Choosing Death

by Albert Mudrian

  “I just thought that it was exciting and—obviously not a word the practitioners would like to see associated with this music—but I also thought it was fun,” says Peel, who was 48 years old when he first played Napalm Death across national airwaves. “I started going to gigs and so on, and I liked the fact that people would do eight-second-long numbers and people would be shouting ‘too long’ or ‘too slow!’ A lot of various forms of popular music, people were becoming incredibly po-faced about it and wanted to see it as kinda exam subject material, so I quite liked the slightly tongue-in-cheek aspect of it.”

  One song in particular captivated the DJ—the one-and-a-half-second “You Suffer,” which crammed the lyrics, “You suffer, but why?” into its brief eruption.

  “I remember I was at Jimmy’s on a Tuesday, and I was like, ‘I wonder if [Peel’s] gonna play it tonight?’” says Harris. “Then all of a sudden he put ‘You Suffer’ on and laughed, and he said, ‘No, that can’t be right?’ And then he put it on again, and we were laughing, saying, ‘He doesn’t get it.’ And then he played it a fucking third time. Then he plays ‘The Kill,’ and he played that twice, and I’ll never forget, he said, ‘I’ll have to play some more of that tomorrow.’ That was it. Obviously, students and other people who were listening to Peel as they did must have been assaulted and thought, ‘What the hell was that?’”

  “He played a couple of tracks and then he discovered ‘You Suffer,’” recalls Dorrian. “That lasted just over a second, and he played it forwards, backwards, on 45, on 33, and he just couldn’t believe the track.”

  Former Napalm Death guitarist Justin Broadrick was one of the many who heard Peel’s initial Napalm Death broadcast.

  “This is a day I’ll never forget in my whole fucking life,” he says. “I had just done a John Peel session—my first one ever—with Head of David, and we had come back home, and the following week it was on the radio. So I went to my friend’s house, and we all sat around and listened to this Head of David session. He played the first Head of David song and then after that he played Napalm Death, and it was one of my songs, a song I actually wrote. It was ‘The Kill.’ We just sat there in absolute disbelief, like, ‘Fucking John Peel is playing Napalm Death.’ And as soon as we heard it we were like, ‘What if Napalm Death becomes popular? ’”

  While their nation was still unsure what to make of Napalm Death, Peel clearly embraced them, inviting the foursome for their own Peel session on September 13th, 1987.

  “It was fucking mental,” says Harris. “We had no gear for the session. I still wasn’t practicing. We just got together when it was time to do a record, because Shane and me were writing the material. Bill wasn’t coming to Birmingham. I was going down there, and then finally Bill’s parents were allowing him to come down. They used to drive him to Birmingham to my parents’ house. He’d stop at my house, we’d have two rehearsals and then he’d go back home, and that was it. But we still managed to pull the session off.”

  The 12 tracks Napalm performed that day were, in fact, the most spectacularly fast things the band had recorded to that point. Within a matter of weeks of the broadcast, Earache was forced to re-press Scum to support the growing demand for the band’s music. Out of morbid curiosity or genuine admiration, people were purchasing Scum, with sales even pushing the record as high as the eighth position on the UK independent charts. Just six months later, in March of 1988, Napalm Death were invited back to perform a second session on Peel’s radio show.

  “I was fucking stunned,” says Broadrick of Napalm’s growing countrywide reputation. “I really couldn’t believe that this album that I just gave away one day without a due concern was now lauded as some fantastic novelty record. And for the first six months, regardless of how popular it was, it did appear that that would be it. You didn’t think for a moment that this would grow into a big worldwide scene. Still, the network had gone past all of the early tape trading—this was serious now.”

  “It got to a stage where you’d have John Peel at night taking the band quite seriously, although it seemed a bit extreme and all that,” says Dorrian. “But in the afternoon there was a guy called Steven Wright. He’s a real prick DJ and he used to do a quiz, and if you got a question wrong you’d have to be subjected to hearing Napalm Death. So on the one side you kinda had people getting what it was about, and on the other side you had people that just thought it was a silly joke.”

  “Wright saw it is as a joke, which I always thought was deeply insulting,” says Peel. “But there was nothing you could do about it apart from kill him, and that seemed to be rather extreme. But he now works on Radio 2, which is the kind of the middle-of-the-road station, which is almost comparable to death.”

  As the press discovered Napalm Death, the spotlight inevitably shined on the Earache record label as well. Pearson understood he needed to keep the releases coming. Fortunately, in his search for talent, he didn’t need to look beyond Napalm. Pearson signed Shane Embury’s pre-Napalm outfit, Unseen Terror, who entered Rich Bitch in September ‘87 and recorded their Human Error debut. The label chief was also keenly aware of guitarist Bill Steer’s other band, the blisteringly fast death metal act Carcass. In 1985, Steer, then 15 years old, started an embryonic version of the band with drummer and fellow Wirral native Ken Owen, also 15.

  “There was the pair of us and a couple of school friends, and we decided to form a band,” Steer explains. “We were really into Slayer, and stuff like that, so I think we maybe had two or three rehearsals, and that was it. The name of the band was Carcass, that was what I came up with and, then that band disappeared. And then a year or so later, I was playing with these other people, these sorta punk guys.”

  By then, it was early 1987, and Lancashire local Jeff Walker had just been dismissed from Liverpool Anarcho punks Electro Hippies.

  “We did a gig up north in Lancashire, and we were driving back and they just dropped me off there in the middle of nowhere,” recalls Walker of his former bandmates. “And even though it was the drummer’s band, Bruno, the bass player was leaving and I think he was just put up to say, ‘We don’t want you in the band anymore.’ The reasons were pretty wishy-washy—they didn’t feel I was contributing enough financially or whatever, but it turned out for the best. They did me a favor.”

  “Jeff then drifted into our band,” says Steer. “Then I persuaded the rest of the group to change the name to Carcass. And then once Jeff was on board, I felt like there was a kindred spirit there, and he just said to me, ‘C’mon, it’s not gonna happen with these guys. If you’re listening to Master or Repulsion, it’s not gonna really sound like that because they don’t play that way.’ So then when we needed new members I thought about Ken again, because, by this point, Ken had a drum kit. The year before, he didn’t.”

  In the summer of ‘87, with Owen in tow, the group enlisted the mysterious Liverpool native Sanjiv to provide vocals for the group’s Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment demo.

  “I doubt that anyone ever knew his last name,” says Walker of Sanjiv. “He was a strange character. He was a bit older than everyone else. When we were turning 20 he was like mid-to-late 20s and would walk around with Siege written on his hand in marker. He was an adult, and he’d get up in the morning and the first thing he would do was write Siege or Deep Wound on the back of his hand.”

  Sanjiv only performed a single show with the band before Walker and Steer assumed the vocals, adding them to their respective bass and guitar duties. Then based on their very first demo, Pearson handed Carcass a recording contract.

  “Of course, at the time, Carcass really had nothing happening for us,” says Steer. “The best thing we could do would be to play a Liverpool club called Planet X, so we’d do little bits and pieces there. So people didn’t even know about the band until Dig offered us an album deal, and that happened really quickly; in retrospect, almost too quickly, because we just weren’t ready, but we still got 22 songs together.”

  “Ken wrote some of th
e first songs and Bill started writing some, and I remember I was probably up my own ass at the time thinking we should have been singing something more serious, but I saw the lyric sheet and it suddenly clicked with me,” says Walker. “On the surface, it was all these death metal lyrics and it was clichéd, but it was funny, and I suddenly just stopped being a miserable bastard and wised up to the fact that you don’t have to be serious all time with the lyrics. So it was me that went overboard writing lyrics. I took out my sister’s nurse’s dictionary—she was just a student nurse at the time—and that’s how the whole technical aspect came about. The whole medical thing was down to just that my sister had a medical dictionary in my parents’ house, so I just applied that. I just tried to bring a whole new angle to the thing that Death and Repulsion were doing, just tried to make it more—intellectual is the wrong word—but more kind of professional? I don’t know. More scientific, I guess, rather than just it being slasher/horror, I’m-gonna-kill-you stuff.”

  In December of ‘87, the band entered the increasingly occupied Rich Bitch to record their debut album with engineer Mike Ivory.

  “The first album was really a three-way thing,” Walker explains. “Ken wrote a lot of stuff, Bill did and I did. But I never wanted to be the singer, especially after being in the Electro Hippies. I remember we were on the train going up to Birmingham to do the vocals [for the first album], and we had just kind of kicked Sanjiv out. So we just sat on the train and ironed stuff out like, ‘You do this. You do that. I’ll do that.’ And we all took a share of it.”

  Unhappy with the session’s results, the trio remixed the album several times over the next few months before it was eventually released as Reek of Putrefaction in June of 1988.

  “That record does sound kind of chaotic, but believe me, it could have been even worse,” says Steer. “I think [Ivory] was even trying to persuade Ken to use Simmons drum pads or something bizarre at one point, because—you have to understand at that time, you’d go into the studio and the engineer wouldn’t have any clue about what music you were playing. They had no reference point. Some of these people had never even recorded a standard heavy metal or punk band before.”

  “We did the album in a day, and the guy who was engineering it really messed it up,” concurs Walker. “But I like the way it sounds now, in retrospect. At the time, we were like pretty upset to where we walked out. It just sounded shitty to us. But that’s part of the attraction—because it just sounds so raw.”

  As he’d before with Napalm Death, Peel was immediately taken with Reek and added Carcass to his growing playlist of extreme British bands, that now included Napalm, Extreme Noise Terror, Bolt Thrower, Unseen Terror, as well as a pair of acts—Doom and Jeff Walker’s old band the Electro Hippies—from the Dewsbury-based Peaceville Records, which was initially established in 1981 as a “cassette label.”

  “I did 51 cassettes,” recalls Hammy, Peaceville’s singular-named, enigmatic founder. “That’s really only getting a bedroom recording from a band and making it available by duplicating cassettes. It really wasn’t a big production, very lowkey—never had any money or anything. I was totally sold on that and loved anarcho-punk and all of the grindy, crusty life. But that was the start of the Peaceville proper, and then shortly after that we signed Electro Hippies and Doom.

  “These were Peaceville’s second and fourth ‘real’ albums that Peel was playing, and they sold like 6,000 copies each in the first week,” Hammy continues. “John Peel gave them both a session, so he was playing them constantly on national radio. They became hip to mention in the media and things like that, and Peaceville had instantly become totally successful.”

  The success afforded Peaceville immediate growth, allowing Hammy to sign Norwegian avant-garde death metallers Darkthrone along with the California-based Autopsy, featuring former Death drummer Chris Reifert.

  “I think they just wrote us a letter,” recalls Reifert. “The first offer we got was from some label that sent us a couple copies of some records they just put out, and they just looked like a 3rd grader put them out. Even we, who were like stupid teenagers, were like, ‘No way.’ So the second offer, which we didn’t know anything about, was Peaceville, and we said, ‘Okay, contract, let’s sign it.’ And we’d never heard of Peaceville because they were so new and they hadn’t done much yet, but it just seemed cool. Later I found out Peaceville wanted us because Jeff Walker from Carcass played our demo for Hammy.”

  However, it wasn’t Walker’s A&R skills, but rather his work with Carcass that continued to bring him attention from John Peel. The DJ even declared Carcass’ Reek of Putrefaction debut as his favorite album of 1988 in the English newspaper The Observer.

  “Maybe John Peel made it seem more pretentious than three kids in a crazy cheap studio in Birmingham making a racket with bad production,” says Walker. “Regardless, he made it more palatable when he gave it the seal of approval.”

  Part of the attraction for Peel was Reek’s stunningly graphic cover art. In fact, this collage of grisly autopsy photos collected from medical journals proved to be an appropriate jacket for songs like “Oxidised Razor Masticator,” “Manifestation of Verrucose Urethra,” and “Vomited Anal Tract.”

  Another Reek number, “Microwaved Uterogestation,” best exemplified the band’s over-the-top lyrical approach, featuring the memorable couplet of “Formentatious perflation hydrogenates your foetal cisterna/ Coagulating haemorrhage and your congenital hernia.”

  “I guess we just wanted to cause some friction,” says Steer. “Part of it was that teenage thing where it’s fun to offend, but there was also this streak of humor running through it. If it was just some brain-dead guys going on about raiding graves or something, that would have been one thing, but when we threw in these other elements it suddenly became something else.”

  For Carcass that angle was vegetarianism. Although their implication that animal and human meat were one and the same was often clouded amid the gore of their album artwork, Steer and Walker were both devout vegans, while Owen was a vegetarian.

  “At the time we were really hardcore about that,” Steer explains. “That was what we were really into and we couldn’t see any other way to live, so that was all wrapped in the whole package.”

  If Carcass was making rumblings in the underground, then the buzz on Napalm Death was louder than a Harris blast beat. Early in the summer of 1988, Napalm reconvened to record their sophomore album, traveling to Birdsong Studios in Worcester with house engineer Steve Bird. They even rehearsed twice this time before the sessions, allowing for a smoother recording.

  “When we were actually recording the album, it just felt a lot more together and a lot more precise,” says Dorrian. “I just remember thinking things like, ‘We really gotta make this as extreme as we possibly can, but it’s also gotta be a bit more rounded.’”

  When the resulting From Enslavement to Obliteration was released in September of 1988, the group knew they had written a better, more cohesive record than their debut. That, however, didn’t prepare them for the attention that ensued.

  “Napalm knocked fucking Sonic Youth out of the number one position in the independent charts with Enslavement, which sold, straight away, something like 35,000,” recalls Harris. “I couldn’t believe it.”

  The record’s success was aided by the ever capricious British press, who granted the band extensive coverage in Melody Maker, Sounds, and also awarded them a cover story in a November edition of New Music Express. Steven Wells, the author of the NME cover piece, even said of the band, “This is not the ‘next stage’ of rock n’ roll, this is its grave digger… This is the music metal and punk hinted at. This is the music for which Jerry Lee, The Who, ‘Helter Skelter,’ The Ramones, Damned, Pistols, Northern Soul, Speed Metal and Speed Core were just practice.”

  Other British journalists even attempted to christen the band’s extreme approach with the term “Britcore.”

  “The reason FETO outsold Scum was obviously
because it was a second album and its popularity had grown, but also Earache as a label had gotten its act together better,” says Pearson. “We knew how to put out a CD, for instance, and make that eligible for the independent charts. That chart is actually quite central to the whole growth, because suddenly these bands were in people’s faces and they started going, ‘What’s this grindcore stuff? Who’s this crazy band that are above Sonic Youth and Pop Will Eat Itself?’”

  “At that time, when NME were covering Napalm, I think people actually loved the fact that we were working-class kids,” says Dorrian. “All the music that was trendy was a bit dippy University student and Happy Mondays indie kind of stuff. And we really just didn’t give a fuck.”

  “I guess it’s easier to achieve that notoriety in a smaller country,” Steer offers. “But Napalm was in a fantastic position, of course, because the band was placed right in between all of these things that happened at once. Looking at it worldwide, there was the underground death metal thing, the underground hardcore thing and the merging of those two scenes, so Napalm was in exactly the right place for that, because nobody could really pin down which side of the fence the band was on.”

  The attention helped make Napalm Death the hot ticket in town, eventually enabling the band to draw over 1,000 concertgoers at a London show in late 1988.

  “It was very mixed,” Dorrian says of the Napalm audience at the time. “It was indie kids, school teachers, there were one or two metallers, but not so many, a lot of punks as well—it was just very diverse. I think it was a special time in music in England, because at that time, Britcore, or whatever you wanna call it, although it was an underground kind of music, it was very kind of anti-establishment and it did join a lot of people from different backgrounds together. It was just pretty diverse times.”