Mayhem’s story is now part of Hollywood lore. How does it feel?
In the wake of Lords Of Chaos and its surrounding controversy, black metal masters Mayhem have returned with a nefarious new record. We find out why their message remains more relevant than ever
When I saw Lords Of Chaos for the first time,” says Jørn ‘Necrobutcher’ Stubberud, “I felt numb. I felt empty. I didn’t feel like talking to anybody. I didn’t feel joyous coming out of the movie theatre. I just felt down because of all the events it reminded me about. I just wanted to go home and be alone.”
As the founding member of black metal’s most notorious, revered and consistently unpredictable band, the Mayhem bassist has a more personal stake in Jonas Åkerlund’s hotly debated movie than most. He’s lived through the suicide of his close friend and vocalist Per ‘Pelle’ Yngve Ohlin, AKA Dead, in 1991, the murder of his guitarist and scene mastermind Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth at the hands of Varg Vikernes two years later, and the numerous church burnings initiated by his bandmembers, all of which, perhaps inevitably, made their way to the big screen. Understandably, he wasn’t entirely happy when he learned it would all be made into a film.
“When I first heard that someone was making a movie out of my life, of our lives, and they didn’t even bother to call us,” he recalls, “I thought it was so disrespectful. It was journalists who called and asked me about it, and I told all these people to go fuck themselves.
“But it turns out that there is a metal nerd called Jonas Åkerlund, who once played with [Swedish black metal predecessors] Bathory, who produced this movie. I thought that it was going to be a Hollywood movie, and you know what those kinds of films are like; they just roll over people’s lives. The bad stuff that happened, they’d make that the whole point, put some extra lies into it and portray us as inhuman, stupid idiots with no empathy. But it turns out that it’s a completely different thing. Jonas doesn’t portray us as ‘normal’ kids as such, but the film shows what can happen to certain people under certain circumstances. If you search deep down enough into the darkness, you will find bad stuff, and bad stuff will happen in the end.”
It would be easy to assume that the events portrayed in Lords Of Chaos, as shocking as they were, have become Mayhem’s defining feature. But just as black metal has proven to be an ever-evolving movement with a profound, if highly complex relationship to its past, so the Oslo band have proved – in the 26 years since Euronymous’s murder – to be a mercurial beast, their history ever wedded to the roots of black metal, but steadfastly refusing to be solely beholden to them.
By coincidence rather than design, when the movie was released, Mayhem had already been touring the world, playing the full landmark album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, that emerged from the chaos of those early years. As Attila Csihar, De Mysteriis…’s inhumanly tuned vocalist who rejoined the band in 2004, puts it, “Logically we would have started the De Mysteriis… tour now, after the movie came out, but luckily we didn’t do that, because that would’ve been fucking cheesy.”
Also coincidentally, Necrobutcher’s book, The Death Archives, the first of three autobiographical volumes detailing Mayhem’s history with reams of archive photos, was released around the same time, opening up doors into a wholly different world.
“Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore wrote the afterword,” says Necrobutcher.
“He talked about it to his friends, including the Beastie Boys. I was like, ‘What the fuck?!’ So me and the Beastie Boys exchanged books. Lars Ulrich got a copy and he liked it so much that he wrote a blurb for the back. I nearly found myself at Yoko Ono’s birthday party two years ago, and
David Navarro from Jane’s Addiction wanted to buy the negative of a photograph of Pelle that I had taken back in the 80s. But it would have been like selling my own kids.”
The other easy assumption would have been that, in the aftermath of Lords Of Chaos, Mayhem’s fortunes would have drastically altered, in terms of the wider world if not amongst their legion of longtime fans. The reality turned out to be somewhat less dramatic, but more… real .
“After the movie came out,” says Necrobutcher, “it was dead silence.
All The LA Times and papers like that, they just didn’t call me anymore. I was thinking that some of the people who had previously wanted me to comment on this movie felt the same thing I felt, the same numbness, and that there was no point calling me afterwards. They didn’t want to write about it anymore, because they saw that the movie wasn’t sensationalistic, it was a really fucking sad story about shit that happened to some people.
“So now I don’t know if the movie had any impact or will sell more concert tickets or whatever. I’m used to crazy stuff happening around me and Mayhem. So it felt almost natural, like, ‘OK, so that happened now’. It’s just a part of the Mayhem story, and we move on. I actually thought there was going to be a lot of hullabaloo, but everything calmed down. The people who were already involved and knew about us, maybe they got some new information, and it was a blast from the past in that sense, but it remains to be seen if shitloads
NECROBUTCHER
“THEY MADE A MOVIE OF OUR LIVES AND DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER TO CALL US”
of people not in the metal scene start to come to the gigs.”
For all the narrative power in Mayhem’s backstory, the band’s career since hasn’t followed any traditional path, the full-length albums from 2000’s Grand Declaration Of War onwards proving just as groundbreaking and unforeseen as De Mysteriis… was at the time. The Stygian, carcinogenic murk of 2007’s Ordo Ad Chao and the clinical, paranoia-spiked experimentalism of 2014 concept album Esoteric Warfare were all leftfield turns that mined black metal for new, exhilarating horrors embedded in its deepest recesses.
Perhaps in the wake of all the retrospective accounts that have emerged recently, the return to a more recognised form of black metal for their latest album, Daemon, is understandable, which isn’t to say that it’s anything less than state of the art. More flowing than its respectively viscous and jagged predecessors, imperious in its scope and seething in its urgency as it charges down rabbit holes at the behest of a host of nefarious entities channelled by Attila, it’s a masterclass that uncovers vast and febrile sonic territories, laying down a gauntlet to the scene’s newest generations.
“It is definitely Mayhem, and yes, it’s different from everything else we’ve done”, says Necrobutcher, “but that’s because we are five years down the line from Esoteric Warfare and we will always continue to evolve. The main difference is that where [guitarist] Teloch wrote Esoteric Warfare, everybody got more involved with the writing of Daemon, so it got more personal with the material.”
“Of course playing De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas live has had an effect on the album”, adds Attila. “We all agreed that we weren’t going to try to relive those times, but we wanted to go back to the roots, and move on from there. The studio I recorded my vocals in was an old church. I surrounded myself with candles, so there was something of that old 90s atmosphere, but we all tried to bring in something new. For me, the whole album has a sense of space, a vibration that opens up new dimensions.”
As futuristic as Mayhem’s music has often proved, that parallel connection to the past has also manifested itself in the three cover versions that grace the box set edition of Daemon (see Covered In Glory, right), but also in their embodying of the understanding that black metal was always about more than just the music.
“Black metal is a complex scene,” says Attila. “Not just music-wise, but in the way that it evolves. It has a spiritual, dark, esoteric aspect, but at the same time, it’s important that the people making it have a bond – to each other and to the idea. Even if you start to play tomorrow and you play the best black metal music, you need time to prove it. You need time to mean it. That requires a lot of belief, a lot of strength and also passion.
“For us, it’s a strong brotherhood,” he concludes. “Sometimes it’s really chaotic, really fucking crazy. I guess we are all kind of crazy in an artistic sense, often personally, too. Most of the time we are OK, but there’s always a tension. Being in Mayhem is still really intense. So we are very much alive.”
DAEMON IS RELEASED ON OCTOBER 25 VIA CENTURY MEDIA. MAYHEM PLAY THE UK AND DUBLIN IN EARLY NOVEMBER WITH GAAHLS WYRD AND GOST