The First Wave: Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer and the Word Itself (1981-1987)

On 1 November 1982 a record called Black Metal reached British shops. Three men from Newcastle upon Tyne had cut it in seven days at Impulse Studios in Wallsend with Keith Nichol at the desk, Neat Records paid for it, and nobody who carried it home that week believed they had just bought a genre. They had bought a sleeve with a goat's skull on it and about forty minutes of noise.

The name came first. The music that would earn the name arrived nine years later, in another country, made by people who had been children when that sleeve was printed. That gap is the subject of this chapter, because everything now filed under black metal was assembled backwards, out of records that shared almost nothing except a refusal to sound competent.

Six acts carry the story between 1981 and 1987, in five countries, on five labels, and out of contact with each other for most of it. Venom in the north east of England, Bathory in Stockholm, Hellhammer and then Celtic Frost in the Swiss commuter belt, Mercyful Fate in Copenhagen, Sarcofago in Belo Horizonte. Play their records in sequence and the striking thing is how little they resemble one another. A theatrical Danish band with two trained guitarists and a falsetto has no business standing in the same lineage as a Brazilian quartet whose drummer treats the kit as an emergency. It stands there anyway, because a later generation went through these sleeves the way a scavenger goes through a battlefield and took only what it could carry.

A word carved on an empty reliquary

The three from Tyneside were not the first band to sing about the devil and they were not, by any measure a musician would accept, the best band doing it in 1981. Formed in Newcastle in 1979 out of the wreckage of two school groups, signed to a label that ran out of the same building as the studio it used, Venom made a virtue of everything a producer would have tried to fix: Conrad Lant's bass and voice arriving as one distorted event, Jeff Dunn's guitar mixed like a fire alarm, Tony Bray's drums falling forward through the bars. Welcome to Hell was recorded in three days in August 1981 and released that December, and the British weekly press treated its sound as an accident rather than a decision.

It was a decision. Lant had worked at Impulse as a tape operator before he was in the band, which is the detail that turns the record from incompetence into policy, and the sound he chased there was the loudest and dirtiest the room could be made to produce. A year later the follow-up put the two words on the front in block capitals, and that sleeve did what nine years of interviews could not.

Musically the record is a fast, filthy version of what British bands had been doing since 1979, which is why the argument over whether Venom were a thrash band at all has never been settled and never will be. Cronos has spent four decades saying the phrase described the lyrics and was never a manifesto. He is right, and it changes nothing. Names are not owned by the people who coin them. "Countess Bathory", "Buried Alive", "Don't Burn the Witch": teenagers in Bergen and Stockholm read that track list as a set of instructions.

A name was carved on an empty reliquary in Newcastle and carried around Europe for nine years before anybody found a body to put inside it.

Thirty-two hours in a Stockholm garage

The Swedish story runs on one person and a family business. Tomas Forsberg, who signed himself Quorthon, was seventeen when Tyfon Grammofon, the label his father Borje ran, needed a band to fill a gap on a compilation after another group withdrew. Bathory recorded two tracks in January 1984, "Sacrifice" and "The Return of the Darkness and Evil", and when Scandinavian Metal Attack appeared that March the label found that almost every letter arriving about the record was about the band that had been added last. Tyfon asked for an album.

Recorded on 14 June 1984 at Heavenshore Studio, a converted garage in Stockholm, and released on 2 October, the debut is the first record in this history that a Norwegian teenager could not have mistaken for heavy metal. There is no bottom to it and no warmth in it. The guitars sit above the register of the human voice and stay there, thin as wire, and "Hades" and "In Conspiracy with Satan" go past without a single passage anyone could call a hook. The first pressing was one thousand copies. It was gone inside two weeks.

What Quorthon did over the following three years is why he, and not Venom, is the technical father of the genre. The Return......, cut at Electra Studios in February 1985 and out on 27 May, is faster and less hospitable still. Under the Sign of the Black Mark, recorded back at Heavenshore in September 1986 and released on 11 May 1987, adds the one thing nobody else had thought to add: space. Reverb used as architecture instead of polish, a keyboard drone laid under the riffs, tempos that open out rather than accelerate. That is where the atmospheric half of black metal is invented, and every Norwegian who picked up a guitar in 1990 owned a copy.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Seventy dollars in the Swiss commuter belt

Formed in Nurensdorf in May 1982 under the name Hammerhead, turned down by every label they wrote to, and staffed by whoever happened to be available that month, the Swiss trio built around Thomas Gabriel Fischer produced three demos in 1983 and one EP, and then stopped. That is the entire recorded career. Triumph of Death, the middle demo, cost seventy dollars to make. The tapes went out to magazines and to anyone who enclosed a stamp, and the British press response was close to contempt.

Hellhammer's method was subtraction. No solos worth the name, no double time, no clean passages, riffs pared back to two chords and held until they became oppressive, and a vocal that is less a scream than a warning shouted up a stairwell. This is the first music in the story that is slow on purpose. Apocalyptic Raids, recorded and released in March 1984 at Caet Studio in Berlin for Noise Records, runs under twenty minutes, carries "Massacra" and the version of "Triumph of Death" that finally got the song onto vinyl, and has since been covered by both Napalm Death and Sepultura. The band broke up on 11 May 1984, two months after their only commercial release reached the shops.

Fischer and Martin Eric Ain reappeared in June 1984 as Celtic Frost, and by October they were back at Caet with Horst Muller producing, cutting Morbid Tales between the eighth and the fifteenth of that month. Noise released it in November. It is a better made record than anything Hellhammer managed and a stranger one: female voices, a timpani, a song that stops dead for a spoken passage. What Celtic Frost became over the next four years belongs to its own article, because by 1987 they had walked out of this history altogether. What they left inside it is a permission slip. Ugliness could be composed.

Copenhagen makes it theatre

The Danish five piece are the outlier, and the proof that the first wave was never a sound. Mercyful Fate could play. Hank Shermann and Michael Denner wrote harmonised twin guitar lines that would have sat comfortably on a British record two years earlier, Kim Ruzz kept time like a session man, and Kim Bendix Petersen, who performed as King Diamond, sang in a falsetto that half the metal audience of 1983 found ridiculous. Nothing about the band was primitive. Everything about it was blasphemous.

Melissa was recorded at Easy Sound in Copenhagen between 18 and 29 July 1983 with Henrik Lund producing and released that October, the first album Roadrunner ever put out. Don't Break the Oath followed on 7 September 1984, from a session that May in the same room with the same producer. Between them the two records gave the genre its liturgy: inverted crosses worn as jewellery rather than scrawled on a demo sleeve, an occult vocabulary handled with the seriousness of a man who had read the books, and songs like "A Dangerous Meeting" and "Come to the Sabbath" built like short horror films with an act structure. The face paint came from the same instinct. Take the theatre of a stage act, then refuse to admit it is theatre.

Belo Horizonte makes it fast

The Brazilian records are the ones a European canon keeps forgetting and Norway never did. Cogumelo Records, operating out of a shop in Belo Horizonte on pressing runs a British independent would have laughed at, put out the split that introduced Sepultura in 1985 and the first Warfare Noise compilation in 1986, and in July 1987 recorded four young men at J.G. Studio for an album released that August as I.N.R.I.

Sarcofago had a singer, Wagner Lamounier, who had briefly fronted Sepultura, and a drummer credited as D.D. Crazy who plays the whole record at a speed the tape can barely hold. Nothing on it is careful. The importance of the album, though, is on the front of it: the four of them photographed in white face paint, leather, bullet belts and spikes. That is the first complete statement of what black metal would look like, five years before anyone in Norway assembled the same uniform. Fenriz of Darkthrone has called the album one you buy or die and put "Satanic Lust" on a compilation of his favourites, and Euronymous of Mayhem, who corresponded with Lamounier directly, was fixated on the spikes and the paint. Lamounier returned the compliment years later by calling the Norwegian records badly made.

Around those six sit the others, and the map matters more than any one of them: Bulldozer in Italy from 1984, Possessed in California with Seven Churches in 1985, Tormentor in Hungary and Root in what was then Czechoslovakia working on equipment the state controlled, Sodom in Gelsenkirchen with a first EP that Norwegian teenagers treated as scripture. That last connection has a chapter of its own, because what the German records did to Norway is the least sentimental part of the whole story.

Ten records and no scene

Read down the last two columns and the argument makes itself. Ten records, seven rooms, six labels, six years, and no scene anywhere in it. There was no club where these bands played to each other, no fanzine that covered all of them, no producer who worked on more than two. Caet Studio in Berlin is the only room that appears twice, and only because Noise Records was cheap and Berlin was where Noise recorded everything. A genre is usually a place. This one was a postal system.

What they actually had in common is very little, and it is worth naming exactly what, because the vague version of this history asserts a shared aesthetic that did not exist.

• Satanism as content, not costume. Not a horror image borrowed for one song, but the subject of the entire record. This is the only genuinely universal feature.
• A refusal of the professional sound. Except in Copenhagen, where the refusal is inverted and the professionalism is used to make the blasphemy respectable enough to alarm people.
• Small labels with no artists and repertoire department. Neat, Tyfon, Noise, Cogumelo. Nobody in those offices was telling anyone to write a chorus.
• Speed used as an eraser. Detail disappears above a certain tempo, and several of these bands worked out that the disappearance was the point.

What they did not share is everything else. Bathory has no groove and Venom has almost nothing but groove. Mercyful Fate harmonise and Hellhammer barely change chord. Sarcofago play faster than any of them, and Celtic Frost at their most effective are slower than doom. There is no first wave sound. There is a first wave attitude and a set of sleeves.

What Norway took, and what it left

By 1987 the first wave was finished as a working proposition. Venom had lost Mantas and were making records nobody defends. Celtic Frost were about to release Into the Pandemonium and then a record that cost them their credibility for a decade. Mercyful Fate had already split once. Hellhammer no longer existed. Only Quorthon was still moving in the direction he had started in, and within a year he would turn towards Norse myth and slow tempos and hand the genre a second inheritance nobody would use for another five years.

Then a few dozen Norwegian teenagers picked over the remains with complete disrespect for what any of these bands had intended. From Venom they took a phrase and a habit of pseudonyms. From Bathory they took the guitar sound, the vocal and eventually the northern mythology. From Hellhammer they took the principle of subtraction and the deliberate poverty of the recording. From Mercyful Fate they took the inverted cross and the refusal to wink. From Sarcofago they took the face paint and the cemetery. They discarded the rock and roll, the humour, the harmony guitars and the whole idea that any of this was a performance.

A genre is usually a place. This one was a postal system.

That act of selective theft is where the music we now mean by the term actually starts, in a basement record shop in Oslo and a concert hall in Bergen between 1991 and 1994. It is also where the story stops being funny. The Norwegian chapter takes it from there, and the first thing to say about it is that not one of the men in this chapter asked for what was done in their name.

Judged on the records, the founders come out uneven and that is the honest verdict. Two of them, the Bathory debut and Under the Sign of the Black Mark, still sound like nothing else made in their decade. Two more, Apocalyptic Raids and Don't Break the Oath, are better than their reputations in opposite directions. Black Metal is a loud, daft, historically enormous rock record whose title has done more work than its riffs ever managed. And I.N.R.I. is a photograph that happens to arrive with music attached. That is the founding canon: scattered across five countries, agreed on almost nothing, and permanent.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Black Metal (Venom album)
• Wikipedia: Welcome to Hell
• Wikipedia: Bathory (album)
• Wikipedia: Under the Sign of the Black Mark
• Wikipedia: Apocalyptic Raids
• Wikipedia: Sarcofago