“I learnt to write songs better down the road, to express myself better,” explains Diamond. “I would get questions like, ‘The song “Evil,” what is that, do you stand for that, you’d like to be as evil as the character in the song?’ No, no. The reason for writing ‘Evil’ was to have the conversation we’re having right now.”
Whatever the exact motives for the lyrics, the epic qualities of songs such as the title track and the eleven-minute-long “Satan’s Fall” remain undeniable, and further depth is added by the classical influences that frequently come to the fore in the guitars, with long instrumental passages common even in catchier numbers such as the irresistible “Curse Of The Pharaohs,” famously covered by Metallica. The album cover is also something of an understated classic, with its almost abstract, black-and-red depiction of what appears to be demonic, skeletal creature.
Interestingly, the title Melissa actually came from the name Diamond had attached to a human skull that was given to him, an artifact used as inspiration for the title song. Initially kneeling in front of a Satanic altar, lamenting the death of what appears to be a lover killed for witchcraft, the song sees the protagonist swearing vengeance on a priest who presumably was responsible for her death.
“That was a skull I got the same time as I got the crossbones I used as a microphone,” Diamond explains. “It was actually from my brother who is three years younger than me. One of his fellow students’ fathers was a doctor who was teaching medical students to operate on donated bodies, and when they finished they would strip the skin off the bones and put them in bags, and he brought some home for his son. The skull though is from an old burial ground. It was over by some cliffs which were eroding and there were churches there—actually we filmed the video for the [King Diamond] song ‘Uninvited Guest’ on those cliffs—and this chalk was slowly eroding away and he found it down where the beach ends and the cliff starts, some of those graves had eroded away and just…” [Diamond makes an uncannily accurate sound of bones rattling on rocks] “… dropped down. But that skull was really odd, you could see this person had had a very heavy blow on the forehead as there was a hole, a part that had come off about the size of a quarter had grown back, so this person had not died [from the wound] and I wondered what had happened to this person. And of course it was not a witch, but I started thinking, ‘Wow, imagine if this was a witch,’ and then this name Melissa came up out of the blue.”
With another memorable album cover (a second skull-faced and horned devil, this time depicted rather more clearly, pointing out at the viewer from the flames), the band returned in 1984 with a follow-up entitled Don’t Break The Oath. Toning down the progressive blues rock overtones somewhat, the album, despite the addition of infrequent keyboards, proved a heavier and more aggressive listen than its predecessor, frequently entering thrash metal territory, while retaining the Judas Priest/Iron Maiden dual guitar attack. A fuller production—the result of eighteen days in the studio, as opposed to the twelve used for Melissa—undoubtedly gives an additional punch to the already meaty riffs, and Diamond’s vocals remain hugely dramatic, his range as impressive as ever.
No ambiguities: King Diamond’s overtly Satanic lyrics are echoed in the cover art (once again by Thomas Holms) for the band’s second album, Don’t Break The Oath, released late 1984.
“I think the biggest difference is that Don’t Break The Oath is a little bit more technical, there were more things recorded, simply because we had more time, so we could realize more ideas. There are more intricate choir parts and guitar pieces, we had a keyboard player in and that was added to a couple of songs, and a harpsichord was added to ‘Come to the Sabbath,’ so there were more things like that. We had bigger arrangements—it became harder to deal with mixing all this stuff—but it felt like a natural progression. Another thing that is different is that me and Michael Denner got some of our songs on the album. Together with Michael I [wrote] ‘Gypsy’ and ‘To One Far Away,’ so we got a little more involved in the songwriting.”
Despite the commercial and critical success of the two albums, however, Mercyful Fate turned out to be a fairly short-lived act, at least in its original incarnation. Following Don’t Break The Oath, Diamond departed (along with Michael Denner and Timi Hansen) to concentrate on a self-titled solo career, which continues to this day, utilizing a horror concept album formula to produce such classics as Abigail and “Them.” Hank, meanwhile, formed Fate, a hard rock band that continues today, though Hank himself departed after the band’s second album.
“It was simply musical differences,” explains Diamond. “It was Hank, and then Mercyful Fate, the rest of us. We had completely different musical tastes suddenly. It was Hank who changed his tastes a lot and I’m not putting him down, ’cos we’re the best of friends and he knows what happened. He was hanging with a certain crowd and there was a lot of disco stuff and watching funk bands, and he wanted to incorporate some Mother’s Finest-style funk into what we were doing and also make it a little poppy. We had a meeting and were presenting demos to each other and that was when we got a shock. Because Hank was a prankster—a few of us liked to play pranks on each other—and we thought it was a prank, like, ‘Okay, play the real stuff now, this is kinda funny, but come on now.’ And he was dead serious. And it was like, ‘You’re kidding? What the hell are you thinking of?’ Well, his intention was that maybe me and Michael Denner could write the music for one side—the ‘Mercy side’—and he would write the music for the other side, the Fate side. Like two different bands. Are you kidding? I would never do that, that would be like pissing on myself and my fans, I’m never going do something I couldn’t believe in. And it was the same from his side. So we parted on good terms. It would be no good if any of us were prostituting ourselves.”
The band would eventually reform in 1992, with all of the original lineup save for drummer Ruzz appearing on 1993’s In The Shadows, an album that also saw Metallica’s Lars Ulrich (a longtime fan and fellow Dane) handling the drums on a rerecording of the demo-era song “Return Of The Vampire.” Two more albums, Time and Into The Unknown (1994 and 1996), were recorded minus bassist Hansen, and two more, Dead Again and 9 (1998 and 1999) following the departure of Denner, before the band finished activities once again. More recently, the popularity of the hugely successful video game franchise Guitar Hero caused a resurrection of the “classic lineup” (again minus drummer Ruzz) to rerecord tracks “Evil” and “Curse of the Pharaohs” for Guitar Hero: Metallica since the original masters had been lost. Still, while the later output is well worth further investigation, there is no doubt that it was primarily the band’s first three official releases that really changed the metal world, and contributed to the slowly emerging black metal scene.
4
BATHORY
“Bathory had a unique sound to them, totally. They always got the worst marks in the reviews, but they were maybe the most important band for the second wave of black metal. They were obscure, Satanic, they had a shit sound, a very cold production and the vocals were different to what everyone else was doing.”
—Apollyon (Aura Noir, Dødheimsgard)
“I’d say it was Venom who created black metal [but] the prototype of today’s black metal was created by Bathory.”
—Mirai (Sigh)
“If anyone says they are into black metal, but do not know or like Bathory, they do not know what black metal is or where it came from. Sure Venom and Hellhammer were important as well, but Bathory defined the sound of black metal as it is known today.”
—Dolgar (Gehenna)
THE IMMENSE SIGNIFICANCE of Swedish legends Bathory within the black metal scene cannot be overstated. Of all the bands in the first wave it was Bathory who had the biggest part to play in creating a template both musically and aesthetically, and for a time they took Venom’s position as the heaviest, darkest metal band in existence.
Whether or not the band were inspired by Venom is a question that has been floating around almost since t
heir inception, even though such influence was passionately denied by the band’s creative force Tomas Forsberg—better known to the metal world by his nom-deplume Quorthon—right until his untimely death in June 2004. Given the similar qualities of the band’s early recordings, such a claim may seem difficult to believe, although it’s also worth noting that the two bands were painting from a very similar palette of influences, namely Motörhead, British punk, and of course, Black Sabbath.
It was in 1983 (1 p.m. on March 16 in fact, according to the official Bathory website) when the three founding members—Quorthon, Jonas “Vans McBurger” Åkerlund, and Fredrick “Freddan” Hanoi—first met. Jonas and Frederick were cousins who had played together for some time (most notably in a band called Die Cast), whilst Quorthon also had some previous experience, having played in two other bands, Agnosticum and Stridskuk. The three young men met via an ad for local musicians placed inside a music store in Stockholm, and wasted no time in getting down to work, rehearsing for the first time on the very day of their meeting.
“It was very popular at the time to form bands, it was just what everybody did,” begins Jonas, who was eighteen at the time. “We would change names every week, we tried all combinations and styles. It was me and the bass player, who was my cousin, we were looking for a guitarist, to be a three-piece. We had the idea to play really, really fast metal and, like everybody else back then, we put our little advert in the record store where you had all the instruments. [Quorthon] called us and our rehearsal studio was not too far away, so we went straight there to try it out.”
Right from the start, Quorthon adopted a commanding role within the band, supplying all the material, much of which he had written before meeting his new bandmates. Years later on the official Bathory website, Quorthon would describe Bathory as an attempt to “amalgamate the gloom of Black Sabbath, sound of Motörhead and the newly found frenzy of GBH,” the latter being one of a number of pioneering English hardcore punk bands active at the time whose efforts were pushing into similarly “extreme” territories.
“The bass player was very much into Motörhead,” explains Jonas, “I was very much into Sabbath and we were all impressed by the punk rock scene and playing fast, but it felt like [Quorthon] always had the vision anyway, his ideas came forward from the first time that we played. The thing with Quorthon was that he wrote all the music and had been writing songs for forever, so he came with a catalogue of stuff. He was already banging it, on the very first day we started playing those songs. He brought so much to the table, because he was a genius musician. We really weren’t used to playing with someone like him, so he brought up the level to a higher scale than we were used to. He was a very different kind of guy, his creativity didn’t come from listening to other people. His creativity came from inside in a weird way.”
“He was kind of an isolated guy, and had this music within him, which just poured out,” he continues, “and he was a very good guitarist—he played very, very fast and he had his own style and his own sound. There were a lot of things I never found out about him. We never really talked about other music, because once we started it was all about us, and where we wanted to go with it. It slowly became darker and darker and faster and faster. It felt like it was a completely different era; the combination of the punk rock and the dark bands like Sabbath and Quorthon’s guitar playing, it kinda fell into place in a way. But it wasn’t really the kind of music anyone else played at the time, especially in Sweden, there was a completely different scene going on.”
The band played a few shows in Stockholm—something that was easy to do, as Jonas explains, because of the strong live scene in the city at the time—but their unique material failed to find much of a following. Fortunately for them, they had a personal connection that would aid them immensely in their attempts to reach a wider audience, namely one Borje “Boss” Forsberg, who was working at the time for the record label Tyfon Grammofon. While Quorthon maintained vehemently throughout his life that Boss was in no way related to him, it is generally believed that he was, in fact, Quorthon’s father. Certainly it cannot be denied that it was Boss who was responsible for giving Bathory their big break, allowing the then-unknown group to contribute two tracks to the 1984 compilation album Scandinavian Metal Attack, alongside more melodic and commercial Swedish heavy metal acts such as Oz and Trash.
“We had an ‘in,’ ’cos a relative of Quorthon had a connection,” explains Jonas, “It wasn’t like we were shopping round for a record deal. Boss was involved in some other bands that were way bigger than us at the time, so we were like the little ‘sideshow’ really, but he was involved with Bathory from the beginning. That [recording for the compilation] was the real deal though, a proper studio, the whole thing. We were all pretty young, we had recorded a lot before, but not like that. I don’t remember paying for it… the other bands that were recording—the bigger bands—we went in [the studio] on their spare hours. When they were finished for the evening we would go in and record.”
A combination of the unrelenting raw brutality of hardcore punk bands such as Discharge and GBH, and the dark atmosphere and sinister lyrics that had been touched upon by Venom and Mercyful Fate, the two tracks Bathory contributed (“Sacrifice,” and “The Return of Darkness and Evil”) were instantly recognized as something new. Arguably a step beyond what any metal band had recorded at that point, they thus took the underground (or at least those who heard the compilation) by storm.
“A friend of mine bought Scandinavian Metal Attack and the first time I heard it I couldn’t believe my ears,” explains Necrobutcher of Norway legends Mayhem. “We hadn’t heard the techniques that he was using, singing through the guitar microphone to create this effect on his voice, how fast the music was, what the lyrics were about… we were just blown away.”
Listening to the recordings today, there’s no doubt that the material has a undeniable Motörhead/Venom swagger about it, but also that it was taking things a stage further than anything those bands had done at the time, thanks in no small part to the notably harsher, more guttural vocals. While Satanism, according to Jonas, was not initially a big part of the concept of the band, by the time these two songs were recorded it had become a dominating theme, as evidenced in the lyrics to “Sacrifice,” which describe the raping of the mother of Christ, the spreading of darkness on earth, and the sacrifice of angels to the Lord of Hell.
Not long after the release of the compilation, Jonas and his cousin began to drift away from Bathory, moving from Sweden to stay in London for a while. Jonas also discovered a career in film, one that would eventually lead him to create full-length features, advertisements, and also music videos for the likes of Madonna, Metallica, and even Norwegian black metal act Satyricon. Coincidentally, one of his first efforts was a video for Swedish doom metal band Candlemass, and featured a young Per Ohlin—future singer of Mayhem—as a zombie extra. Despite his work in film, Jonas maintained contact with Quorthon, and still speaks of him with admiration today.
“I knew he [Quorthon] was going to keep going, then slowly my film interests grew and that felt way more natural to me. I wasn’t that good of a drummer but I realized early that I was pretty good at editing film, so I never regretted that [decision]. He didn’t really need any other musicians, because he was so talented he could do it all himself. I mean the one thing that we knew was that Quorthon had tremendous star quality, and that he was a very gifted musician. That was very, very clear… It was a good ten years before I realized what Bathory had become though. I see people with the goat head tattooed on them now—we had that very, very early, I think I had that on my bass drum, I don’t remember, but I think I did—and I mean, who would have thought that would happen back then?”
Though the first lineup of the band was dissolving, Scandinavian Metal Attack had earned the band rave reviews and Quorthon decided to build on the buzz by recording a debut album. He hired Rickard “Ribban” Bergman, who had played in Stridskuk, as well a new drumm
er called Stefan Larsson whom he’d heard playing on a tape by a band called Obsklass. The result of the three young men’s hard work was a self-titled album that would ignite the metal underground. Released via Black Mark Productions—a sub-label of Tyfon Grammofon set up especially for the release (with a “666-1” serial number no less)—the album’s cover was emblazoned with the now-familiar goat’s head design. Though Quorthon is credited on the Bathory homepage, the image was in fact taken from a drawing by American illustrator Joseph Smith, and has become one of the most iconic images within black metal today. The reverse of the record was illustrated by a large pentagram.
Aesthetically speaking, the sleeve had much in common with the early Venom releases, with one important difference: a complete absence of band photos. This, coupled with the fact that only Quorthon and Boss were mentioned on the sleeve, meant that the element of mystery and anonymity had now well and truly been added to the black metal formula, a mystery made easier to retain due to the decision to keep the band as a studio-only project. While Bathory wasn’t a one-man band, due to the use of session musicians, it was largely assumed that this was the case. Quorthon later explained on his website that both he and the record label believed it would confuse matters to include the names of “hired guns” in the credits and indeed, even Kerrang! stated: “So who is Bathory? No-one knows for sure, but its pretty well ascertained that this… is the work of a fellow called Quorthon. He wrote and played all the instruments on all the songs, as well as co-producing.”
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 4