A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible.John Milton, Paradise Lost
By the end of the previous chapter thrash metal had a name, four flagship bands, major label money and a shape that everybody could hear. It also had a settled idea of what it was for: fast, tight, technically respectable music made by young men who wanted to be taken seriously as musicians. That version is American, and it is half of what happened between 1983 and 1990.
The other half was made in West Germany by people who had heard the same British records and drawn the opposite conclusion. Where the Bay Area wanted to play better, Essen and Gelsenkirchen wanted to sound worse, and the records that came out of that decision are the ones death metal and black metal would later build on. This chapter is about three bands, one label, one producer, a great deal of very cheap studio time, and the reason a teenager in Norway in 1990 owned In the Sign of Evil and not Ride the Lightning.
Coal, steel and nothing to do
The Ruhr is not a city. It is a hundred kilometres of towns that grew into each other around coal seams and blast furnaces: Duisburg, Oberhausen, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum, Dortmund, five million people and no centre. For a century it had made West Germany rich. By the early 1980s the coal was too expensive to dig, the steel was cheaper from Japan and Brazil, and the collieries and mills were closing one after another, taking with them the guaranteed job a boy in Gelsenkirchen had been able to assume since his grandfather's day. Essen's Zollverein colliery, whose Shaft 12 had been the showpiece of German mining since it opened in 1932, stopped producing coal on 23 December 1986.
Kreator formed in Essen in 1982. Sodom formed in Gelsenkirchen the same year, about fifteen kilometres up the road. Neither band came out of an art school or a college music department. Tom Angelripper of Sodom spent ten years as a blacksmith in the Hugo pit and did not leave it until 1989, when the money from Agent Orange finally made him a full time musician, and Mille Petrozza of Kreator was a teenager in a city where the visible future was a training place at a works that might not exist in five years. You can hear it. The German records are not angry in the American way, which is to say articulate and political. They are angry in the way of somebody hitting a wall.
Destruction, the third of the three, ruin the geography. They formed in 1982 in Weil am Rhein, at the far southwestern corner of the country where Germany, France and Switzerland meet, six hundred kilometres from the Ruhr and about ten from Basel. That distance matters twice: it put them outside the northern scene, and within a short train ride of the Swiss bands, Hellhammer and then Celtic Frost, who were making something equally ugly at the same moment. Teutonic thrash is a convenient label rather than a local scene. The third of its founders lived closer to Zurich than to Essen.
Berlin, Noise and the men with the contracts
What held them together was not a club. There was no Ruhr equivalent of the Berkeley room, no single stage where all of this was played every weekend. What held them together was the record business, and two companies in particular, both a long way from the Ruhr.
Noise Records was founded in Berlin in 1983 by Karl-Ulrich Walterbach as an expansion of his company Modern Music. Walterbach had come out of the Berlin punk scene, where he had run a label and a venue, and he approached metal with the instincts of a man who had sold hardcore singles by the boxful: cheap, fast, high volume, contracts written strictly in the label's favour. Bands who signed to Noise got released. Bands who tried to get out again found out what the contracts said. When Helloween's management moved the group directly to EMI in England in 1990, the sixteen cases that followed were decided by the German courts in Noise's favour and settled out of court after a two year fight. The roster he assembled between 1983 and 1987 is close to a map of European metal: Helloween, Running Wild, Grave Digger, Celtic Frost, Coroner, Voivod, Sabbat, Kreator, Tankard, Deathrow.
The label's calling card was a 1984 compilation with a title that arrived six years early. Death Metal, out in May 1984 and cut at the same Berlin studio the thrash bands would use, gave two tracks each to four bands, Helloween, Hellhammer, Running Wild and the otherwise unrecorded Dark Avenger, and none of it is death metal in any sense the phrase later acquired. What it did was to put Hellhammer's deliberate primitivism on the same piece of vinyl as Helloween's speed metal and let German teenagers decide which they preferred. A striking number of them chose the primitive one.
The other company was Steamhammer, the metal arm of SPV in Hanover, which signed Destruction outright and put Sodom's first EP out on a one off sublabel called Devil's Game, the parent imprint not wanting those lyrics under its own name, before taking the band onto Steamhammer proper. Between Noise and Steamhammer the whole first wave of German thrash was under contract by 1985, recorded in the same handful of rooms, on budgets that would not have covered a week of Metallica's studio catering.
Bands who signed to Noise got released. Bands who tried to get out again found out what the contracts said.
Three bands, three first records
The first of them to reach a shop was Destruction's Sentence of Death, recorded at Caet Studio in Berlin in September 1984 with Wolfgang Eichholz producing and released by Steamhammer on 10 November that year. It runs nineteen minutes and thirty-three seconds, opens with a song called "Total Desaster", and sounds like a rehearsal room with the door left open. Malcolm Dome gave it two and a half out of five in Kerrang!; Metal Forces gave it eight out of ten. Both scores were correct about different things.
Two months earlier and a few streets away in the same city, Sodom had cut In the Sign of Evil at the same studio, in October 1984, again with Eichholz at the desk. It came out in January 1985 on Devil's Game, and it is the most extreme record anybody in Europe had made outside Switzerland. The band could barely play. Tom Angelripper's bass and voice arrive as one distorted event, Witchhunter's drumming is a controlled fall down a staircase, and "Blasphemer", "Burst Command Til War" and "Sepulchral Voice" are not songs so much as speeds. Every anthology of the first wave of black metal contains it, and the reason is not the inverted crosses. It is that the record sounds possessed rather than performed.
Destruction's first album, Infernal Overkill, followed on 24 May 1985, self-produced at Caet, thirty-nine minutes long and a large step up in competence: Mike Sifringer's riffs have shape, Schmier's shriek has become an instrument he can aim, and "Bestial Invasion" and "Death Trap" are structured songs rather than accelerations. Kreator's Endless Pain was recorded at the same studio in March 1985 with Horst Muller producing and released by Noise that October. Its oddity is the vocals: Mille Petrozza and the drummer Jurgen "Ventor" Reil split them roughly down the middle, so the album keeps changing throats mid-record, one a rasp and the other a bark, while Rob Fioretti's bass holds the bottom. Nobody would call it well made. It is also the fastest thing released in Europe in 1985.
1986, the year the Germans went past everyone
Three records appeared in 1986 that settled the argument about what German thrash was. The weakest is the most notorious. Sodom's Obsessed by Cruelty came out on 7 May in two different versions, one recorded at Tonstudio Hiltpoltstein for Steamhammer in Europe, the other at Casablanca Studio in Berlin for Metal Blade in America, so for years the album a listener knew depended on which side of the Atlantic he bought it. Neither version is good: the drums sound like cardboard and the guitars are buried, Uwe Christophers on the European pressing and Michael "Destructor" Wulf on the American one. It sold anyway, because in 1986 there were not many places to get music this violent.
Destruction's Eternal Devastation, recorded in April 1986 at Studio Hiltpoltstein with Manfred Neuner and released on 12 July, is the opposite: the sound of a band suddenly deciding to be excellent. "Curse the Gods" is the best song any of the three had written to that point, and the record has an internal clarity, riff into riff into solo, that the earlier ones lacked. It was the last with the drummer Tommy Sandmann.
Then, in November 1986, Kreator released Pleasure to Kill, which is the point of this chapter. It was made at Musiclab in Berlin with Harris Johns and Ralf Hubert producing, runs thirty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds, and is played at a tempo that in 1986 had no precedent outside Possessed. "Ripping Corpse", "Death Is Your Saviour" and the title track are built from tremolo-picked riffs that do not resolve, over drumming from Ventor that frequently loses and regains the beat inside the same bar. Petrozza's voice had settled into the throat-tearing rasp he still uses. The lyrics are gore rather than politics, the mix is a wall, and there is no melody anywhere on it, deliberately.
The important thing about Pleasure to Kill is not that it is fast. Slayer had been faster in places. It is that everything on it, the vocal, the guitar tone, the drumming, the refusal of choruses, points away from heavy metal and towards two genres that did not exist yet. Death metal bands in Florida and Sweden name it. So do black metal bands in Norway. It is one of the very few thrash albums that sounds like a beginning rather than a peak.
Why the German records sounded rawer
It is tempting to explain the difference by temperament, and people do, usually with a joke about Germans. The real reasons are duller and more convincing, and anyone reading our complete thrash history in order will have seen most of them coming.
The inheritance was different. The Bay Area bands grew out of the melodic end of the British new wave, Diamond Head and Angel Witch, and they kept the twin-guitar harmony that came with it. The German bands grew out of Venom, Motorhead and Hellhammer, three acts whose entire proposition was that competence was optional and atmosphere was not. Nothing in that lineage tells a young band to tighten up.
The money was different. Master of Puppets was made over four months in Copenhagen on Elektra's account. Pleasure to Kill was made in a Berlin room on a Noise budget, and Persecution Mania was recorded in twenty days. When you have twenty days you keep the first take, and the first take is where the danger lives. The German records are full of small disasters nobody could afford to fix, and those disasters are now the reason people love them.
| Record | Band | Released | Studio | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentence of Death | Destruction | 10 Nov 1984 | Caet, Berlin | Wolfgang Eichholz |
| In the Sign of Evil | Sodom | Jan 1985 | Caet, Berlin | Wolfgang Eichholz |
| Endless Pain | Kreator | Oct 1985 | Caet, Berlin | Horst Muller |
| Eternal Devastation | Destruction | 12 Jul 1986 | Hiltpoltstein | Manfred Neuner |
| Zombie Attack | Tankard | Jul 1986 | Musiclab, Berlin | Harris Johns |
| Pleasure to Kill | Kreator | Nov 1986 | Musiclab, Berlin | Harris Johns, Ralf Hubert |
| Terrible Certainty | Kreator | 22 Sep 1987 | Horus, Hanover | Roy Rowland |
| Persecution Mania | Sodom | 1 Dec 1987 | Musiclab, Berlin | Harris Johns, Sodom |
| Release from Agony | Destruction | 1 Dec 1987 | Karo, Munster | Kalle Trapp |
| Agent Orange | Sodom | 1 Jun 1989 | Musiclab, West Berlin | Harris Johns |
| Extreme Aggression | Kreator | 19 Jun 1989 | Music Grinder, E.Q. Sound, Cherokee, Hollywood | Randy Burns |
| Coma of Souls | Kreator | 6 Nov 1990 | Eldorado, Image, Hollywood | Randy Burns |
The rooms were different, and one man is most of that story. Harris Johns worked out of Musiclab in Berlin and recorded, among many others, Kreator, Sodom, Tankard, Voivod, Coroner, Helloween and Celtic Frost. His method was to capture a band rather than correct it, and the sound is instantly identifiable: dry drums, guitars with the top end left on so the picking hand is audible, vocals sitting in the mix rather than on top of it. American thrash of the same period is smoothed and compressed. A Johns record sounds like a room with people in it who are slightly out of control.
The language was different too. All three bands sang in English as a second language, which stripped their phrasing down to consonants and stresses. There is very little vowel in a Sodom vocal. What is left is rhythm and threat, which is exactly what the next two genres wanted.
And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic Mills?
William Blake, Milton
Beer, Aachen and the second tier
The fourth member of what German magazines eventually called the Big Four came from Frankfurt and refused the entire premise. Tankard formed in 1982 and decided early that since they were never going to out-blaspheme Sodom, they would sing about drinking instead. Zombie Attack, recorded in June 1986 at Musiclab with Harris Johns and released that July on Noise, is a genuinely fast thrash record with a cartoon on the front; Chemical Invasion followed in October 1987 and is better. Andreas "Gerre" Geremia has one of the great unpretty voices in the genre, and the band's refusal to grow up has now outlasted most of the serious ones. There is an argument, made mostly in Frankfurt, that being the joke band was the most sustainable career decision anyone in German thrash took.
Below the four there was a second tier deep enough to have carried a scene on its own. Holy Moses came out of Aachen, had existed since 1980, and were fronted by Sabina Classen, whose vocal on Finished with the Dogs in 1987 is as harsh as anything a man was doing that year and predates by a decade the idea that this was unusual. Deathrow, from Dusseldorf, started in 1984 as Samhain and made three albums for Noise; the third, Deception Ignored, cut at Musiclab in December 1988 and released the following June, abandoned brute speed for something angular and technical that almost nobody bought and that Voivod listeners would have recognised at once. Assassin, also from Dusseldorf, put out The Upcoming Terror in 1987 on Steamhammer, a record whose title tells you the level of the lyrics and whose riffs do not care. Vendetta from Schweinfurt recorded Brain Damage with Harris Johns at Musiclab in June 1988 and Noise put it out that December, the best German thrash album almost nobody owns. Living Death, from Velbert, had been going since 1980 and kept Thorsten "Toto" Bergmann at the front from 1981 to 1989, a singer who pitched himself higher than anyone else in this chapter and who is, depending on the listener, the funniest or the most frightening thing in it. Exumer from Wiesbaden made Possessed by Fire with Harris Johns and released it on Disaster in November 1986, lost the singer Mem V. Stein before Rising from the Sea the year after and was finished by 1991.
There is an argument, made mostly in Frankfurt, that being the joke band was the most sustainable career decision anyone in German thrash took.
Persecution Mania to Coma of Souls
Everything above was made by amateurs. Between 1987 and 1990 all three of the main bands learned to play, and the interesting question is what each of them lost in the process.
Sodom gained the most. The arrival of the guitarist Frank "Blackfire" Gosdzik in 1987 turned a shambles into a band, and Persecution Mania, recorded at Musiclab between 2 and 22 October 1987 with Harris Johns and released on 1 December, is the record where Angelripper's project becomes music without becoming polite. "Nuclear Winter", "Electrocution" and "Bombenhagel" have riffs a Bay Area band would have been happy with, played with a viciousness no Bay Area band could reproduce. The lyrics turned from occultism to war, which is where they stayed.
Agent Orange, recorded in March and April 1989 at Musiclab in West Berlin with Johns and released on 1 June, took that further and sold. It is a Vietnam record made by men from Gelsenkirchen who had never been near Vietnam, and it works because the war it is really about is the one that had closed the pits at home. It reached number 36 on the German album chart and sold a hundred thousand copies in Germany. Blackfire left for Kreator immediately afterwards, which tells you something about how Noise and Steamhammer money compared.
Destruction went the other way. The Mad Butcher EP in 1987 was a holding action; Release from Agony, recorded that September at Karo Studio in Munster with Kalle Trapp and released on 1 December, added a second guitarist in Harry Wilkens and a quantity of dissonance and tempo change that pushed the band close to progressive metal. It is their most accomplished record and their least loved, and within two years Schmier was out, replaced for 1990's Cracked Brain by the Swiss singer Andre Grieder. The band spent the nineties in a form most of its audience declines to acknowledge.
Kreator simply got bigger. Terrible Certainty, cut at Horus Studio in Hanover with Roy Rowland and released on 22 September 1987, is the transitional album: the songs have edges now, and the production is clean enough to hear them. Then Noise sent the band to America. Extreme Aggression was recorded in Hollywood early in 1989 with Randy Burns, the producer of Seven Churches, came out on 19 June through Noise in Europe and Epic in the United States, and got Kreator onto MTV, where the video for "Betrayer", partly filmed at the Acropolis in Athens, went into rotation on Headbangers Ball. Coma of Souls, again with Burns in Hollywood, released on 6 November 1990 with Blackfire in the line-up, closes the decade with "Terror Zone" and is the last Kreator album before the band began pulling itself apart on purpose.
What Norway heard
By 1990 the German scene looked finished in the same way the American one did. The four had made their best records, the second tier was folding, and the audience was drifting towards Seattle or towards the harder thing Florida and Stockholm were selling. What nobody in Essen knew was that the earliest and worst-sounding German records, the ones the bands themselves were slightly embarrassed by, had been going out by post to teenagers in Scandinavia who took them very seriously indeed.
The first wave of black metal is usually listed as Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, and then In the Sign of Evil and Sentence of Death. Those two are on every version of the list, and their traces in early Norwegian music are not subtle: the treble-heavy guitar with no bottom end, the vocal delivered as a hiss rather than a shout, the preference for atmosphere over arrangement, the refusal to sound like a professional recording when a professional recording was available. Mayhem's Deathcrush, cut at Creative Studio in Kolbotn in February and March 1987 and released that August on the band's own Posercorpse label, is a thrash record before it is anything else, down to the Venom cover at the end of it. Darkthrone arrived from the other direction and later. They formed in 1986, made a death metal album in Soulside Journey, and only turned in the early nineties, and the names they gave for that turn were Bathory and Celtic Frost rather than anything from Essen.
The mechanism was the tape network from the first chapter, still running and now carrying vinyl as well as cassettes. Sodom and Destruction had made their debuts at the exact moment a system existed to carry them to anyone who wrote a letter, and both records were short, cheap and easy to copy. What the Norwegians took was not riffs. It was permission: proof that a record could be released, reviewed in Kerrang! and treated as real while sounding as though it had been made in a cellar by people who did not care whether you liked it.
That is the German contribution, and it is larger than the sales figures suggest. The Bay Area gave thrash its craft and the Big Four gave it its audience. Essen and Gelsenkirchen gave it the exit door, and the bands who went through it invented two genres on the other side. The next chapter follows the same postal system out to Sao Paulo, Vancouver and everywhere else a padded envelope could reach, in the chapter that finishes the thrash story abroad.
