As Tom matured, his musical tastes moved toward the heavier end of the spectrum, and after following bands such as British heavy metal act UFO, he became a huge fan of the emerging NWOBHM movement. Given a financial reward for finishing high school by a distant relative (“I think it was some sort of token of guilt,” he explains, “because they had not taken me out of the indescribable situation of my youth”), Tom visited England, the source of so much of the music that fascinated him. Making a pilgrimage to HMV in London’s Oxford Street, he discovered an entire wall of NWOBHM records, including In League With Satan, the debut single from Venom. It would prove to be an epiphany.
“I had no idea what they sounded like, but I saw the photo on the back and felt this was the most extreme photo I had ever seen of a band,” he recalls. “So I bought it and took it home to Switzerland and was like, ‘I have found my revelation.’ It literally changed my life, these two tracks on this single completely changed my life.”
Along with two other UK bands, Motörhead and Discharge, Venom would have a huge impression on the youth, directly inspiring him to start making music himself, initially as a bass player. “I understood then that it was possible to play the music that was inside of me, and I knew at that point I needed to get an instrument and try myself. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision as an obsession, an addiction. And I’m not saying that to appear like some mythical figure here, I simply began involving myself in music so much that I guess it was inevitable that I would try to start to play music myself. I had so many emotions inside of me, I wanted to write music, I wanted to write lyrics. The only happiness, fulfillment, recognition, the only identity I felt, was in music.
“It was very difficult to get a proper instrument in Switzerland at that time and everything is very expensive here. I was in an apprenticeship as a mechanic and made hardly any money so I had to sign a installment plan for I don’t know how many years, to get the rate low. I was into Rush and Motörhead and so I wanted to have a Rickenbacker bass—at that point I didn’t think I would ever play a guitar, so I bought that and started paying it off. Having that instrument in my hands was magic beyond any description… I would be sitting in front of that instrument for hours, smelling the scent, touching it, looking at it. It was like some magical thing I had seen in record sleeves and magazines, and even though I didn’t know how to play it, the power that instrument had over me was amazing.”
Hungry to work with other musicians, Tom went to try out with a hard rock group from his school called The Fox Tails. Almost as soon he met them, however, it became clear to the young musician that this was not the band for him, so he instead asked the drummer if he wanted to form a NWOBHM band. “For some reason, which is beyond me, he said yes,” explains Tom today, “and with our limited English knowledge we called the band Grave Hill.”
Grave Hill proved to be a fairly amateurish affair, with all members having only a rudimentary ability on their chosen instruments and rehearsals taking place in Tom’s cramped bedroom. In fact, so difficult was it to find a guitarist who would take them seriously that the band were even forced to recruit a second bass player and then put Tom’s bass through a distortion pedal (à la Venom) to make it sound more like a guitar. Ultimately the band was to be short-lived, but it did finally provide Tom—albeit indirectly—with a like-minded character named Urs Sprenger, soon to become the co-founder of Hellhammer.
“Of course my whole life story is that I’m always too radical for the others in the band,” Tom sighs. “I wanted to become heavier and heavier. I’d heard Venom’s In League With Satan, but it wasn’t heavy enough for me. The single was on 45 rpm and I played it at 33 rpm to make it heavier and we had some sort of a roadie—even though we never played any concerts, we had a hanger-on—and he was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, that sounds much better on 33 rpm.’ He listened to punk and listened to Venom, he was like me, so I asked if he wanted to join the band and at that point everyone left the band. They said, ‘Hey, these guys are crazy, that’s no longer music.’ So we felt we might as well form a new band and be dedicated in trying to be as extreme as possible, and that was the birth of Hellhammer in May 1982.”
Sprenger took up the role of bass in the newly formed band, with Tom moving on to guitar and vocals. Inspired by a fellow apprentice whose surname was “Krieger,” German for warrior, the pair adopted the pseudonyms Tom Warrior and Steve Warrior. “It sounded cool,” explains Tom, “and we liked that a lot of the bands in England were brothers—like Raven, with the Gallagher brothers.” All that now remained was to find a drummer, a role they initially filled with an individual called Peter Stratton.
“He was a million miles from us,” smiles Fischer. “Me and Steve were fanatics and he just wanted to be in a band—and to top it all off his parents were radical Catholics! As you can imagine that only lasted a few months, but it did give us a rehearsal space. The Catholic Church had some nuclear-hardened bunkers at their disposal for youth activities, and they didn’t really know what sort of band we were, so they gave us an affordable bunker which was only [the equivalent of] fifty euros a year, which is of course sensational. For us it was hard even to find that money, but at least we had a rehearsal room. We lost that drummer after a short while, but Steve and I went to a tiny heavy metal festival in a gym hall in the next city and there was a band, Moorhead, whose drummer was really good. So I went up to the guitarist and said, ‘Can you give me the number of your drummer?’ and the guy was stupid enough to do it. So I called the drummer and said, ‘Hello, my name is Tom Warrior, I’m here with the heaviest band in the world ever, do you want to be our drummer?’ and it worked. That was Bruce Day.”
The stage name “Bruce Day” (his real name being Jörg Neubart) was apparently inspired by another pair of NWOBHM brothers, namely Paul and Brian Day of London-based outfit More. While other musicians also briefly played in the band, it was the core trio made up of Satanic Slaughter (Tom Warrior), Savage Damage (Steve Warrior), and Bruce Day (also known as Bloodhunter and Denial Fiend) who first achieved a real impact with Hellhammer. Together the three young men forged a furious and stripped-down sound, juxtaposing slow, foreboding passages with fast-paced, aggressive parts, while making use of a distinctive guitar sound and Tom’s inimitable vocals, which were characterized by unique pronunciations, a gravelly tone, and occasional screams. A fresh and insanely raw experience, the music revealed an obvious debt to the unholy British trinity of Motörhead and their two most influential disciples, Venom and Discharge, while also drawing on more obscure reference points.
“If you look for the key ingredient in Hellhammer it was Discharge and Venom,” Tom explains, “but there were a whole number of bands that were very crucial to my songwriting at the time, and because of the very nature of NWOBHM at the time, sometimes a single song could have a huge impact that would last for years—sometimes until this very day. For example I picked up the Metal for Muthas compilation which had Angel Witch’s ‘Baphomet,’ and that song became an icon for me. To this very day I’m trying to recreate something like that. So completely strange to think a single song might change my life, but it has done so several times.”
In a situation that would become depressingly familiar to the band, the newly formed Hellhammer were largely met with disinterest and even outright disgust. Not to be deterred, the group began working even harder, not only on their music, but on the creation of an all-encompassing package that included visual and thematic elements. An important aspect of this was the use of a stark, high-contrast, monochromatic aesthetic, one that drew obvious influence from both hardcore/crust punk and NWOBHM, genres that frequently used similar imagery out of sheer necessity.
1983: A young Thomas Fischer, then known as Satanic Slaughter, poses at the Grave Hill bunker with a Hellhammer setlist in shot. Photo: Martin Kyburz.
“There was absolutely no support, no encouragement, no nothing,” Tom sighs. “In spite of that we tried to be as professional as possible, in fact all the ba
nds that had a name in Switzerland were actually far lazier than us. We said, ‘We need to have an image, a concept, a logo, a symbol,’ and since we had no support whatsoever, we did everything ourselves. We wrote the lyrics—at first blatant copies of Venom lyrics, then later we tried to make them more original—and worked extremely hard, without having a chance to really achieve anything. Steve Warrior was a massive punk fan and brought in a lot of punk aesthetic, but what shouldn’t be forgotten is that NWOBHM was such an underground movement that a lot of the singles were done in an almost pathetic manner, black-and-white, hand-drawn, and I think we took some of our aesthetic from there.”
Eventually the band decided it was time to make their first professional recording—the word professional being used in its broadest possible sense.
“We couldn’t wait to hear a recording of our music—we were so eager even though we knew it was way too early to record anything—but we didn’t have any money. But my father told me that one of his friends was a sound engineer. I would see my father a few days a year because of a court order; they had told him that he had to see me every month, of course he didn’t do that, but I would see him a few times a year. A friend of his was a sound engineer, so I called that guy and said, ‘I’m Mr. Fischer’s kid, we have no money, could you do us a cheap recording?’ The guy said yes and came with a mobile recording unit, which was basically just a tiny tape machine, a four-track tape. Us being completely unprofessional, having never been into a studio, instead of using four tracks, we used sixteen tracks, we were like, ‘let’s record everything!’ The sound engineer was sitting there wide-eyed and said, ‘Look, what you’re playing is absolutely terrible, it’s not music, has nothing to do with music, this is a waste of tape, it’s awful.’ But we insisted. We said, ‘You have to mix it and give it to us, we’re dying to have it.’ So we waited while the tape was just languishing at his place. He waited for weeks until he said he had mixed it—even though he probably didn’t do anything to it—then he sent us a cassette. For years after I would hear from my father that he was still talking at the motorcycle magazine where they both were working as journalists, the guy would badmouth my music for years afterwards, saying, ‘This guy cannot play and his band is a joke.’ But at least we had our first demo.”
1983’s Triumph of Death second demo cassette was the first to be distributed properly. It was released by the band’s own label, Prowlin’ Death Records.
In fact, the session ultimately resulted in not one, but two demos. The first was Death Fiend, a tape spread only to a few close contacts with instructions not to copy, and the second was Triumph of Death, released by the band’s own label, Prowlin’ Death Records.
“We were going to [release] two demos originally, the first, Death Fiend, with the older songs, and Triumph of Death, which was going to be the newer songs. But when we listened to Death Fiend we realized ourselves that this was awful. By now it was 1983 and American bands were coming out like Metallica, we had heard the first Slayer demos and the Metal Church demos, and even the English bands had progressed massively. The trend was to go more commercial and get clean productions that sounded fantastic. Most of the singers tried to sing like Ronnie James Dio, they sang very high and had multiple-octave voices, and here we were with our shoddy little tape that sounded just like a bulldozer. So we felt really ashamed initially and we knew this wouldn’t go anywhere and everyone that heard it, they were laughing their asses off, nobody took it seriously.”
“Back then people approached Hellhammer with ridicule and hatred,” he sighs, “they couldn’t believe what kind of music we were playing. [These demos were] recorded with a mobile recording unit in the rehearsal room bunker, which was barely padded, so the sound was crappy, we couldn’t play, we had shitty equipment, it was awful. Of course many years later it would be a habit to have bad productions—many of the Norwegian bands purposely wanted to have a production like that and it makes you get used to it after hearing this for almost twenty years. When you listen to Hellhammer production now it’s very fashionable, but if you see it in the context of the early eighties—when all the bands tried to improve and bands like Venom and even Motörhead were accused of not being musicians—it was extremely anachronistic. We were picking up a lot of reviews and I’m not exaggerating when I say that ninety-nine percent of them were devastatingly bad. We were ridiculed up and down and the most important new magazine, Metal Forces… completely ripped us apart repeatedly and rendered any chance of being taken seriously moot.”
Satanic Rites demo, finished on the 31st December 1983.
It was against such a background and following the release of Triumph of Death that Hellhammer fell apart for a time, with Steve Warrior departing the group. “I realized that even though Steve and I were as radical as one another, many other things between us didn’t match—Steve Warrior enjoyed certain drugs and lots of alcohol and he had problems progressing on his instrument,” Fischer states, “and we all knew that we needed to progress on our instruments.” Finding a replacement proved to be problematic and time-consuming but eventually the group resurfaced with a new bass player, Martin Stricker, known to fans as Martin Ain or Slayed Necros. It was around this time that Hellhammer experienced its first ray of hope.
“There was a brand new German label, Noise, that had arisen from a punk label [Aggressive Rock Produktionen] and they were looking for the most extreme band in the world,” explains Tom. “A fanzine writer in Germany had told them there was a band in Switzerland that would probably qualify for that title, so they sent me a letter. All I had at that time was the Triumph of Death demo so I assembled what I believed were the best songs from that demo and sent them a letter saying that we were trying to improve and become more professional. They listened to it, looked at the photos—which were radical at the time—and based on the photos they said, ‘If you can come up with a better demo by the end of the year then you get your record deal.’ Of course that was something I never expected and it gave us immense energy in the few remaining months of the year, to come up with a better demo, and on the 31st December we had the demo finished and sent it to Germany.”
The demo in question, Satanic Rites, saw Tom handling vocals, guitars and also bass since Martin—in a move Tom puts down partly to cold feet—fired himself from the band prior to recording, claiming he did not have sufficient ability to participate. The forty-six-minute demo, which featured revamped numbers such as “Messiah” and “Triumph of Death” alongside new material, was enough to convince Noise, who promptly signed the band.
“When I got that letter… well, can you imagine? Here was this complete outcast kid who hadn’t been given any chances in life so far, who had just one dream, music, and I get this letter… I was beside myself with happiness. Like, ‘Wow, someone actually takes me seriously.’ Of course the record deal was ridiculous—they gave us the chance to be on a compilation and maybe do an EP—but for me that was the biggest thing in the world. So we worked like maniacs day and night on this music. In my apprenticeship I started failing really badly, because I wasn’t doing any homework. I would come home stinking from cooling liquor from the tool machines and go straight to the rehearsal room, play until midnight, walk back home from village to village through the forest, listen to the music at home, then try to get three or four hours sleep, then start again. I failed at school, the CEO of the company where I did the apprenticeship ordered my parents to come and try to forbid me to play music. My whole life became disorganized and catastrophic just because of this musical dream.”
While it might have been detrimental to his formal career prospects, this union with Noise soon gave fruit—initially in the shape of a 1984 compilation called Death Metal, which featured two rerecorded songs from the Satanic Rites demo (“Revelations of Doom” and “Messiah”) alongside contributions from fellow Noise Records bands Running Wild, Dark Avenger, and Helloween.
More importantly, the same year also saw the release of the EP Apocalyptic Raids, w
hich featured four songs recorded at the same session as the Death Metal tracks, including new numbers “Horus/Aggressor” and “Massacra,” a song that would end up being revisited by a wealth of black metal bands including Emperor, The Abyss, and Merrimack. Murky and primal in sound, the EP revealed its hardcore punk inspirations on fast-paced songs such as “Massacra”—particularly in the drumming, which featured a more primitive and idiosyncratic take on Discharge’s famous “D-beat”—while elsewhere featuring torturously slow and lingering passages, complete with pained screams, such as on the ten-minute-long “Triumph of Death.”
Hellhammer’s Apocalyptic Raids EP, released 1984.
“It was amazing to have an EP in our hands,” explains Tom. “Going to Berlin, into a real international recording studio, I mean none of us had any experience of that, it was totally mind-blowing. We came there as the mighty Hellhammer, this radical extreme metal band and pretended we knew everything… and we didn’t. We said, ‘We’re going to produce this EP blah, blah, blah,’ and of course it sounded horrible at the time. And even though it was great to have this in our hands, to have the test pressing, we got a phone call from the record label saying, ‘This sounds so terrible, we’re thinking of not releasing it.’ The subsequent reaction [after it was released] from the rock press was absolutely devastating, there was hardly anybody who loved it. So the EP was a huge step back for our credibility, even though for us it was the realization of a dream.”
Despite being utterly demoralized by this blow, Tom and Martin refused to let the opportunity they’d worked so hard for fall through their fingers and instead took desperate measures in order to keep their ambitions alive.
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 6