In 1978, in a Danish band called Black Rose, a singer born Kim Bendix Petersen put black and white paint on his face before a show. He has not stopped since. Almost half a century of it, through Mercyful Fate and through a solo career that outlasted the band twice over, and in all that time the thing on his face has changed meaning at least three times without him changing a brushstroke.
That is the problem with writing the history of the practice. The paint stayed roughly the same and the argument underneath it was replaced, twice, by people who had no interest in what the previous owners had used it for. What is now called corpse paint is not one tradition with a long descent. It is two traditions that happen to share a surface, and the second one was built specifically to insult the first.
Face paint before it meant a body
The rock and roll pre-history is well attested and it is not Norwegian. Screamin' Jay Hawkins was climbing out of a coffin in the fifties. Screaming Lord Sutch followed him. Arthur Brown, whose "Fire" went to number one in Britain and number two on the American charts in 1968, wore black and white paint under a burning helmet that began as an accident at the Windsor festival in 1967, when a colander soaked in methanol went up on his head and a bystander put him out with a pint of beer. Alice Cooper has said that watching Brown was like every Halloween of his childhood arriving at once.
The seventies turned the trick into an industry. Kiss played their first show on 30 January 1973 at the Popcorn Club in Queens and unveiled the four painted characters that March at a club in Amityville. Secos & Molhados were doing something adjacent in Brazil the same year. Klaus Nomi took it towards opera, Dave Vanian of the Damned took it towards the crypt, the Misfits took it towards the drive in, and Zal Cleminson of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band used it to look like a clown who had gone wrong. Every one of them was building a character. The paint announced a person who was not the person underneath, and the audience was invited to enjoy knowing the difference.
Metal inherited the trick intact. Petersen, by then performing as King Diamond, carried his version from Black Rose into Mercyful Fate, whose first EP landed in 1982. Hellhammer and Celtic Frost used something close to it in the same years, and so did a long tail of Brazilian, German and Canadian bands who had seen a photograph and liked it. None of them claimed the paint was anything other than theatre, because at that point it was not anything other than theatre.
The photograph that turned a costume into a specification
Formed in 1985 in Belo Horizonte by four musicians with nothing to lose and no scene worth the name to lose it to, Sarcófago assembled the uniform in one photograph and did it three years before anybody in Norway thought to. Wagner Lamounier had walked out of Sepultura in March 1985, leaving behind the lyrics to "Antichrist" on the Bestial Devastation EP and taking with him a conviction that the whole business needed to be pushed further. I.N.R.I. was recorded and released through Cogumelo in July 1987, with Eduardo Patrocinio hammering out blast beats at a length nobody had committed to tape before, and the picture on the reverse stood four men in white face paint, leather, forearm spikes, bullet belts and inverted crosses, photographed straight on with no wink anywhere in the frame.
What the picture removed is the interesting part. There is no character on that back cover, no name for the painted face, no persona to be dropped when the tour ends. Metal Storm has called them the first band with true corpse paint, and whatever one makes of the ranking, the functional break is real. Who exactly did it first is a question worth its own argument, and it gets one in corpse Paint vs KISS.
Dead made it a claim about a body
The man who finished the job did it with a sentence rather than a brush. Per Yngve Ohlin, born on 16 January 1969 in Västerhaninge, put together the Swedish band Morbid in early 1986 and cut the demo December Moon with them, then sent Mayhem a tape, a letter and a crucified mouse and was in the band by early 1988. He buried his stage clothes so they would rot before he wore them. He kept a dead crow in a bag and breathed it in before going on, on the grounds that the smell was part of the job.
It wasn't anything to do with the way Kiss and Alice Cooper used makeup. Dead actually wanted to look like a corpse.
Jørn Stubberud of Mayhem, quoted in Lords of Chaos, 1998
That is the whole hinge of the history, and it is a change of function rather than of appearance. Every painted face before Ohlin said look at what I have become for the next ninety minutes. His said look at what is left. The paint stopped being a mask over a performer and started being a face worked up to look like something recovered from water, and once one person had said it out loud there was no returning the practice to its previous owners.
Ohlin died on 8 April 1991. He was twenty two. Within a year the paint he had redefined was standard equipment across a scene that had barely existed while he was in it.
Eight years of a uniform
Darkthrone took the paint and the pseudonyms together in 1991, Gylve Nagell becoming Fenriz, Ivar Enger becoming Zephyrous and Ted Skjellum becoming Nocturno Culto, and then put out three records in three years that settled the question of what the image was for: A Blaze in the Northern Sky, cut in August 1991 and released by Peaceville in 1992, Under a Funeral Moon, recorded the following summer, and Transilvanian Hunger in February 1994. Nothing in that run is theatrical. The men in the photographs are not playing anybody.
By the middle of the decade the signal had done its work and started to fail from overuse, which is the fate of every signal that works. Emperor and Satyricon both put the paint down and said plainly why: a mark used by everybody marks nothing. Meanwhile the export version was doing extremely well without them. Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir carried painted faces onto major label budgets and European chart positions, Marduk and Gorgoroth carried them in the opposite direction entirely, and the same four square inches of greasepaint were now serving a nocturnal theatre act and an unholy one at the same time.
A mark used by everybody marks nothing. The people who invented it worked that out faster than the people who copied it.
What the paint means now
Formed in Uppsala in 1998 and never once photographed with a clean face, Watain returned the practice to its most literal reading, and they did it by going back past the paint to the things around it: animal carcasses on stage, blood poured over the front rows, a 2014 show at the Brooklyn Night Bazaar where enough of it went into the crowd that the story reached television. The band buries clothing. Ohlin buried clothing in 1990. Thirty five years of black metal separate the two gestures and there is not a millimetre of difference between them.
The awkward part is the reception. Lawless Darkness took a Swedish Grammis for best hard rock album in 2010 and The Wild Hunt went to number one in Sweden in 2013, which means a painted, blood soaked, openly Satanic band was collecting the same statuette as the country's pop industry. In September 2025 the band announced that their eighth record arrives on 20 September 2028 and that it will be the last. Even the refusal has a schedule now.
None of which settles what the paint is. It has been a character, a claim about a body, a uniform, a joke and a merchandise line, and it has been all five simultaneously since about 1997. The one thing it has never gone back to being is neutral, and that is the measure of what Ohlin did to it. For where the paint sits inside everything else the genre built, and what the rest of the code was doing while faces were being whitened, take the big picture.
