Grand Magus’s Viking-In-Chief JB CHRISTOFFERSSON has the most metal Slaylist of all time.
Grand Magus’s Norse-loving frontman is actually a huge secret fan of Swedish techno and reggae. Just kidding: he’s metal as fuck.
“A lot of the songs I chose for this list are overlooked. Sinner is a great JUDAS PRIeSt track, but it’s not one that people usually talk about. I get a feeling of triumph when I listen to it; it’s very uplifting. It’s got a fantastic riff and great melodies. It’s just a very inspiring song from an overlooked album [1977’s Sin After Sin]. MANoWAR’s Louder Than Hell is another album that I think gets overlooked. A lot of people say that the first five Manowar albums are great and the rest are shit, but I think it’s one of their most consistent albums. King has got a real drive to it. The stuff that Eric Adams [vocals] does at the end of the song – hitting that perfect note and pushing higher and higher – sounds amazing! It’s a track that I like to put on to put me in a good mood. Rock The Nations is another underrated song. It belongs up there with the classic SAXoN tracks. It’s extremely catchy; a proper heavy metal anthem!
Bomber is my favourite MotÖRheAD album from the classic line-up. One aspect that I don’t think many people think about when it comes to Motörhead is how groovy they were. Bomber isn’t a stiff punk song; it’s actually super-groovy and almost swings. At the same time, it’s extremely powerful. Great stuff! There’s great groove on
Flick Of The Switch, too. It contains some of AC/DC’s heaviest stuff and I think Nervous Shakedown has got a brilliant riff. It has the classic AC/DC trick of putting a lot of air between the guitar parts so that the snare is alone, which makes it really, really powerful. Even though it’s AC/DC, it almost spills across into heavy metal. Our drummer, Ludwig [Witt], loves that era of hard rock and is a very big fan of RoSe tAttoo. Scarred For Life has got such an outlaw feel and we’ve actually adopted it as our ‘getting ready to hit the stage’ song in the dressing room. It always puts us in a great mood. We did a tour with Amon Amarth and Testament, and [Testament bassist] Steve Di Giorgio also loves Scarred For
Life, so he used to come into our dressing room, have a drink and listen to it with us.
Vinterblot is a track from the Nordland I album, which
I think was a huge comeback for BAthoRY. They returned to the epic Viking stuff that they did on Hammerheart and Twilight Of The Gods. This track, it has a fantastic melody but it’s also really heavy. There’s a guitar riff that comes just before the chorus and it distorts in a way where it sounds like the speakers are going to blow! It’s a very powerful track. UNleASheD are another Swedish band; one of the greatest death metal bands of all time. You usually think about Viking stuff when it comes to Unleashed, but We Must Join With Him is actually a Lord Of The Rings song. I’ve been a huge fan of those novels ever since I was a kid and many bands have lyrics that try to capture their tone, but I think the only band that have really succeeded are Unleashed. You really get the feeling of the armies of Mordor crushing everything. It’s extremely bleak: ‘There will be no dawn for men.’ It gives me chills.
NAZAReth may have covered Beggars Day, but they totally made it into their own song. It’s from Hair Of The Dog, which came out in ’74, and – for an album of that vintage – it sounds extremely heavy. I think a lot of that has to do with the vocals of Dan McCafferty. They’re just vicious! Beggars Day is a great song with, again, a great groove, but it’s the voice that does it, I think.
I’m literally ending on a high note: the stuff that Ian Gillan does on Born Again is pretty mindblowing! His screams are in the stratosphere. I got the Born Again album as a teenager. It was a different kind of BlACK SABBAth but it’s one of my favourites. The title track is almost a ballad and it builds to this climax that’s unbelievable.”
Grand MaGus’s new albuM, WOLF GOD, is out now via nuclear blast
“STEVE FROM TESTAMENT DRINKS TO THIS SONG”