Earache banner. Perhaps even more importantly, he secured distribution for the fledgling label throughout the United Kingdom.
“Living in the UK was quite important because of the strong independent music scene here and, even better, the strong independent distribution sector, which didn’t exist until the punk explosion of the late ‘70s,” says Pearson. “A company called Rough Trade came out of a record shop in West London and was very important in the whole scheme of things. Basically, they started Rough Trade Distribution, which was an independent distribution company, and for the first time ever it was like you didn’t need to have major distribution in the UK to survive. So when I started my label there were people receptive to what you were doing. I mean, I was just some guy who wanted to put out an album by Napalm Death. Most people would be like, ‘Get out of here.’ But because of the history of the independent scene in the UK, it was actually no problem.
“I went to a company called Revolver,” he continues. “They were part of the Rough Trade family and not afraid of left-field music. That was such an important moment, because they accepted my label. I had no track record or anything, and they were like, ‘Yeah, sure, we’ll distribute your records.’ So I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve got distribution. Great!’”
In light of this development, Pearson was now the clear choice to release Napalm Death’s music. The band agreed to a deal with Earache to issue the August ‘86 Rich Bitch session featuring the Bullen/Broadrick/Harris lineup and the May ‘87 recording with the current incarnation of the band as one full-length LP. In June of 1987, Earache pressed and released 2,000 copies of Napalm Death’s debut album Scum stickered with the words, “Debut album by the undisputed World’s Fastest Band.”
“I remember going down to the plant the day the record was pressed so I could get the first copy of Scum that came off the press,” says Harris. “I was so excited and co
uldn’t wait to just see it, so I took the first copy out of the first box and still have it to this day.”
Almost immediately, Napalm embarked on their first genuine tour—a three-week European jaunt with Birmingham hardcore punkers Ripcord. By the time they returned to England in late July, bassist Jim Whiteley had grown disillusioned with what he believed was no longer a “level playing field” between the band’s members. “I felt that the wholesale personality shift that had taken over Mick Harris during this period was irreconcilable with any reasons that I could find for wanting to contribute my time and effort any further,” says Whiteley. “It felt like I was only there as a supplement to his band, even then only insomuch as I was capable of writing lyrics—though that didn’t stop him from copywriting some of them as his own later. I’ve heard the one about bands being democracies led by dictators. I decided enough was enough.”
“I can’t say I took control,” says Harris. “I felt some sort of responsibility that I just wanted to keep the whole thing together, but not as a leader, just keeping everything organized as far as rehearsals and shows and tours. Maybe that got to Jim, because he was a lot older and more educated.”
A few weeks later, Napalm’s outlook brightened. First, Whiteley was replaced by the once-reluctant guitarist Shane Embury on bass.
Perhaps even more importantly, the band was granted invaluable help from BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel. A national treasure in England, Peel, who was hired by the BBC in 1965, continually sought out and championed new music, helping to usher in the punk and new wave eras of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night, Peel willingly explored new directions and artists on his national radio program, helping break the careers of British pop luminaries like David Bowie and the Smiths in the process. A copy of Scum found its way onto Peel’s desk and, like every other recording the DJ received, he spun it.
Choosing Death Page 10