On the evening of 26 November 1990, in a cellar club called the Eiskeller in Leipzig, four Norwegians played to a room that would have fitted into a school hall, and the tape a small German label made of that night went on to teach a generation what black metal was supposed to sound like on a stage. Mayhem had no album out, no distribution worth the name, and a singer who buried his stage clothes in the ground before a tour so that they would arrive at the venue smelling of the earth they had been in. Obscure Plasma released the recording in 1993 as Live in Leipzig. It is still the reference point.
The concerts this genre is famous for are famous for a short list of reasons, and only one of them is the playing. One became a police evidence file. One put a man in hospital. Several are remembered because the band refused to give them at all, which in a music this suspicious of the stage counts as a performance in itself. Anyone who has read how the Press Covered the Scene, Then and Since will recognise the pattern in advance: the show gets one sentence, the incident gets the headline, and the set list disappears entirely.
Leipzig, and the tape that set the standard
The four who walked into the Eiskeller that night were not yet the band the world would argue about. Per Yngve Ohlin, who used the name Dead, had joined from Sweden in 1988 and brought with him a set of stage habits that were not theatre in any sense his bandmates recognised: corpse paint worn as a condition of appearing at all, a dead crow carried in a plastic bag and inhaled before a set, pig heads mounted on stakes and thrown at whichever part of the audience looked most casual. At Jessheim on 3 February 1990 he opened his arm with a broken bottle mid-set and needed hospital treatment afterwards. None of that is on the Leipzig tape, because a tape only carries sound. What the tape carries is a guitar tone with no warmth in it anywhere and a band playing faster than the room could follow.
Twenty eight days earlier, on 28 February 1990, the same line-up had been recorded in Sarpsborg. That second tape has an ugly history. After Ohlin died on 8 April 1991, a photograph taken of his body was put on the sleeve of an unauthorised release of the Sarpsborg recording, against the wishes of the surviving members, and it circulated in that form for two decades before an official reissue in 2017 replaced the artwork. The music on it is a rehearsal room caught on a cheap desk. The sleeve is the reason anybody outside the genre has ever heard of it.
The show that ended up in a police evidence room
On 1 February 2004, in Krakow, the Bergen band Gorgoroth filmed a concert for a video release. On stage were sheep heads on stakes, roughly eighty litres of sheep blood, and four models crucified for the length of the set. Polish police opened an investigation on two fronts, religious offence and cruelty to animals, and impounded the footage. No charge against the band followed, on the reasoning that they had not known what Polish law forbade. In 2007 the promoter was fined ten thousand zloty for knowing and saying nothing. The tapes stayed in official custody for four years.
Poland supplied the second courtroom as well. In September 2007, at a show in Gdynia, Adam Darski of Behemoth tore up a Bible on stage, called it a book of lies and described the Catholic Church as the most murderous cult on the planet, which is prosecutable in Poland under the law on offending religious feeling. He was acquitted in 2011. Both cases are worth holding next to what actually happened in Norway, where the offences were arson and killing and the stage had nothing whatever to do with them. A prop is not a crime scene. Treating the two as the same thing is the oldest error in the writing on this subject.
A concert the police had impounded came back four years later as a retail product with a chart position.
When somebody got hurt
On 6 March 2003, at a Mayhem show in Bergen, a sheep's head being cut up as part of the stage act came off the singer's knife and struck a man in the audience. Per Kristian Hagen, twenty five years old and a fan of the band, suffered a fractured skull and was treated in hospital. He filed a complaint of involuntary assault, which carried a maximum of six months. The investigating officer told reporters that nothing suggested a deliberate act. Hagen recovered.
That is the whole of it, and it is worth stating in exactly that many words. A stage covered in animal remains is a hazard to the people standing in front of it, and the genre's own literature has a bad habit of filing this kind of thing under folklore. It is not folklore. It is a hospital record with a name on it.
That motley drama! oh, be sure it shall not be forgot!
Edgar Allan Poe, The Conqueror Worm
The bands who would not do it at all
Refusal is the other tradition, and it is older than any of the notorious shows. The Swedish project that supplied half the raw material the second wave later built on, Bathory, stopped performing after 1985 and never toured, its founder having decided that organising concerts cost more than it returned and that the records could do the work alone. Burzum has never played a concert in its entire existence. Darkthrone gave their last one at Rockefeller in Oslo on 6 April 1996 and have released roughly a dozen albums since without setting foot on a stage, a position the guitarist Ted Skjellum has summed up as saying no to being wealthy for years. The French group behind Deathspell Omega has never performed at all and has never explained itself beyond the records.
The weight of all that refusal is easy to underestimate. A genre whose most influential catalogues were built by people who would not or could not tour had to find some other route to an audience, and it found the tape, the split release, the mail order list and eventually the download. That is why the live history of black metal is so thin next to thrash, and why the handful of concerts that did happen get worked over so obsessively. There were never many to choose from.
Coming back, and what it cost
Reunions belong on the same list, because in this music a return to the stage is read as a statement about whether the band still means it. Emperor came back in pieces after years away: three songs in Oslo on 30 September 2005, the Inferno festival in April 2006, Wacken that August, and two decades of festival slots since on the strength of albums recorded before most of the audience was born. Dissection reformed in 2004 after Jon Nodtveidt was released from prison and toured as Rebirth of Dissection, playing a final European show in Stockholm at Midsummer, 24 June 2006. A video of the tour came out on 29 July that year and reached number five in Sweden. Nodtveidt died by suicide on 13 August 2006, and the band ended with him.
Set the list side by side and the shape of it is plain. Two concerts produced a court file, one produced a hospital admission, several of the most important bands in the genre produced nothing at all, and the recording everybody actually listens to was made in a cellar in front of a crowd small enough to count. The stage was never where this music decided anything. That was settled on tape, in bedrooms and in the post, which is also where the argument about what those tapes were actually saying belongs, and whether is Black Metal Satanic has one answer or a dozen.
