Venom’s influence on black metal can’t be underestimated, but the band’s sound is light-years away from that of the most revered black metal bands, including Burzum, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Emperor, and Immortal. Three other early European bands had a far greater impact on the sonic development of the genre: Hellhammer was a sloppy Swiss group that existed from 1982 to 1984 before changing its name to Celtic Frost and recording far more experimental and majestic compositions. Bathory was a Swedish outfit that launched in 1983 and recorded three Satanic, extreme thrash records, then shifted gears in the late eighties, embracing Viking themes and epic arrangements. And Mercyful Fate was an accomplished New Wave of British Heavy Metal–style band from Denmark whose front man, King Diamond, wrote Satanic lyrics and wore face paint, which he punctuated with an inverted cross on his forehead.
THOMAS GABRIEL FISCHER (Triptykon, ex–Celtic Frost, ex-Hellhammer): Hellhammer started as a clone of Venom. The first songs we wrote were complete copies of Venom material, including the Satanic lyrics. Then in the final month of Hellhammer, we reached a stage where we were good enough to write our own material. The lyrics became more dignified and dealt with occultism in a historical manner, a researching manner, not a Satanic manner. That’s really when we became our own band. When Hellhammer existed, the band was ripped apart by everybody—fans, media, record companies. Ninety-five percent of all of the reviews of the demos and [1984] EP [Apocalyptic Raids] were obliterating. The words journalists found to destroy Hellhammer are beyond belief. Nobody understood what Hellhammer was doing at the time. The myth of Hellhammer only happened later, after the band was gone.
THOMAS “QUORTHON” FORSBERG (1966–2004) (Bathory): I went to London with a friend about a year prior to forming Bathory. In the London Dungeon—a sort of wax museum of horror—there was [a] display built to resemble a medieval chamber. In the middle of the room, reclined in a bathtub filled with blood, we spotted this naked female figure. Above the tub, three or four also naked female figures were hanging upside down suspended in chains, throats cut and blood flowing. After finding out the woman in the tub’s name was Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a sixteenth-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer who bathed in the blood of female virgins in an effort to retain her youthful looks, I realized her life story was as close to a Bathory lyric as can be; the name was, of course, perfect for the band. As for my name, Quorthon, during the winter of 1983, I was reading this book on Satanic rituals and there were a bunch of names of dark princes banished from Heaven and now in the service of Satan. These guys were supposedly supreme princes of darkness and evil, destined to fight at Lord Satan’s side in the final battle between the forces of light and dark. I stopped at one name and felt instinctively that this was it: Quorthon.
KJETIL-VIDAR “FROST” HARALDSTAD (Satyricon): When I was thirteen, I lived in the countryside, so I had to travel quite a distance to get to town and buy albums, and the first one I bought was the first Bathory album. I remember I was drawing the goat on the front cover and the pentagram on the back of the cover, and then I’d turn off the lights and turn on the album, and I was never the same after that experience. That was the first time I got a connection with something deeper and darker in music.
QUORTHON: All I knew about metal when I started Bathory in 1983 was Motörhead and Black Sabbath. But I knew that what I wanted to do sure as hell was a lot closer to metal than Oi! [punk]. So the little metal I knew became all the more important for the sound of early Bathory. The energy and speed was obviously Oi!, but the sound was absolutely Motörhead, and the gloom was, of course, Black Sabbath.
IHSAHN: Even though Venom invented the term black metal, not much black metal sounds like Venom. At the time, no bands really sounded like Celtic Frost either, even though they had the same image and were a hugely respected band from having influenced the scene when they called themselves Hellhammer. But the vocals and epic style of black metal with keyboards originated from Bathory. I have only one idol when it comes to black metal vocals and that’s Quorthon. That’s the only reference I need.
QUORTHON: My vocal style at the time must have been something nobody had ever heard before. It was once described as reminiscent of a dog choking to death on a goat’s head.
PER YNGVE “DEAD” OHLIN (1969–1991) (ex-Mayhem): Why is Quorthon talked about so often? I don’t think he invented occultism or the death way of singing. I can listen to the early stuff by Bathory, only, like, the first LP. Later he lost all that ability to crush and kill.
QUORTHON: The fanzines and magazines back in the early eighties had a field day reviewing our first album. The only thing that came to their mind was Venom, and we were called Venom clones for years, when in fact we hadn’t even heard Venom at that point and couldn’t see or hear any resemblance at all once we actually got to listen to them. The funny thing is, when I told people I heard Venom for the first time after the release of the first Bathory album, they wouldn’t believe me. And when I mentioned GBH was an influence, nobody knew what the hell I was talking about.
VARG “COUNT GRISHNACKH” VIKERNES (Burzum): When I started Burzum I hadn’t even heard about Venom, so naturally Burzum is not—like some have claimed—influenced by Venom, in any way. The other guys in the band liked Entombed and Morbid Angel, but I have never liked or listened to them. But in late 1991 we began listening to our old Celtic Frost, Destruction, Kreator, and the older Bathory records as well.
QUORTHON: When every second band in interviews refer to Bathory as their main source of inspiration or influence, that’s when you realize you’ve been doing at least some things right. But all Bathory was trying to do was make interesting metal and paint with words.
CRONOS: To me, Venom [guitarist] Mantas and [drummer] Abaddon were just living the image in Venom. These are guys who would always use blasphemous phrases and wear crucifixes around their necks—that’s hypocrisy to me. Once, Abaddon went on some TV show in England and the guy asked him if he was a Satanist, and when he said yes, the guy interrogated him and Abaddon fell flat because he couldn’t answer any of the questions.
KIM BENDIX “KING DIAMOND” PETERSEN (ex–Mercyful Fate): When I wrote [the Mercyful Fate EP] Nuns Have No Fun, I had a lot of questions about Christianity. The song is about a cult raping a nun and crucifying her, and there’s an image on the cover depicting that. You may ask, “Where is the good in that?” Well, I’m not saying it’s good, but isn’t it funny that a lot of people freaked out about a drawing on a record? After we released it, I was on a Saturday night TV show in Denmark having a discussion with a priest about this record cover. He was there to confront me. He had been after Mercy’s ass since we started. He wanted us banned from the radio and had a personal vendetta against us. I was so fed up with this guy. He tried to slaughter us with all these accusations, and the first thing I said was, “You know what? I really like your tie. I think you are very nicely dressed for this occasion. I will compliment you on the way you are dressed.” He got totally silent, and then he said, “Well, thank you,” not knowing what else to do. Then I said, “Oops, pride. Isn’t that one of your sins? Why are you dressed up for this? Shouldn’t you just come in as you are normally? Okay, forget that, let’s talk a little bit about the Inquisition? Wouldn’t that be nice to talk about now that we’ve talked about the cover of my record. Because those are the things your faith did for real. They didn’t just draw it on a little cover. They did it for real to how many people?” He left the studio and never interfered with us again.
DANI “FILTH” DAVEY (Cradle of Filth): I heard Don’t Break the Oath by Mercyful Fate when I was thirteen, and it felt like I was listening to ghosts captured on vinyl. I was elated because it seemed like something I had been searching for. I grew up in a witch county, so it was like Halloween most of the year. People would come to our village to try to find the graves of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, and Christian martyrs that were burned. We’d feel that vibe, but you could never quite put your finger on it. At th
e time, I was listening to horrible eighties pop music like Ultravox, which I thought was dark. Then somebody introduced me to metal. A few weeks later I heard Don’t Break the Oath and that was the trigger for everything else.
ADAM “NERGAL” DARSKI (Behemoth): When I was ten, I was getting into metal, and I remember my brother’s friend said, “Hey, I have this record of music made by Satan. It’s a black mass.” I was scared when he put it on, and it was the intro to the first song on Mercyful Fate’s Don’t Break the Oath [“A Dangerous Meeting”]. He never said what band it was, and when I bought the record years later, all the memories came back.
KING DIAMOND: I always liked to be scared. I must have been eight years old and I’d fall asleep thinking vampires and monsters would come out from under the bed and take me away; that was very exciting.
QUORTHON: In 1983, there were no places in Stockholm for a band like Bathory to perform. And even if there had been such a place, given the quality or appearance of Bathory in those days, there was not a shot in hell that [we] would have been booked or allowed an inch of a stage. By the time we did have the money, we weren’t interested in anything beyond the studio.
THOMAS GABRIEL FISCHER: In the eighties, Hellhammer were shunned. We never played live. Nobody would give us a chance. Promoters, fans, musicians, they all laughed at us. They said, “This is not even music.” They told us we had to play like Dio or AC/DC, and we did exactly the opposite. No one would book us, so we resorted to private shows for friends in a nuclear-hardened bunker underground where we practiced.
QUORTHON: In the late eighties people began to send letters written in blood. These were the frantic days of HIV hysteria, and it was sometimes necessary to wear plastic gloves when reading fan mail. Prisoners that really shouldn’t have had access to pen and paper where they were locked away began to write the band commenting on some of our lyrics that, to the apparent joy of these cannibals and molesters, coincided almost in detail with crimes they had committed earlier—crimes that had rendered them a triple life sentence. The most bizarre photos would arrive, depicting everything from a young female fan dressed up as a nun masturbating with a crucifix to a young male fan munching on a dead rat. Fans would slice the band’s name into their arms and happily snap a shot or two of themselves proudly displaying their arms spelling out the word Bathory in fresh cuts, with blood splattered all over the floor.
THOMAS GABRIEL FISCHER: We got the unwelcome attention of National Socialist Satanists, which became quite dangerous. Maybe to some, that sounds like a joke. It certainly wasn’t. There was an early heavy metal–related Satanic movement in the Scandinavian black metal scene. And there were exponents of that in Switzerland because Hellhammer was one of the very few bands that dealt in occult topics. They tried to indoctrinate the band. We did not want to be associated with that. We wrote absurd lyrics, but the lyrics didn’t represent our way of life. That was one of the reasons Hellhammer dissolved and Celtic Frost took shape.
GYLVE FENRIS “FENRIZ” NAGELL (Darkthrone): Hearing Celtic Frost’s “Dawn of Megiddo” from 1986’s To Mega Therion was insane—like going to another dimension. Celtic Frost was one of the bands that pushed me into forming my own band on Christmas of 1986. I bought Bathory in ’87, but I was young and didn’t get the harsh sound right away. But it was good enough to buy [their next album], Blood Fire Death, in ’88, and I listened again and again. Suddenly I realized the [low-fi production] was the perfect sound for Darkthrone. And so the seed of black metal was planted, growing slowly but steadily in me.
QUORTHON: The money reserved for the [first Bathory] record was around $600. We knew about this place in Stockholm that was a garage turned into a demo studio. It had primitive recording equipment, a homemade 8-track table, two small recording machines in one room, plus this switchboard thing on the wall. It was best suited for acoustic and vocal material and maybe light pop music. Nothing like Bathory had ever been recorded there. We had to adapt to the place and its limitations, [which is why the music sounds so low-fi].
KING DIAMOND: When the early Mercyful Fate stuff was written I had a lot of experiences with the supernatural, especially in this apartment in Copenhagen. One time me and King Ross, the drummer, were waiting for the other guys in Mercy to come by and my brother’s beer glass rose two feet in the air and came down very slowly. The song “A Dangerous Meeting” is actually a warning not to mess with the occult. If you don’t have someone in there that can really interpret things the right way, it is way too dangerous for young teenagers to fool around with because you don’t know what’s speaking to you. And if it feels mocked or disrespected, it can give you answers back that will ruin your life. After my first experiences with the supernatural, I went to the library and read a lot about the occult and I realized that most of those books were written from one specific viewpoint, where Satanism was always depicted as these maniacs sacrificing virgins. That’s insanity.
CRONOS: I believe in nothing. My philosophy is this: you’re born and one day you’re in a box, and what you do in between is your own choice. And to live by a dogma that tells you that you can’t do this and you can’t do that is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard.
KING DIAMOND: I would be stupid to say, “I don’t believe in anything, so there is no God.” I would be the last to say there is no God. There might be fifteen, there might be a hundred, there might be none. No one can say.
The seeds of black metal spread across the world in the eighties. The antiauthoritarian and antireligious views of the genre’s pioneers struck a particularly strong chord in the rural youth of Norway, who felt stifled by small-town conservatism and Christian ideologies. By the end of the decade, a second wave of black metal, initially bred from the bowels of thrash and death metal, expanded upon the rhetoric and blasphemous lyrics of the genre’s forefathers. Venom may have coined the phrase black metal, but the first band to create a misanthropic, macabre, chaotic aesthetic for the music was Mayhem; they were followed shortly thereafter by Darkthrone, Burzum, and Immortal.
JORN “NECROBUTCHER” STUBBERUD (Mayhem): I was coming from a place in Norway called Langhus, and I went to a town called Ski five kilometers from the center of the county in 1984 to try out for a band. There was this guy who was going to meet me at the train station who was going to guide me to the house of this band, and this was Øystein [Aarseth], this was Euronymous. Walking there, we realized we liked the same music: Venom, German electronica, punk. We were both seeking the extreme, and we were amazed that we could have been living so close together without already knowing each other. Since I had another band and a rehearsal space already, I asked him to join my band immediately, even before we got to the audition. Me and my drummer [Manheim] had a band called the Musta, which is “black” in Finnish. Euronymous had come up with the name Mayhem for a band that he put together to play songs for his [high school] graduation ceremony. The name was taken from the Venom song “Mayhem with Mercy” from the Welcome to Hell album, and we decided to keep that name, because we felt it was better than Musta.
ØYSTEIN “EURONYMOUS” AARSETH (ex-Mayhem): I’d like to think that we would have been the first evil band if the older bands wouldn’t have existed. Venom was our first and major influence, later Bathory, Hellhammer, Sodom, and Destruction. I’m sure [if it weren’t for them] we would sound very different.
NECROBUTCHER: We were into dark music and horror movies, especially ones by the Italian directors [Dario] Argento and Lucio Fulci. We liked the splatter, the thinking about death, anti-Christian, anti-religious, antisocial lyrics. But we were not religious in any way. Many people have misunderstood us. They called us Satanists, but we were so far from that—as far as you could possibly be. Satan is mentioned in the Bible, so if you’re a Satanist you’re also a Christian, and we are anti-religious. Religion is for weak people who need something to explain the bigger picture—why they are living. We didn’t need any help from any religion to be able to cope with reality.
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URONYMOUS: I will never accept any band which preaches [Anton LaVey’s] Church of Satan ideas, as they are just a bunch of freedom- and life-loving atheists, and they stand exactly the opposite of me. I believe in a horned devil, a personified Satan. In my opinion, all the other forms of Satanism are bullshit. Satanism comes from religious Christianity, and there it shall stay. I’m a religious person and I will fight those who misuse his name. People are not supposed to believe in themselves and be individualists. They are supposed to obey, to be the slaves of religion.
FENRIZ: Lyrically, I was influenced by Danzig and writings from the Church of Satan as much as anything else—although I knew distinctly that affiliation with the Church of Satan was out of the question. We formed our own aesthetic. We all had a contempt for organized religion since we were mere toddlers, combined with a natural interest for the opposite of that—and a morbid hunger for the sickest sounds of underground metal. Sounding angry or aggressive was also important, but the bands we got the black metal vibes from were original and had evil atmospheres and sounded twisted—they certainly weren’t overproduced.
The first wave of Norwegian black metal bands shared similar influences and perspectives, so their music had common threads. The bands were almost all fast and frantic, and their songs were more minimalistic and atmospheric than most extreme metal. Many emphasized repetitive, minor-key riffs and eschewed traditional start-stop metallic crunch, opting instead for a monochromatic, mesmerizing buzz.
BRANDON GEIST: These guys were trying to one-up what was previously the most extreme style of metal. Death metal seemed like it was as extreme as it could get, and black metal’s like, “That’s bullshit. You’re wearing sweatpants and your production’s too good. We’re gonna make this way more evil and way more extreme.” One way they did that was by making the production more low-fi and genuinely disturbing in this visceral way that’s a little more mysterious.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 51