Mikael Åkerfeldt has given a plain and slightly funny explanation of how Opeth were taken seriously by the Norwegian black metal scene in the early nineties: nobody had seen them.
"We were accepted in the Norwegian black metal scene because there were no pictures of us. It was just silhouette pictures," he told Loudwire. "At the time we were like the enemy; we looked like the hippies that they wanted to kill, but when I met with Emperor early on they were just like me."
His reading of why the mystery existed at all is generous. "Maybe they wanted to keep a little mystery around themselves. But it was important and some great music came out of that scene."
He is equally plain about how little he belonged to it. "I was never too much involved in the black metal scene because I was into Deep Purple, Scorpions, and prog later on. I was never into being cool. I was in it for the music."
That last sentence explains a career better than most retrospectives manage. A band whose records went from death metal to Camel and back was never going to be governed by what a scene permitted, and the same interview covers what Bathory meant to him at the start.