“We came up with a serious band with serious titles, but at the end of the day we’re human beings, you know? We’re entertainers. This isn’t Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, this is a rock band, so having something like ‘Teacher’s Pet’—it was the ‘wink,’ you know, to show we were human. Like on the back of the first album where we had the message ‘If this album is warped, scratched or defaced please throw it away and buy a new one.’”
The band’s next album, At War With Satan, released in early 1984, would complete what most fans now regard as the classic Venom trilogy. It did so in a somewhat unexpected fashion, with a concept album based on a story Cronos had originally intended to release in book format. Given what had gone before, this somewhat more thoughtful approach turned more than a few heads, as did the fact that an entire side of the record was devoted to the opening title track.
“That again was Venom being controversial,” Cronos explains. “Everyone expected another Black Metal or Welcome to Hell, another eleven songs, and I said, ‘No, fuck it, let’s freak them out and make one song that takes up the whole album ’cos it’ll be what they don’t expect,’ ’cos remember,” he adopts a mock-whiny tone, “‘Venom can’t play, they’re crap.’ So to be able to create a twenty-minute song was just Venom sticking a massive middle finger up!”
While the move did little to make the band a more respected entity within the mainstream, the album was once again well received by fans, and in many cases the critics too. In Sounds, Bushell enthused that “[Venom] top everything they’ve spewed forth before with a truly terrifying twenty-minute concept-epic, a real fifteen-rounder. It will definitely go down in heavy metal history as the ultimate headbang.” Neil Jeffries of Melody Maker was similarly positive, declaring the album “the absolute, no-holds-barred, complete and utter last word in total noise/heavy metal… proof positive that Venom are the most awful/best heavy metal band in the world.”
When not releasing milestone albums, the band were busy establishing themselves as one of the most over-the-top and entertaining live bands in the business, apparently regularly spending a thousand dollars per show on pyrotechnics. Unusually, the group had never known any different since—aside from a few early gigs in church halls—they had achieved enough success in their early days to avoid ever having to “sweat it in a van.” While the band played perhaps their most famous shows in the Seven Dates of Hell tour, taking with them an up-and-coming Los Angeles band called Metallica, the lifestyle that accompanied this tour started causing cracks in the once-close unit, with Mantas eventually departing the band altogether.
“It wasn’t really a shock,” said Cronos. “The year and a half leading up to it I could smell it coming. If you ever watch [the Metallica documentary] Some Kind of Monster and [see] James Hetfield—that was Mantas. He just turned off. He wasn’t interested anymore. All demure, all attitude. ‘Have you got any ideas?’ Nah. ‘Any stage gear?’ Nah. It was like talking to a different bloke. Speaking to him years later I asked him what happened, and he said he felt under pressure to join in with everyone and didn’t want to. And I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, of all people, you could have had anything you’d wanted, if you’d wanted to go back to the hotel room you could have, you didn’t have to fuck that chick or whatever.’ I mean me and Abaddon were just drinking the Jack and getting stuck in, but that wasn’t for him, because of doing all the fitness and the martial arts. In a way, it made me go the other way—I partied even harder as if to say ‘Look how great this is, this life we’re having, look how fantastic and happy I am.’ But I think that pushed him even further. I think if I’d straightened up, been a bit more sensible and not been off my fucking tits, I might have been able to communicate with him better.”
While Venom has since developed a reputation as a band whose members couldn’t stand each other, Cronos is keen to explain that it was only around this period that things began to fall apart on a personal level.
“I thought we got on very well. From the very early days we had to, there was that much animosity around us and we weren’t part of the Newcastle clique, so we stuck together like glue, we did everything together, it was always Venom, Venom, Venom, to do with the band. So I felt we got on well and had good communication skills, but as the career went on we went into different directions. I remember Mantas turning round and saying, ‘We’re all trying to get to Newcastle, it’s just we’re taking different routes.’ We all deeply believed in Venom, we just had a different idea of what Venom was.”
The band recorded one final album with the Cronos/Mantas/Abaddon lineup, entitled Possessed, but it was a relatively disappointing effort, perhaps inevitable given that when the band reached the studio they had no songs rehearsed. Cronos explains that Mantas was relatively disinterested by this point, and as Abaddon had never contributed much in terms of songwriting, it essentially fell to the singer to teach the other members the songs. Perhaps as a result, there’s a definite chemistry missing from the album.
While Venom would release a wealth of material in the years that followed, with a variety of members—even reuniting the classic lineup for 1997’s Cast In Stone—there’s no doubt that it was their early career that really helped create the black metal movement. And of course, Venom will always be the band responsible for the term itself (alongside several others), even if the later bands that appropriated the phrase would interpret it somewhat differently.
“When we started to see people like Eddie Van Halen doing guitar solos for Michael Jackson on the song ‘Beat It’—and then that song got into the Sounds ‘heavy metal chart’—we were just disgusted to tell you the truth,” concludes Cronos. “I mean I’ve got nothing against Jackson, but he’s not heavy metal. At that point it was like we are not heavy metal, if Jackson’s there we do not want to be in that chart… we are black metal, death metal, power metal, thrash metal, all of this, but not heavy metal. Coming up with a term like black metal or thrash metal, it was great when bands came along and used those titles. The Norwegians used the term black metal ten years later ’cos they knew they would automatically be put into a category they wanted to be in. They were like, ‘This is dirty, this is nasty, this is Satanic, we’re gonna put fucking corpsepaint on, sing about Satan’… they knew the black metal tag would give them an identity.”
3
MERCYFUL FATE
“Mercyful Fate was really important. When I was listening to it I knew instinctively that it wasn’t normal heavy metal like Queensryche you know? You can’t really compare it, it had something extra, and that was the black metal extract.”
—Fenriz (Darkthrone)
“Mercyful Fate do not sound very much like a black metal band as most people define black metal today, but they were very early to incorporate the occult/Satanic aspects as an important part of their artistic expression. Just listen to Don’t Break the Oath, the entire sound and production reeks of the occult! Truly a pioneering band and quite incomparable to anybody else.”
—Dolgar (Gehenna)
OF ALL THE BANDS of the first wave, Danish veterans Mercyful Fate are the furthest away, musically speaking, from what most people now think of as “black metal.” First appearing in 1981, the group were fronted by vocalist Kim Bendix Petersen, who had been using the King Diamond moniker since playing guitar in a heavy rock band called Brainstorm, a move prompted by a concern that fans would have trouble pronouncing the group’s Danish birth names. When Brainstorm split, Diamond had begun to search for a new band and, finding an ad for a band looking for a singer, made the bold move of attempting to “sneak in as a singer-slash-guitarist,” despite having never sung before. That band was Black Rose, an outfit that allowed Diamond to not only make his vocal debut, but also to start to experimenting with the horror themes and stage show that he would become famous for in later years. “We played several shows and got quite a reputation for the show effects we used, which were very homemade,” explains the singer in his soft-spoken and eloquent tones. “An old friend was
a butcher at a large butcher’s factory, so we used pig’s blood and guts and stuffed them into a doll, and then stabbed the doll and pulled out the pig’s guts and threw them into the audience. I used to work as a lab technician, and I—you can say in a nice way—‘borrowed’ materials and made our own homemade bombs. It was stupid, it was dangerous, and it was also a lot of fun, that’s how we got a reputation for having a wild show even back then.”
Desecration of Souls: Mercyful Fate live at the L’Amour venue in New York, November 1984.
Photo: Frank White.
The inception of Black Rose came courtesy of guitarist Hank Shermann (Rene Krolmark, then known as Hank De Wank), who was playing in a band called Brats, a punk/hard rock act that had already released one album on the CBS label, aptly (if not imaginatively) titled 1980 and released that very year. The record had received mixed reviews, mainly due to the vocals, which had been performed by the bassist Yenz, and the group were now looking for a lead singer.
“Their musical style,” explains Diamond, “some of it was heavy metal, some of it was punk, but when I joined we made an agreement that this was going to be heavy metal, not punk, we were gonna write new stuff and only concentrate on that. We played a few shows and recorded demos for CBS for a new Brats album and when they heard our stuff they freaked out, they told us there was no way they were going to release that sort of stuff, that we had to go back to this more pop-oriented heavy metal, more accessible stuff in the style of the first album. That’s when me and Hank split and started looking for musicians to make our own band.”
The final Brats recording, a rehearsal tape with Diamond on vocals, saw the band already heading in a notably darker heavy metal direction, with many of the songs later becoming Mercyful Fate numbers, albeit under different names. The predominant inspiration at this point was clearly Judas Priest, something Sherman himself confirmed in later interviews. Not only did the music echo that band’s galloping pace, progressive blues rock leanings, intricate songwriting, and ferocious hooks, but King Diamond proved more than capable of matching Priest vocalist Rob Halford’s impressive range, taking falsettos in metal to new extremes.
“Deep Purple had influenced me to try to sing like Ian Gillan,” Diamond explains. “At one of our shows I remember one of our fans saying, ‘You should really work on your falsetto, ’cos it sounds really cool those few times you used it.’ I had no idea what the word meant, he had to explain to me what it really was. So then I started to work harder on it until I had better control of it and could hold the note and sing more relaxed, so I didn’t come home without a voice every time.”
While the last days of Brats may have hinted at the musical future of Mercyful Fate, it didn’t prepare the world for the important change of image that would occur in the few short months between the two bands. With the need for compromise gone, the group were able to concentrate on their more occult- and horror-based interests. Diamond began using a microphone stand constructed of human femur bones, and sporting ghoulish black-and-white face paint that frequently included an inverted cross, doing much to encourage the use of black metal corpsepaint as we know it today.
Far from the first musician to utilize such stage makeup, Diamond followed in the footsteps of seventies acts such as Alice Cooper, The Misfits, The Damned, and Kiss, all of whom in turn followed the inimitable Arthur Brown, the eccentric and theatrical English rocker who sported a remarkable corpsepaint-like look around the time of his 1968 debut, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
“I used makeup [even in] the Brainstorm days,” Diamond recalls. “I remember seeing Alice Cooper on the Welcome To My Nightmare tour, and I thought, ‘If I ever get in a band, I’m going to use makeup,’ not like him, but use makeup, because it had such an impact on me and I thought it must have such an impact on anyone who looks at a stage and sees this. To me he looked like he was not a real person, he looked like something totally out of this world, and it felt like if I could reach up on stage to touch his boot, he would probably disappear into thin air.”
So it was that Fate became the first band to pioneer this aesthetic within a resolutely metal (rather than rock) context, and the group continued to break new ground, not merely using Satanic themes in their metal, but extending that interest into reality—King Diamond declaring himself to be a Satanist (probably metal’s first musician to do so), and specifically a follower of the form of Satanism espoused in Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible. In fact, Diamond would become one of the few rock musicians LaVey would ever have direct contact with, the High Priest even inviting Diamond to visit him.
“I was so fortunate to be invited to the Church of Satan in San Francisco and spend the whole night there with Anton LaVey… [I] spent two hours in the Ritual Chamber with him at a time when it had not been open to anyone but him. It was reenergizing energy and I think I was the only one who had been there in the last year and a half at that time. It was very interesting and we became… I can’t say close friends, but friends that had a high respect for each other, and he reflected that in some of his autobiographies… those experiences I will never forget, seeing how serious he was about what he wrote and at the same time the aura he had, and the humor he was in possession of, in particular.”
As with Venom, there was a significant and clear divide between the band’s fantastical lyrics and genuine Satanic belief. While LaVey’s philosophy was explicitly not based around the belief, much less worship, of a personified Christian devil figure, Diamond’s lyrics tended to feature Satan in a very traditional role. Songs such as “Satan’s Fall” depict Lucifer as an embodiment of evil, complete with glowing eyes and horns, receiving the sacrifice of a newborn child with glee, a far cry from Diamond’s own philosophies.
“Journalists would always ask, ‘Are you really a Satanist?’” explains the singer, “And I would answer, and I still do, ‘Well, first I must know from you, what you consider a Satanist, because otherwise I can’t answer truthfully.’ If you think a Satanist is what is often described by Christians, sacrificing animals and you’d like to get your hands on a little baby and taste the blood then, no, no, that’s insanity to me, complete insanity. That’s not treating others with the respect you want to be treated with, so no I’m definitely not a Satanist. But if you’re referring to the philosophy that LaVey has in his book, yes, I lived by that philosophy even before I read that book, if that makes me a Satanist, then yes I am.”
While it’s clear that Diamond distinguished between his own beliefs and the more traditional, horror-styled Christian concept of Satanism featured in Mercyful Fate songs, it’s likely that such subtleties escaped many fans at the time. The existence of a band that could claim a link to the unholy subjects they dealt with in their music added a sense of authenticity to the genre, and undoubtedly fueled the attitudes of many bands that would follow. A line had been drawn in the sand; there were now bands who believed and practiced in Satanism and those who merely sang about it.
With all this in mind, it’s curious to note that Mercyful Fate actually got their break via BBC’s premier music channel, Radio One. Having shuffled ranks over a series of demos and self-releases, the band settled on a lineup that saw King and Hank joined by drummer Kim Ruzz, ex-Brats guitarist Michael Denner, and bassist Timi “Grabber” Hansen (who had played in Denner’s post-Brats band Danger Zone, a band Sherman and Diamond had also participated in). The band were invited to play the Friday Night Rock Show thanks to a friend who was helping to distribute their demo, and were given eight hours in the studio to record three songs, namely “Evil,” “Curse Of The Pharaohs,” and “Satan’s Fall.”
The broadcast caught the eye of a small label in Holland called Rave-On, who invited the band to travel over and record what would become their self-titled four-song EP, often referred to as the “Nuns Have No Fun EP” after the title of the record’s second song and the similarly themed cover art. The four tracks (completed by “A Corpse Without Soul,” “Doomed By The Living Dead,” and “Devil
Eyes”) find the wild solos and exuberant vocals for which the band would become known already firmly in place. Compared to later material, however, the riffs reveal a greater hard rock influence, coupled with a definite NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) vibe. The recording is also notably rougher round the edges than later albums, a result, the vocalist explains, of a simple lack of time.
“We did the whole thing in two days. We had so many things prepared, like backing vocals, solo overdubs and harmonies, but when we got there we had no time for that. Backing vocals, okay, [they said] you can have one extra vocal—well, that’s not what I intended, but there was no time [for anything else]. Hank when he recorded the long intro solo for ‘A Corpse Without Soul,’ he gave it a couple of shots and didn’t quite get it right, then the producer said, ‘Okay, we don’t have time for this shit, do it now and whatever you make that’s what’s going on, I’m sorry,’ and he did the one that’s on there now!”
Melissa, 1983. Thomas Holm’s haunting sleeve art perfectly complements the eerie, yet epic, nature of the music within.
Despite its limitations, the record met with a good reception and led to Roadrunner picking up the band for a two-record deal, the first half of which was fulfilled by 1983’s magnificent Melissa. Infinitely slicker than the EP, yet still steeped in a unique atmosphere, the album again demonstrates a pronounced influence from Judas Priest, particularly their early albums, with both dual lead guitars and progressive overtones present. However, Melissa also replaces the melancholy found on albums such as Sad Wings of Destiny with a creepy malevolence that mirrors the album’s lyrics, the frequent use of the word “Satan” still standing out today, especially due to the clarity of Diamond’s vocals. From the beginning the focus is on the cruel and the macabre, the album’s opening song “Evil” telling the story of a mercenary raised from the cemetery—via hell itself—to murder and torment the living.
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 3