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SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION

PRESENTS

e xt r e m e ly e xt r e m e

BLACK METAL

SPECIAL ISSUE [featuring]

IMMORTAL ^ BURZUM ^ VENOM DARKTHRONE ^ EMPEROR SATYRICON ^ ENSLAVED ROTTING CHRIST … and the stories behind their greatest records

d ec i b e l m ag a z i n e .c o m

NOTHING’S BLACKER THAN

METALLICA

LIVE AT GRIMEY’S In June 2008, Metallica took the stage at a super-secret show at The Basement below a record store in Nashville, belting out a blistering “Master of Puppets”, “For Whom The Bell Tolls and More.” Now out for the first time ever on CD and double 10” VINYL, exclusively at Metal Club stores. WWW.MYMETALCLUB.COM

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EXTREMELY EXTREME

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just words from the editor

OK, before you ask, “Where in

the name of all that’s unholy are Mayhem and Bathory?” let’s quickly go over the three rules for inducting a record into the Decibel Hall of Fame: The record must be at least five years old. (Check!) 2) The record must be considered an “extreme music classic,” as determined by Decibel’s staff. (Check!) 3) Decibel must interview every band member who played on the recording, and present each of them questions exclusively about the writing, recording, touring and overall impact of said album. (Uh-oh…) 1)

Now, while Decibel recognizes Deathcrush, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and, honestly, every Bathory release from “the band’s” self-titled debut through Blood Fire Death as undisputed pinnacles of the black metal genre, without directly speaking with the late Euronymous and Quorthon, articles on said releases would paint incomplete portraits at best. So, let’s focus on the pages that lie ahead—eight black metal Hall of Fame features, including three brand new, never-before-seen HOFs on Burzum’s Filosfem, Satyricon’s Nemesis Divina and Rotting Christ’s Thy Mighty Contract, plus a story on Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger previously only available in Precious Metal. It’s just the kind of light reading we know you all enjoy when you’re spending a lazy Saturday afternoon around the house plotting to once again burn Fantoft Stave Church to the ground, or just watering the plants.

—Albert Mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

Alex Mulcahy

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Venom, Welcome to Hell .................................................... 04 Rotting Christ, Thy Mighty Contract .................................. 12 Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse ..................................... 20 Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger .................................... 26 Enslaved, Frost ................................................................. 34 Burzum, Filosofem ............................................................ 42

To order by phone: 1.215.625.9850 (10 a.m. – 6 p.m. EST) To order by fax: 1.215.625.9967 To order online: www.decibelmagazine.com Decibel (ISSN 1550-6614) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $29.95. Periodical postage, Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia PA 19107.

Satyricon, Nemesis Divina ................................................. 48

Immortal, At the Heart of Winter ...................................... 56

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COVER PHOTO BY PETER BESTE

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story by adem tepedelen

Enter Satan the making of Venom’s Welcome to Hell

he decision to induct Venom’s debut, Welcome to Hell, rather than the band’s second album, Black Metal, came down to one simple fact: there would be no Black Metal—the album or the genre—were it not for Welcome to Hell. It may seem something of an obvious statement to make, but the success and the metal paradigm-changing impact of the debut really set the stage for a second album that, while excellent in its own right, gave little more than its name to a genre. Certainly, nothing musically on Black Metal is any more influential or, for that matter, particularly different than Welcome to Hell. What cannot be overlooked is the incendiary effect that this blasphemous debut had on an already white-hot metal scene. While other New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands were generally pursuing a more traditional path, content to draw influences from Sabbath, Purple, UFO, Priest and other ’70s heavies, Venom wanted to make the “devil’s music” truly evil. In 2010, seeing a goat’s head in a pentagram on the front cover of an album wouldn’t cause most metalheads to take a second look. Satanic/occult imagery has become an integral part of metal, particularly among certain subgenres. Such was not the case in late 1981 when Welcome to Hell was released. Sure, it sported the DBBMHOF exact same front cover image as the band’s debut single, “In League With Satan,” but the full extent of the wickedness in store was to be found on the back, where the Welcome to Hell band—Cronos, “Bulldozer Bass and Growls”; Mantas, NEAT, 1981 “Buzz Saw Guitars”; and Abaddon, “Drums and Nuclear Newcastle trio Warheads”—included this quote: “We are possessed by makes metal black all that is evil / The death of your God we demand / We spit at the virgin you worship / And sit at lord Satan’s left hand.” The evil vibe was furthered by song titles like the title track, “Sons of Satan,” “In League With Satan,” “Witching Hour,” “One Thousand Days in Sodom,” etc. It was, without question, the most blatantly wicked, quasi-Satanic metal album ever released up to that point. While others— Black Sabbath, Pentagram and KISS among others—flirted with these images and topics, Venom shoved them in our faces. And the Newcastle-based trio accompanied this imagery with an equally menacing racket that, while not exactly precise or tight, was well-suited to the overall vibe. This was an album recorded and mixed in six days, and it showed. But if we’re to consider some of the bands that drew inspiration from this unholy first effort—Slayer, Hellhammer, Mayhem and countless others—it’s not hard to see how dramatically this album, no matter how sloppily it was played, impacted the entire history of metal that followed. [4]

Venom,

PHOTO BY KEVIN HODAPP, FRANK WHITE PHOTO AGENCY

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5 d B

VENOM WELCOME TO HELL Cronos in chains You can’t spell Conrad without “rad”

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of Wallsend, which is a very industrial part of Newcastle, called Neat Records had a studio above it called Impulse, and all of these bands were recording there. We were kind of hanging out with these guys and hanging around with them. We weren’t particularly friendly, but were kind of hanging around as peripheral parts of the scene. CONRAD “CRONOS” LANT: Back in those days, it seemed like everybody was in a band. There was a lot of music stores and whenever you went into the music stores, there was a guy sitting there trying out new guitars. There was a very big interest in all things musical. Everybody just seemed to want to play music. It was all based around the heavy rock music. The punk scene had kind of been and gone. Nobody really took it that seriously; it was a shock thing. It wasn’t a musicians’ thing, something that people would aspire to. They did it really to piss their parents off.

What was the Newcastle scene like at the time?

Around about that time, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was just kicking off. Newcastle was pretty much at the center of all that. You had the London connection with Iron Maiden and people like that, but there was a hell of a lot of bands in Newcastle. There was a great, thriving metal scene, and practically all of the bands were on Neat Records—Raven, Fist, Tygers of Pan Tang, White Spirit. TONY “ABADDON” BRAY: The scene was pretty exciting. We’re an industrial city and I guess a lot of what we grew up believing were kind of punk attitudes. If you could play a sport well, like football, maybe that could get you out of the JEFF “MANTAS” DUNN:

doldrums. If you could play music, that could get you out of the day-to-day existence that you’d seen your parents go through. The country was going through a pretty bad economic time then. There were a lot of pit closures, there were a lot of steel mills closing down. People were pretty pissed, you know, and that kind of down feeling seeps down to everybody. The music scene was what was kind of helping. [There were] a lot of bands who were kind of before this New Wave of British Heavy Metal, bands like Raven, Tygers of Pan Tang, Fist. We kind of looked up to these guys because they were doing what they wanted to do. They were playing live—pretty shitty places—but they were playing live. They were creating music. A very small place in the middle B M HO F

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LANT: We weren’t, really, because we set our sights high from the word go. We wanted to put two drum kits together. We weren’t happy with one drum kit. We didn’t want just two 4 x 12” [cabinets]; we wanted like 200 4 x 12”s! Because we were so over the top, everybody was wagging their finger, like, Tut tut tut, you don’t do it like that. What you need to do is work hard, play the clubs, pay your dues. We never understood that. We used to look up to bands like KISS and fucking Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin. We didn’t look up to fuckin’ Motörhead, Sham 69 or the Sex Pistols. We weren’t looking up to some little bar bands who had 50 people in the crowd. We wanted a fuckin’ million people in the crowd. DUNN: We were pretty much the outcasts at the time. We weren’t liked—let’s put it that way—by the other bands in the area. I think the thing with that was just the fact that we sort of came off the back of the punk scene, and we were trying to do something different and not just be your standard sort of rock act. All the other bands far outweighed us in playing ability and technical skill and all this kind of stuff, but with us it was sort of right place, right time. BRAY: Initially, we weren’t accepted. We were called punks with long hair. At the time, some of the bands who were kind of pre-New Wave of British Heavy Metal kind of still saw themselves as hangovers from the ’70s. We were kind of outlawed a little bit. I don’t think we were striving to be fantastic musicians. We were striving to be a good band, and I don’t think some of the other bands really understood that and they used to look down their noses at us a little bit.

PHOTO BY KEVIN HODAPP, FRANK WHITE PHOTO AGENCY

How well was Venom accepted into the Newcastle scene initially?

Did you have the idea for the blatantly satanic imagery and lyrics from the beginning? LANT: Absolutely. Rock ‘n’ roll is the devil’s music. We’ve always said this. It was one of the cool things when we first met and we realized that we had the same ideas. We were in different bands originally. I was in a band called Dwarfstar originally when I met Mantas, and his band was called Guillotine. We met through girlfriends we were seeing and he told me that Guillotine were looking for a guitarist. I had kind of already gotten to the point with the guys in Dwarfstar where I realized they weren’t really serious about what we were doing. And Mantas sounded a lot more serious. So, I went along and had a practice with the guys and seen what the score was and thought that they were a lot more mentally where I [was] at. They wanted the big drum kits and the big backlines and all this sort of stuff. DUNN: The Venom logo was drawn by Abaddon. I remember way before Cronos joined the band we had the idea. Like every band, I suppose, at that point, we wanted to go out and shock people. That was a deliberate thing. We wanted to go out there and be brash and obnoxious and grab attention. We all had an interest. The satanic imagery and the changing of the names and everything, that was all planned. I remember showing up to rehearsals one day and I’m sure it was Abaddon’s mother or his auntie had embroidered or stitched this huge backdrop, and it was the pentagram. And that was our first backdrop. And obviously that became the cover of the first single, “In League With Satan,” and then Welcome to Hell. BRAY: We had it right from the beginning. We knew we weren’t going to by called by some Christian names. We were going to be known as single-word names. And the imagery was there right from the beginning. Right from early rehearsals. I used to take pyrotechnic powder to rehearsals and we used to rehearse with pyrotechnics. We used to blow shit up in halls and things and just see what it would do, with a view to one day putting it all together.

my system. I was able to ask the engineer, “Could you work for free and I’ll do extra hours in the studio?” So, I kind of had to bum the first demos. It wasn’t until after we’d recorded them that the record company started picking up their head and saying, “Oh, hold on a minute, this is very different—this could do something.” DUNN: We just bugged Neat Records constantly about releasing a record. They released “In League With Satan” with “Live Like an Angel,” and all of a sudden the thing exploded. And I’m convinced to this day that Neat Records just pressed up a few of those and put it out there waiting for us to just bomb [so they could] go, “OK, boys, now fuck off. You had your chance, now get the fuck out of here!” BRAY: We did the single first and that got great reviews. We got invited back to do what would have been our second set of demos. As we were walking upstairs with the equipment—I remember there was about eight flights of stairs, it was a horrible place to record in—and the guy from Neat Records stopped us halfway up the stairs and said, “Instead of just doing these demos that you’re going to do for the couple of days, why don’t you do all the songs you’ve got and we’ll make an album.” We were jumping up and down and thought, Oh yeah, great!

to Hell,” was actually written in the studio. That was essentially how the album came about. It was put out so quick, it was done so quick—you can see by the [“In League With Satan”] single cover, it’s the same as the album cover. It’s the same fucking cover just blown up to 12 inches. BRAY: Consequently, you’ve got two sides that come out of that [brief recording session]. One is that it’s a very frenetic album, a very hurried album. All the songs need to be demoed further. So, you’ve kind of got an album which a lot of people say it sounds like it wasn’t ready to be recorded. And you can say that, because it wasn’t. But also, because of that, because of the hurry-up values that came with it, and the excitement that was in it, it was full-on adrenaline. Knowing that you had such a short time to make your debut, what was the approach to recording the songs? DUNN: None of us had any technical knowledge of studios, so we just went in—in true Spinal Tap form—and turned everything up to 11 and recorded it. Looking back on it, production has come a long way in 30 years—with the digital age—but I think what you get from Welcome to Hell even now is the sense of a band just going for it and doing it live. And I think the one thing that has stood up and stood the test of time is the songs. It’s as simple as that. Putting the production values aside, at the end of the day it’s all about the songs. BRAY: From my point of view, most of the drum tracks were all done in one take. We kind of got in and blasted them down and thought, Well, this sounds exciting, this sounds good. The guitars obviously had a little bit longer [time to work]. A lot of these songs had been written before Cronos was in the band, but he changed lyrics and wrote different lyrics, so there was a writing process going on. LANT: The thing is, the songs had been played for about a year and a half at rehearsals up to that point. The songs were fine; we knew them backwards. We didn’t have anything to learn. The only overdubs were some vocals, some lead guitar overdubs and the secretary who came upstairs to read a psalm over the “Welcome to Hell” bit in the middle with the drum beats. But apart from some effects and things, there wasn’t much overdubs.

[After the album was released] when we were getting letters from fans–Yeah, we’re going to sacrifice the virgins–[the label] were all like, “What the fuck is this shit?!”

How did you get hooked up with Neat Records? LANT: Because I was actually working as like A&R [for Neat] and bringing all these other bands in, I [was] constantly badgering Neat: “I want my band in, I want my band in.” They’re like, “Shut up, kid.” They thought I wasn’t really serious. They thought it was just a case of, because I liked heavy music and because I was getting all these other bands in the studio, then I wanted some. So, I still say to this day that the only reason they let [Venom] in the studio was to kind of get it out of

C O N R A D “CRO NO S” LA NT So, what was to be a demo session basically turned into your debut album? LANT: The whole Welcome to Hell album, we were kind of tricked into that, because it was actually a demo session. When we had went to record the first three songs that we did [for the single], the record company had said, “Look, have you guys got some more songs?” And we said, “Yeah, loads.” So, they said, “Come in the studio and we’ll give you three days. Just record everything you’ve got and we’ll see if there’s a single or whatever in all that.” So, we spent three days recording Welcome to Hell. To us it was just an idea, it was demos, it wasn’t going to be an album or anything. And then the record company at that point gave us the ultimatum: either we’ll release that as it is, as the album, or we don’t get the deal. At the time, we were absolutely furious because we knew we could do better. DUNN: We were given three days in the studio and that was it. We had a few unfinished songs that we put together. The title track, “Welcome

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Was part of the instant appeal of this record simply the fact that it had such a raw feel that perfectly suited the material? DUNN: Absolutely. The evidence of that is, the first time we played Hammersmith Odeon, I remember running onstage and the front row was full of [4]