Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “Martin and I have always been very honest, we never tried to trick ourselves to believe something that wasn’t true. At the time Hellhammer was completely beside the sound that everyone was looking for. Martin and I realized that, and we became afraid that we would lose the record deal that was such a dream for us. We were thinking of how to avoid this and realized we needed to completely overhaul what we were doing. By now the first Slayer album had come out and the first Exciter album had come out and Metallica were much bigger, Megadeth and Metal Church were coming out and here we were with this EP, a million miles from the standards being set in America. Radical as we were, we said, ‘Instead of trying to reinvent the band a million times, let’s start from scratch,’ and on the night of May 31, 1984, Martin and I sat together in my room and spent the entire night drawing up the concept for the band, making it as detailed as possible. We designed three albums; we said what the covers would be, the song titles, what the lyrics would be about, we said what kind of photos we would choose for each album, we said how these could be promoted… everything. We put this in a handmade book—this was well before desktop publishing, so we wrote it all down with a typewriter and sketches—then sent it by snail mail to Berlin and said, ‘Hellhammer no longer exists, this is Celtic Frost and we’d like to take over the record deal with this new band.’ And we thought they would never go for it. But to my huge surprise, once they got our little presentation they called me and said, ‘You don’t have to do a demo, let’s go for a mini-album. The whole thing sounds convincing.’ So on June 1, essentially—and retroactively—Celtic Frost was born.”

  Seeing in the new year with leather, bullet belts and big sunglasses: Hellhammer, January 1st, 1983. Steve Warrior, Bruce Day and Tom Warrior. Photo: Andreas Schwarber.

  And as of that night, after two short years of existence, Hellhammer was dead. Not only did all activities cease, but for many, many years the band’s ex-members did all they could to distance themselves from the project, frequently dismissing it as little more than youthful folly.

  “For me, Hellhammer would always inevitably be connected to the circumstances of my private life as a youth,” Fischer explains. “I had finally freed myself from the world my mother had created where I was completely helpless, and I really did not want to be reminded of that for many years. For decades I pushed that era aside. I did not want to have anything to do with Hellhammer, even in a lighter sense. I was very glad to leave this behind and be in Celtic Frost and be a contemporary and not have to think about why Hellhammer really existed. It was only as I approached my forties that I began to be able to assess that time realistically.”

  Eventually Tom, and his ex-Hellhammer bandmates, learned to not only accept Hellhammer but even celebrate it, and in 2009 the band’s complete discography was released in a collection entitled Demon Entrails. The following year saw a lavish book about the band released, entitled Only Death Is Real. Having now come to terms with the work and events of his past, Tom acknowledges just how significant those years were in shaping the man and musician he is today.

  “I’m a self-confident, grown-up musician now, who’s been in the music industry for quarter of a century, and I think there’s a point where you have to stop making excuses, be an adult and take responsibility for your own actions. On the other hand, I cannot deny that the background I experienced as a kid has completely affected every detail of my life, my entire outlook, my infinite hatred for mankind, my radically violent reactions nowadays when someone looks at me even slightly the wrong way. Every time that happens a movie plays in my head… back then I was a little kid who wasn’t able to defend himself and as soon as I became an adult that turned completely and I would punish the person who exerted this on me by putting all the anger that had accumulated over all these years on that one person.”

  “It is not an act, my lyrics are not an act, unlike so many who adopt a certain image to look evil. My music has never been that, it’s always been very honest, and is a reflection of my background. So I’m very torn between the intellectual who thinks it’s time to be different and the radical metal musician who almost enjoys that side of me. That’s the world I’ve created for myself, that’s the sanctuary I found. I once was pushed into that world, and I was pushed so radically that I eventually started loving this world. I found myself in there and that world was darkness, it’s become my life, my personality and vice versa.”

  6

  CELTIC FROST

  “To me this band is out of this world, the way Tom G. Warrior makes the riffs and puts the notes together is totally unlike other people. I’m lost for words, let’s just say that on every album we did there has been something of Celtic Frost there.”

  —Fenriz (Darkthrone)

  “They were a great influence because that was a hard rock/metal band that did things a different way, that created a unique style and aesthetics. And it’s wicked, and it’s bad, and moody, and dark and all that.”

  —Snorre Ruch (Stigma Diabolicum/Thorns)

  IF HELLHAMMER was the direct result of restrictions placed upon the musicians within it at the time, then Celtic Frost (which is pronounced, contrary to popular opinion, with a hard “c”) was a band that actively avoided limitations wherever possible. In fact, as a direct result of the negative experiences with their previous band, Tom and Martin worked actively from the very beginning to avoid being pigeonholed or cornered creatively, a stance that directly influenced the choice of band name.

  “This was the time of the Metallicas and Megadeths,” smiles Tom, “and we wanted a name that wasn’t so ‘cliché-metal.’ Hellhammer had a name that completely defined our music, so we wanted a name that gave us total artistic freedom, that didn’t sound metal, that didn’t sound anything, so we could incorporate whatever we wanted into our music, from jazz to opera. We wanted the name to represent our lyrics—basically the apocalypse—and chose a civilization, the Celts, as we ourselves had Celtic backgrounds, and ‘frost’ which symbolized the end of the year, the end of a civilization, the end of a cycle. But a new cycle arises after the winter, just as with all civilizations. It was a very symbolic name.”

  The band’s first effort was the groundbreaking mini-album Morbid Tales, recorded as a trio with Tom, Martin, and session drummer Steven Priestly, and released midway through 1984. While the band might have been doing their utmost to distance themselves from their past, this collection of songs suggested that Frost still had much in common with the band from whose ashes they had risen. Tracks such as “Into the Crypt of Rays” and “Procreation (of the Wicked)” might have boasted a far tighter, chunkier and more professional sound than anything recorded by Hellhammer, even introducing a hint of groove to the mix, but they were nonetheless clearly cut from the same cloth.

  The newly formed Celtic Frost in June 1984: Original drummer Isaac Darso, Tom G. Warrior and Martin Eric Ain. Photo: Martin Kyburz.

  All the same, Celtic Frost were clearly also utilizing a much wider spectrum of influence, including that of gothic rock acts such as Bauhaus and Christian Death, and were already beginning to demonstrate the decidedly innovative approach to songwriting (evident in the restrained but notable use of violin and female vocals) that would increasingly earn them the “avant-garde metal” tag. The record was followed in early 1985 by Emperor’s Return, an EP that continued where its predecessor left off and saw the introduction of a permanent drummer Reed St. Mark, real name Reid Cruickshank.

  “It was still very difficult to find a studio drummer in Switzerland who would believe in our music and there were only so many drummers in the country to begin with,” Tom recalls. “We heard all these great drummers coming out of America, and even though we didn’t know how to pay for an American drummer—his flight and accommodation—we were like, ‘Maybe we need an American drummer, we won’t find a drummer in Switzerland who will match these guys, and these guys are our competition.’ Our record label knew of a drummer who was staying in the country, who had played briefly in
another Swiss band and was about to head back to America. They met him in a record store and said, ‘If you’re looking for a new gig, there’s a band called Celtic Frost who are looking for a drummer.’ In February or March of 1985 we finally hooked up and heard him play. We were in awe, he played like all these drummers we’d heard on American albums and we knew we had to have this guy, whereas he was quite bewildered by our appearance and by our music. But he needed a new gig, so he decided to give it a chance against his better judgment.”

  Vocally, Tom’s wonderfully distinct, almost alien handling of words continued to define the group’s sound, and as in Hellhammer he peppered his vocals with unexpected bursts of enthusiasm, often throwing in a “hey,” or, more famously, an “uuuuuurgh!” The latter would become something of a trademark, and in metal circles has become fondly known as the “death grunt,” appearing innumerable times in later metal and black metal recordings, a sign of the band’s profound influence.

  “I never personally said that I created the death grunt, it was I think Xavier Russell of Kerrang! who said that, but of course it’s not true,” smiles Tom. “I first heard the ‘death grunt’ when I was a child, when I heard James Brown in the early seventies. During the seventies a lot of hard rock bands would do that as well, then NWOBHM bands like Diamond Head, Iron Maiden, and even Motörhead, I simply picked up on that. On the first Iron Maiden single there was a death grunt and we thought that was so unbelievably cool. Maybe I took it to a different level, maybe that’s the credit I deserve.”

  Just as Celtic Frost’s music was evolving from the Hellhammer template, so the lyrics and imagery expanded on earlier preoccupations, most notably the dominant occult and anti-religious themes.

  “Everything I do in music basically comes from my private life—my life and my music are one, you cannot separate the two,” says Tom earnestly. “I carried with me a tremendous hatred for organized religion ever since I was a child. I found it at best ridiculous, and at worst very dangerous and short-sighted. The older I got and the more I read about it and experienced it firsthand, the more the hatred I had for that mechanism increased. That includes all organized religion, not just the Catholic church, but even including Satanism. I’m an extremely unreligious person and Martin and I would spend hours, days, weeks, months, discussing certain topics in infinite detail and trying to pick up occult or religious or historic literature that would answer our questions.

  “Occultism had always interested me and at times in Hellhammer and Celtic Frost we got a lot of first-hand experience of all that because our extreme music and lyrical topics attracted a lot of very serious people from both sides of the line: Catholic religious fanatics, national socialist Satanists, and everything in between. Some of those would want to literally kill us and some would try to turn us to their direction, it was a very weird time and it frequently still happens actually. At one point we had problems with a local grotto of Satanists that tried to infiltrate Hellhammer to convey their message. Since they also had National Socialist tendencies Martin and I completely blocked them off, which infuriated them no end, and they made very serious death threats. I’m actually friends with these people nowadays, and even though I disagree [with their ideas] I have to really deeply respect them. I respect a lot of radical people simply because they didn’t wimp out and cut their hair and become normal citizens, what can I say?”

  Adorned in an iconic H.R. Giger painting entitled Satan I, featuring a multi-headed devil using a crucifix as a slingshot, the band’s 1985 debut full-length is certainly saturated in such occult and irreligious concerns. Entitled To Mega Therion, it was an opus that would prove to be a true milestone in the development of both black metal and extreme metal as a whole. Crushingly heavy, it retains an aggressive and muscular sound as well as the familiarly choppy, rhythmic approach to riff writing, but compliments the metal content with apocalyptically grandiose—even pompous—orchestral touches, in particular the eerie use of French horn courtesy of the memorably named Wolf Bender. Careful use of female vocals adds a further level of drama and only helps to increase the overall effect of eclecticism, something which owed much to the band members’ musical upbringing.

  “It was part of the music we grew up with,” Tom replies simply. “The record collection of my parents was very eclectic—classical, jazz, The Beatles—and Martin had a background with a lot of new wave and a lot of church music. We were never a ‘small town-minded’ heavy metal band, we were always fascinated by music. We didn’t want to adhere to some invisible border that heavy metal bands had set for themselves, like, ‘You can’t have a keyboard on an album,’ and all the crap that was being said back then. We always felt it was about the music, and we thought it was much more courageous to be a musician and try to make an eclectic album, rather than adhere to a list of things you cannot do. We had a violin and female vocalist already on Morbid Tales, and the bigger the budgets became and the more experienced we became as musicians, the more we incorporated that.”

  Curiously, Martin was not present on the album due to another brief hiatus, and was temporarily replaced on bass duties by one Dominic Steiner, who had previously played in a glam outfit called Junk Food. In something of a nod to the past, To Mega Therion also includes an appearance by Hellhammer co-founder Steve Warrior, on the instrumental number “Tears in a Prophet’s Dream.”

  “Steve did a very short-lived musical project after Hellhammer, a fake Icelandic band called Køtzen,” Tom explains. “It was more of a joke than a real band but there was one track on the demo which we all felt was fantastic and we asked him if we could use it as a basic track and then build lots of stuff on top of it. Steve actually stayed on with Celtic Frost as a member of the road crew, but he had changed massively and moved in different circles by that time and there was a very unfortunate incident where the rest of the road crew didn’t want to work with him anymore and we had to let him go. He used to be one of my best friends but we simply moved into completely different directions.”

  Translating as “The Great Beast,” the title “To Mega Therion” was a biblical phrase adopted by occultist Aleister Crowley, an individual whose influence would surface throughout the band’s career. All the same, Tom is quick to point out that the man once dubbed “the most wicked man in England” wasn’t the only inspiration for the album’s title.

  Never understated: An advert/promo sheet for Celtic Frost’s 1984 debut Morbid Tales. During this period Prowlin’ Death Promotion/Management represented bands such as Hirax and Drifter, as well as Celtic Frost.

  “I had discovered his work through Martin, and Martin had discovered his work through the grotto of Satanists in Switzerland. Martin was briefly involved with a female member of that grotto, she was his first girlfriend, and he picked up a lot of things that inspired him from that period, that being one of them. I had known about Crowley but didn’t involve myself really until Martin brought it closer to me. But though certain references are obvious within Celtic Frost, in song titles or album titles, you often have to read between the lines. We often liked to play with associations and a lot of things had a completely different meaning to us. To Mega Therion is ‘the great beast’ of course, and for us that had many other meanings both from our own small universe, like the record company, to more global social issues, like our watching of the social system on the planet and human behavior, which often frustrated us.”

  Frustration was sadly an emotion that largely defined this period of Celtic Frost, and though the band were undoubtedly more warmly received than Hellhammer, they still frequently met with prejudice.

  “Hellhammer was such a hated band in the early eighties it made it extremely difficult for Celtic Frost to be given a chance,” he sighs. “For the first two albums we had this huge rock tied to our ankles—whenever we went to an interview or a record label or promoter, everyone would say, ‘Oh, it’s the Hellhammer guys, they can’t play and it’s crap,’ and it was an extremely difficult start for Celtic Frost. Our rec
ipe to avoid this was to distance ourselves radically from Hellhammer; if you read period interviews, Martin and I are very often distancing ourselves just to get a chance with Celtic Frost, so people would recognize that we wanted to do something better. It took many years for Celtic Frost to be taken seriously. It began when we released Into the Pandemonium in 1987—that was basically our breakthrough album and the one where we started to get respect.”

  A revolutionary and highly influential effort, Into the Pandemonium would prove to be an even more bold and diverse effort than To Mega Therion. Taking the experimental streak even further, the album rarely stands still stylistically, shifting from upbeat hard-rock-tinged thrash (for example “I Won’t Dance” or the Wall of Voodoo cover “Mexican Radio”) to industrial/electronic efforts (“One in Their Pride”) to deeply melancholy metal numbers such as “Mesmerized” and even, perhaps most provocatively, a classical piece with French female vocals, “Tristesses de la Lune.” Deeply haunting and epic in tone for the most part, the album also upped the orchestral ante thanks to a legion of session musicians, an addition that wasn’t without its challenges.

  “Hardly any [metal] bands had ever used classical musicians,” says Fischer. “None of us could write scores, so we had to enlist an arranger and he arranged a mini orchestra for the studio. These guys came in and said the same old story: ‘What you guys are playing, it’s noise, not music.’ They were very reluctant to even try it, especially when they learnt that none of us could conduct, none of us could write scores and that we were mediocre musicians. They laughed at us, they didn’t realize they were taking part in something that was a pioneering album. And neither did we of course.”