Remarkably, Niklas was only twelve when the band formed in 1996, and reports that it was actually his grandmother who introduced him to the movement by showing him her record collection and acts such as Burzum. Though not too interested at the time, by fourth grade his friend Alexander had brought bands such as Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, and Deicide to his attention, and together the two boys soon formed a death metal band called Incinerate.
“Alex is partly English so was really good at the English language,” Niklas recalls. “I still remember the first line of the song we wrote. It was called ‘Necrophiliac Sarcasm’ and the lyrics were ‘Butchered by a maniac sixty years ago / sperms are flowing into the dead man’s mouth / raping an old man while he was lifeless and helpless.’ I wrote these lyrics down on my bench and that caused a big problem at school, I had to go to counselors and stuff.”
By sixth grade Incinerate had become Tyrant, inspired by blacker bands such as Marduk, Dissection, Mayhem, and Thorns. Thorns would become a key musical influence along-side fellow Norwegians Manes, Strid, and Burzum, the latter reintroduced to Niklas by Andreas “Leere” Casado of the notoriously disturbing Swedish black metal outfit Silencer. Armed with these new inspirations, he soon formed a new band with drummer Ted Wedebrand called Voorhees (named after the villain from the Friday the 13th films), which in turn would become Shining.
Niklas Kvarforth of Shining performing live in Norway, 2008. Photo: Ester Segarra.
“I was like, ‘What other name can we use?,’ maybe ‘Krueger’ but that didn’t sound too good—‘Hello we are Krueger from Sweden!’ So we were talking about different movies and at the same time I said ‘Shining’… I had a clear picture of what I wanted to do and I thought other people might not, so it became good to say, ‘What shines for me might not shine for you.’ So there were two meanings to it, the meaning it would have for me and it’s a great movie. Not a great book though—Stephen King hated the movie and said Kubrick had destroyed his vision. Fucking idiot. How the fuck can you hate anything by Stanley Kubrick, the misanthrope himself?”
Niklas was only thirteen when he recorded guitars and bass for Shining’s debut release (the 1998 Submit to Selfdestruction seven-inch), an opus he unleashed via his own label, Selbstmord (meaning “suicide”) Services. As the name of both record and label suggest, Shining was from the start very much an exponent of what has become known as “depressive” or “suicidal black metal.” This is perhaps unsurprising given the profound influence of Burzum and Strid and Niklas’ personal connections with Silencer (these three acts, alongside bands such as Germany’s Bethlehem and Abyssic Hate and Norway’s Forgotten Woods, having had a large part in creating this particular sub-genre).
“I labeled Shining, unfortunately, as ‘Swedish suicidal black metal’ and from there this suicidal black metal genre was born in a way,” Niklas explains. “But it was a huge mistake because I’ve never been good at explaining myself in the English language. The idea I had was something describing the melancholy and darkness and suicidal stuff in the human being and glorifying it. Not being like a kind of therapy but rather force-feeding people these ideals. Not a catharsis but to try to make them face the emptiness, the darkness, or whatever. Not just, ‘Oh I feel so bad about myself because my girlfriend left me.’ If I look at the bands that followed they have this self-pity which I was never interested in, even at thirteen.”
One could probably accuse the young Niklas of precociousness, and his social group was certainly somewhat unusual for a boy his age. “I was thirteen, but my friends were all like twenty-five years old,” Niklas explains. “I actually celebrated my thirteenth birthday at a twenty-three-year-old’s bar and got my first tattoos as a birthday present. It was pretty strange. I guess looking back it seems fucking hilarious, because I wouldn’t hang out with a thirteen-year-old today. I went to school until I was sixteen—I remember because when I was in eighth grade I gave the whole class Submit to Selfdestruction and they were like, ‘Hey, Niklas became a rock star.’” He laughs. “That’s pretty fucked up considering it’s worth one hundred euro now. Then I started working at a kiosk where I sold candy and listened to Strid and Thorns on headphones all day, reading porn magazines. I started my own label when I released the first Shining and got some money from this and I went to college for about three months, then worked full-time with the label and the band.”
Despite his youth, Niklas’ label would release some significant records, including the first two Shining albums, 2000’s Within Deep Dark Chambers and 2001’s Livets Ändhållplats (“Life’s Endingplace”), as well as releases by Craft, Ondskapt, Forgotten Tomb (an Italian act following a similarly suicide-fixated path), and the aforementioned Bethlehem, who were probably most famous for the outlandish and despairing screams of their first vocalist Andreas Classen. It was Classen whom Niklas recruited for Shining’s debut full-length, and along with Wedebrand and a bassist known only as Tusk, the four headed into Sweden’s famous Abyss Studios. Such a setting did not come cheap however, and financial hardship faced the young musician, who reportedly paid about 20,000 Swedish kroner to record the opus.
“We sent only to Misanthropy Records but they refused us and it was really hard,” Niklas recalls. “I was sitting on five hundred copies of a Bethlehem LP and didn’t sell them until years later when I started doing it more seriously and got a proper distribution network. [But there was] an old man that would pay me and my friend a lot of money to play poker for clothes, so that you were naked. He wanted us to piss in his mouth when he was in the bathtub and we got fifty euro, something like that. He always said we shouldn’t piss in his eyes but of course we did and we made swastikas on his wall in shit. He showed us child pornography, stuff like that, he was a really twisted old man but he made a lot of money selling moonshine to younger boys. We used to beat him up and steal his homemade liquor. I was thirteen when I met him, I was introduced by Robert who sang on the first Shining seven-inch.”
Though his childhood was certainly dramatically different from that of many other musicians, Niklas is quick to point out that he was happy during his youth, and doesn’t see it as the sole reason for the direction his life and art took. “We lived in a good house, I had good food, went out with older friends, it was a pretty good experience… Actually I had a lot of support from my grandmother, she loved what I was doing with the music and my mother was proud but very skeptical, she did not understand what I was doing. She didn’t have a lot of time. My dad was okay, he was just a criminal, nothing special, an idiot. But I didn’t have a bad upbringing at all, on the contrary I had a very good upbringing. I’m always hearing people complaining about their youth saying, ‘Oh I got fucked in the ass and it made me into a psychopath,’ but I don’t buy that. I went through a lot of shit too and I’m more thankful for that, because it made me open my eyes and see the world through a more realistic perspective. For me it was definitely a good thing, otherwise I would be another blind idiot on the street. To some extent we have to experience negativity to experience the good in life.”
While the events of his youth may not be entirely responsible for his character, they may partly explain why he seems to have been so ready for the darkness that the black metal scene offered. Another factor, however, was the onset of mental illnesses, and it is only recently that he has finally been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“At fourteen I actually went berserk with nunchucks,” he explains, “which ended up with me attacking and kicking my mother in the stomach so hard that she had to have an operation in her ovaries. My mother’s husband I attacked with a chain and big ball with spikes on it and then I got locked up for the first time in my life. I had a lot of mental problems which I only found out about last year, though I knew I had some problems in my head. My mother was in denial, my father didn’t know about it. It was when I moved at age nineteen that it really hit the fan and I had to go to emergency hospital because I attacked people with knives. I guess [my mother]
didn’t understand what mental illness does to you, she said, ‘You have to look after yourself and live a better life.’” He continues thoughtfully, “I think there are two reasons for it, firstly the mental problems I had since my very birth but also because of the fact that I was so into negativity, darkness, evil, and all this shit that in the end it swallowed me. Back then I was constantly glorifying madness and all these things [and] I think they grew onto me in a way. I think it’s a pretty common thing, people who are into this darker aspect of life get fucked over and become what they preach.”
Such themes dominated the band from the start, yet musically Shining were initially relatively conservative, utilizing a distinctly Burzum-esque template for the first two albums. 2002’s III—Angst—Självdestruktivitetens Emissarie (“Self-destruction’s Emissary”) saw the band edging away from their early sound however, the lineup also shifting, with Tusk replaced by his younger brother Alex, the aforementioned co-founder of Incinerate who now went by the name Phil A. Cirone. On drums was none other than Mayhem’s Hellhammer, while second guitars were handled by Håkan “Inisis” Ollars.
It was the follow-up, 2005’s IV—The Eerie Cold, that really saw the band refine their sound, introducing the style they are now known for, a compelling blend of black metal and doom, rock, blues, and classical. Though replacing Inisis with John Doe of Craft, Niklas still wrote all lyrics, and almost all the music. Seeking to break with the past somewhat, he now colored the songwriting with a much greater dynamic range and a far stronger emotional charge, utilizing a more intricate approach that included acoustic guitars, piano passages, film samples, and a definite sense of groove despite the more pronounced atmosphere of despair.
“For the first time I think we saw it as a full band and it was the first time we worked with a proper producer [Rickard Bengtsson],” Niklas reflects. “It was a strange time, I had a fiancée and we had a child and I tried to live my life with that. But I failed miserably.”
Trouble was indeed brewing. While the album no doubt expanded the fan base, it was the events of the following year that really put Shining—and Niklas himself—in the spotlight. In August 2006, a statement was posted online by the band stating that the frontman had been missing for four weeks and was feared to have killed himself. Furthermore, it explained, instructions had been left with the band that the forthcoming launch show would feature a new vocalist known as Ghoul, a stranger to the band chosen by Niklas as a replacement. Further rumors suggested that a friend of Niklas’ had been with him when he leapt off a bridge, apparently to his death in the waters below. In fact, Niklas simply relocated to Oslo during this time, working in a rock bar/club in town, while indulging himself, he explains, in sex, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin.
The launch gig did go ahead however, in none other than the band’s hometown of Halmstad. Ghoul turned out to be Niklas wearing a zombie outfit, though he maintains that the band only became aware of this on the night itself. During the performance he was sporadically joined by three of the individuals he’d spent time with in Oslo, namely Attila Csihar, Roger “Nattefrost” Rasmussen of Carpathian Forest, and ex-Mayhem frontman Maniac, who appeared with a swastika carved into his forehead and spent much of the show assaulting Niklas, even smashing a chair onto his back. For his part, Niklas handed out razors to the audience and even kicked a fan who dared touch him. Causing outrage in the Swedish media, the whole incident is believed by some to have been a publicity stunt (an accusation the vocalist denies) but whatever the truth, it gave the band a massive boost in attention.
“We had a pretty violent breakup, me and my fiancée, and I felt I had to leave Halmsted,” Niklas explains, “so I went to Norway and didn’t tell anyone. People thought I was dead. Then I wanted to play a trick on the other members by reappearing at the show when they thought it was Attila that was going to do the whole thing. It is true I jumped off a bridge into the water—I was walking with a really stupid guy and jumped off as a prank and he thought that I drowned, but obviously I didn’t, I just swam away. I went to Norway that night… We could have done the gig ten thousand times better of course and we got into huge fights after the show because the guitarists were very angry that I had not told them I was still alive. [The violence] wasn’t planned at all, I just told Maniac to do what he wanted to do … I told him that what we do on stage is not going to affect us—if he wants to beat me up, he can, I don’t care that much.”
Maniac had become a close friend by this point, Niklas not only staying with him in Oslo, but also joining his band Skitliv (“shit life”), an early demo of which was memorably titled Kristiansen and Kvarforth Swim in the Sea of Equilibrium While Waiting. Combining elements of black and especially doom metal with industrial touches, Skitliv has proved to be an engaging project and continues to feature both musicians, though Maniac undoubtedly remains the central figure.
Some girls gonna get hurt: A typically tasteful Shining promo shoot. Photo courtesy of Spinefarm.
“Mayhem were supposed to play in Stockholm when I was seventeen, it was the first time I was meant to meet Hellhammer,” recalls Niklas of his first meeting with Maniac. “I was just out of a mental facility so I was pretty shook up and on meds. I went backstage and then I started to cry, then I started to laugh, then I started to cry and then I started to laugh again. Hellhammer thought it was hilarious but Maniac hated me and I wanted to beat him up and he wanted to beat me up… Later when I moved to Norway I was working at Rock In, clearing up the dishes from outside and I saw Attila and he was like, ‘Hey man, what’s happening? I heard you were dead, I’m so glad to see you.’ We sat down and had a drink and he said Maniac is coming by and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to meet that fucking doofus,’ but then he came and told Attila he was starting a band called Skitliv. Attila said, ‘Oh you should talk to Niklas,’ ‘cos I had that tattoo which is where they took the logo from, and I became the guitarist of Skitliv and moved in with him.”
While Halmstad was surely the most noteworthy show, Niklas began to make a name for himself generally with performances that included self-mutilation and both sexual and violent engagements with attendees, the vocalist taunting and caressing audience and band members alike. It was around this time, in fact, that Niklas famously kissed Maniac on stage in London and Oslo, a move that genuinely horrified the more conservative elements of the black metal fanbase—a fact both participants were well aware of. However, provoking black metal fans is something Niklas clearly revels in.
“I am heterosexual and one of the most disgusting things is kissing a man,” Niklas clarifies. “But then if people think I like to have a big cock in my mouth it doesn’t really matter to me, ‘cos I know what I like. [In the Bible] it says ‘If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable,’ so if all these people with their inverted crosses talk about evil and Satan then they should glorify homosexuality and not whine like children who don’t get their toys for Christmas. What can I say? I think black metal in general is pretty weak. The only thing they do is talk, it’s very easy to sit behind a computer and talk about what is ‘true’ and what is not. Put these people in the Central Park in New York and see what happens after fifteen minutes, see how cool their studs and inverted crosses are then. They should try experiencing real life—if you want to experience real evil it’s not in the forest, it’s on every fucking street corner.”
It’s pretty hard to shock or offend a black metal audience these days, but Shining still seem to manage it: Photo: Ester Segarra.
While these years saw the band establish their reputation as one of black metal’s more confrontational acts, it also saw them back up their actions with their art. In fact, 2007’s V—Halmstad proved arguably the strongest record to date. By this point the lineup had changed completely, Hellhammer fired due to conflicting schedules and replaced by Ludwig Witt of stoner rockers Spiritual Beggars. A musician named Johan Hallander now handled bass, while Fredric “Wredhe” Gråby of
Ondskapt and Peter Huss were on guitars. Huss proved a particularly significant choice, being a highly talented player who favors the technically accomplished compositions of bands such as Megadeth and Guns N’ Roses, an act Niklas also favors.
V—Halmstad would clearly reflect such interests, maintaining the melancholy groove and black doom of its predecessor while adding plenty of intricacies, as well as the melody and accessibility of more commercial rock/metal music. It’s interesting to note that Huss is the only member on the album still with the band today and certainly the albums that have followed—2009’s VI—Klagopsalmer (“Hymns of Lament”), 2011’s VII: Född Förlorare (“Born Loser”), and 2012’s Redefining Darkness—have continued to hone the approach of Halmstad, combining aggressive and catchy black metal with elements of prog, doom, rock, and even pop. For Niklas, mainstream success is most certainly the goal of the group.
“I want Shining to be black metal’s version of [German pop rock act] Tokyo Hotel—or a black metal version of Opeth for that matter,” Niklas explains earnestly. “I want it to be big. I’ve always been inspired by [Swedish pop/rock outfit] Kent for example, who have been a huge inspiration since the second album, but I guess with the fourth album I felt now is time to leave the black metal scene and I wanted to distance myself from it as much as possible.”
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 49