OLD PAPER: Mayhem (Terrorizer's Secret History of Norway, May 2014)
"The pocket book version of Mayhem's history," 1984-2014, by Necrobutcher himself.
One morning sometime in March 2014, I get a call from my friend Gunnar, who at the time was the press officer for Season Of Mist, the label Mayhem were signed to. Terrorizer magazine was doing a special on Norway, and we had agreed to try to talk to Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud, bassist and founding member of the infamous and legendary band, to get a sort of oral history thing done for that special, as they were naturally one of the bands we had selected for Norway’s Hall Of Fame, and on top of it they had also reached the always interesting mark of 30 years that year. If there ever was a band more unlikely than Mayhem to reach that kind of longevity, I can’t think of it right now, yet here they were, and what’s more, they’ll be 40 soon. They’ll probably bury us all.
Anyway, it was 11-something in the morning and I was still in bed, I had been to a gig the previous night that had run really late, not the first that week, and I was quite tired and had decided to sleep in. Perfect timing. “So, you remember the interview with Necro?” Gunnar asked. We had tentatively agreed to an interview slot that had never been confirmed, so I had forgotten about it already. “Yeah, what about it?” I asked, trying to hide my sleep grogginess, as if the epically bearded Gunnar hadn’t seen me in much worse states in some of our many previous adventures together. “Well, he just confirmed the slot. It’s today.” I was like, well, okay, cool. “Can you remind me what time it was?” To which Gunnar somberly replied, “yeah, that’s the thing, it’s at noon.”
Bear in mind that I never really do a ton of preparation for interviews. Of course, I get all the information I need on new releases, titles, dates and stuff like that, I’m not an totally unprofessional hack, but unless I’m really clueless about a band, which most emphatically wasn’t the case (it’s fucking Mayhem!), I’ll just read up on a few curiosities I might not have known, look for the most recent news, and whip up a few topics. I don’t do proper questions, either, just a vague doc with “stuff to talk about”. So I looked at the time, saw that I had like twenty minutes left until Necro would call, and thought fuck it. “Sure, let’s do it,” I told Gunnar, already leaping from bed as I did so, while wondering in the back of my mind if I should interview Mayhem in my PJs.
So I did. I got up, sat down in my home office, turned on the computer, fired up Skype, collected my thoughts, recited their albums in order in my head, loaded their Encyclopaedia Metallum page just in case, and for an instant overall sense of chronology (what would we do without that site, eh?) during the chat, and waited for Mr. Stubberud to call. I rarely get nervous before talking to people for my work, and I’ve winged sudden interviews before, but not with someone of this status, and not for an article of such responsibility. Of course I treat every artist and every bit of writing the same, yada yada, but you know what I mean. Turns out I didn’t have to. Not only was the famously grumpy Necrobutcher in delightful mood, but he turned out to be an absolutely fantastic storyteller. With mininum steering of the conversation here and there from my part, the man went through the past 30 years of his band with remarkable clarity, brutal honesty (it’s Necro, after all), emotion, humour and always providing interesting details and tidbits on every situation, no matter how grave or how lighthearted. After about an hour or so, he concluded with that comment, “I can talk for a few weeks more, but consider this the pocket book version of Mayhem’s history.”
When putting the article together, I quickly realised the only thing I needed to adapt from the transcription was to remove my words, they were not needed there at all. I just grouped things by the topic we were discussing and that was it. When I sent it to the Terrorizer editor at the time, my dear friend Tom Dare (whose podcast Hell Bent For Metal you should check out immediately if you haven’t yet), his initial reply was that we’d need to snip off about 800 words of it (it was way over the specified wordcount, which I had warned him already, but I couldn’t find it in me to cut anything). He emailed me an hour later after reading it and said “Scratch my last - I'm not cutting a bloody word of this. This is one of the most explosive, revealing, self-aware, honest interviews we've had for years, and I'd be mad to trim it down. I'm cutting something else and making this bigger.”
It remains one of my favourite interviews, obviously, and I don’t think it will be passed in the list anytime soon, quite frankly. And all of it in PJs.
HALL OF FAME: MAYHEM
LORDS OF CHAOS
The pioneering, peerless MAYHEM are as shrouded in mystique as any band in heavy music. Terrorizer spoke to NECROBUTCHER, to the one man who has been there since the start. Here, in his own words, is the history of Norway’s most notorious band.
Words: José Carlos Santos
Main pic: Ester Segarra
AND SO IT BEGINS
”Me and my friends at the time, this was around 1982, 83, we were interested in music, we wanted to play in a band, so we bought instruments and taught ourselves to play. We got a rehearsal place, it was a borrowed room in an old school building because our drummer Manheim’s father was a school principal. We called ourselves Musta, which is the Finnish word for “black”, but somebody told us that it’s also a slang for “must have”, and we thought that was cool. We didn’t even think about that, so we just kept the name. When I finally turned 16, in 1984, I started to venture out a little bit, I had some money in my pocket, I could take the train... I was expanding my horizon, going to the next towns from where I lived. It was in a town nearby that I found a metal scene, there were three or four bands there that I had never heard of, and that summer I started to hang out with those guys. Øystein Aarseth [Euronymous] was there, he was one of those guys. I didn’t know him before.
“It came to be that I went to an audition for a band that included a few of those people at a place a few kilometres away from my town, called Ski. I took the train, the guys picked me up at the station, and the first thing that amazed all of us was the fact that we had the same favourite bands. Back in those days, very few people looked them up and nobody liked them, except me, I thought. I thought I was genius, I was a big Motörhead fan, I liked the more extreme songs of Maiden, Priest, AC/DC, I was always a Stones fan... I never liked Kiss. I always thought they sucked. So we talked about that, and this guy, who of course was Euronymous, tells me he has a guitar and that he knows how to play a few cover songs that we were also fucking around with at our own rehearsal place back home, like stuff from the ‘Welcome To Hell’ album, a few Sabbath covers, ‘(Don’t Need) Religion’ by Motörhead... so, basically, as I was going up to this metal band’s rehearsal place to audition, I ended up asking Euronymous if he wanted to start a band with me and Manheim, as we already had a place too and a drummer and everything. So the next day he came down to our rehearsal place with his guitar and his shitty amplifier, and the moment we started to play together, everybody knew that this was ‘it’.
“I can still remember the feeling we had, we were just so ecstatic that we had found each other, and we thought everything was going to be fantastic. That’s where everything really started, we had a lot of enthusiasm and we just stayed in our rehearsal place because that’s where we loved to be. We had a new one because shortly after we were kicked out of the school, and while everyone our age was out in discos or going to the Gran Canaria or whatever, we were in that place, drinking beer and playing.
“After a while, we started to reach out to other bands for inspiration, stuff like Sodom, Assassin, Napalm Death, all these bands that were around in the 80s. It was such a small brotherhood of extreme bands that we were all kind of friends. Totally different from each other, of course – these people from England were militant vegetarians, we weren’t politically oriented at all, we hadn’t even thought about that. We were into horror films, violent stuff, mysterious books, things like that. Something happened in those years that separated us from everything else. We grew long hair, black or dyed black, got bulletbelts, tattoos... we basically distanced ourselves from the rest of society.”
‘PURE FUCKING ARMAGEDDON’ & ‘DEATHCRUSH’
”After a while we played a gig, we recorded the ‘Pure Fucking Armageddon’ demo at the rehearsal place, completely shitty sounding, of course, but then we wrote a few new songs and we got enough money to go into a studio. Not a lot of money, so it was a quick in-and-out, and that was ‘Deathcrush’. After that, Manheim left the band, We were rehearsing without a vocalist up to then, we actually had never had a steady vocalist. It had been just Messiah for a little while and Kittil Kittilsen, who did a gig with us. Maniac lived in a mountain village quite far from us, and he came down to do the ‘Deathcrush’ vocals only. He told me he lived too far away, couldn’t come rehearse with us regularly so he didn’t want to commit to being our vocalist. So we kept rehearsing without a vocalist, we borrowed a drummer from a friend’s band called Vomit, where Kittil also played. So we never really made the Vomit guys members of Mayhem, they were always session players and everybody was aware of that. We did it to keep things going. Then, in December 1987, we got a letter in the mail, in the PO Box we had for Mayhem.”
DEAD & ‘DE MYSTERIIS DOM SATHANAS’
”It was actually quite a big package, and I thought, fucking hell. Is it a letter, or what is it? When I opened it, it was a dead mouse crucified on a little wooden cross. This had come all the way through the mail, so it was rotting and stinking like hell. I put the letter that came with it and the dead mouse in the back of the pick-up truck that I was driving at the time, and the thing stank up my van through the whole journey back home from the post office. It turns out it was from a friend of Metalion who played in a band called Morbid – it was Dead, aka Per Ohlin. We decided to try him out, and he flew over from Sweden to Norway, but when he arrived, he had everything he owned with him. He wasn’t here to check it out, he was here for good, to stay.
“We were completely unprepared for that, this was 1988, I was still nineteen years old, we were all still living with our parents at the time. So when he arrived, we just put him in the rehearsal place. That’s how things started with him. We used to joke that we lived in the rehearsal place because we spent so much time there, but now we actually had one of us, Dead, living - literally - in the rehearsal place. Around the same time, we heard about Hellhammer from a mutual friend, we got in touch with him and arranged a session. We all clicked quickly, so we started to rehearse together, the four of us - Dead, Euronymous, me and Hellhammer - and for the first time we had a proper line-up. Everybody was totally into it, dedicated, we were all unemployed and we devoted our entire lives to this band. We played some gigs, and then when we were just about ready to book the studio to record a new album that would be ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’, Dead committed suicide.
“That was a big blow, especially to me. I took it very hard. Not only was he one of my best friends by then, but I also felt somehow that I had to take care of the guy. He came to my country, he didn’t have any social network here, we used to hang out all the time. I knew he was a little bit different, he was a special person, but I never thought he’d actually do it. He talked a lot about it, but I didn’t see it coming for real. The reactions to what happened with Dead were very different for me and Euronymous. I was crushed by grief, while he thought this was some kind of promotion for us, take those pictures of the corpse and all that shit. I had to distance myself from all that. I told him “burn the pictures or don’t fucking call me again”. He didn’t even go to the funeral, I was the only one there. It was very disrespectful, and I told him to wise up. He did the opposite. He called Vikernes to put the bass lines that I had written on ‘De Mysteriis…’, on the songs that I had written with him. The betrayal... what a stab in the back from the bloke.”
RETURNING TO MAYHEM
”A couple of years went by, and eventually we started to hang out together again, in the summer of 1993. We started talking because of the tenth anniversary gig that we were going to have, at the Rockefeller Music Hall which is one of the main venues in Oslo. We were planning and plotting that, and so I was kind of back in the band, because Vikernes only played on ‘De Mysteriis...’ and said he never wanted to be a part of Mayhem. I was actually asked by Euronymous to re-record the bass lines. We agreed on that, we were happy to start working together again, and then... he is killed. I don’t even know what to say. I think I coped better with his death than Dead’s, because I was still quite pissed off at him. So that helped me in my grief, but it was still hard to overcome that. He was obviously my best friend, we hanged out together every fucking day for almost ten years, writing songs together – we would write a riff each, put them both together and that would be a Mayhem song, it was like that with ‘Deathcrush’, with ‘Freezing Moon’, it was a unique thing we had, a collaboration like that. I suppose it happens with every songwriting pair in music history, from Lennon/McCartney to all the others, that writing music together leads to a lot of bad conversations. When there are big personalities, big egos in a band pulling in different directions it creates sparks, but that was good for us. It was real feelings being transferred to live recordings and live shows.”
‘WOLF’S LAIR ABYSS’
”At the time of Euronymous’ funeral - I was already in a band with Maniac called Fleshwounds at the time – I talked to Hellhammer again, and from that conversation we decided to keep going. Maniac was a better vocalist by this time, he wanted to do it, he had moved and lived around the Oslo area, so he could step into the band again. Hellhammer told me he had a bloke in mind, but he had just thrashed our rehearsal place. So, maybe not. [laughs] But some time later he showed up to try out with us, the same guy that had done that, and it was Blasphemer. Anyway, we got back together in 1994, I remember very well that we went to the rehearsal place, very close to Elm Street in downtown Oslo, it was still the same place we had used to write for ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’, and we agreed that if we had the right feeling, we would continue, but if not, fuck it. We started playing, I looked at Hellhammer, and we both knew that it was all still there. After that, we basically lived in that space for two years.
“The Norwegian papers had written all kinds of shit about us, we were public enemy number one for a long time, we were called Nazis, Satanists, everything they could throw at us on their front pages, they did. We couldn’t do anything to defend ourselves against all the stupid tabloid shit coming out all the time, it got totally out of hand. We had a lot of people working against us. Even Øystein’s parents, they wanted the band gone. They didn’t want to keep reading about their son on the papers anymore. Which is understandable, but I live for this band. This is me, it’s more than me. I got lost somewhere in there along the way, so to stop was never an option.
“This period culminated in the ‘Wolf’s Lair Abyss’ EP. We could have waited a little bit longer, we could have written a few more songs and released a full-length and made more money. EPs aren’t a grand thing like albums are so fucking grand. I never got it. Most of my favourite albums are under half an hour. ‘Reign In Blood’, Voivod albums. I don’t care what the music industry holds as standard, we weren’t part of the industry, we’ve never been. So we felt we just had to record what we had.
“That’s what we did, we went into the studio for fourteen days, recorded it, came back and listened to the songs, and we were like, fuck! We had been too aggressive when we recorded it, some of the melodies inside the songs were too fast and too aggressive to have the meaning they were supposed to have. We actually had to re-record most of the album. That’s the state of mind we were in. We were so pissed off and violent, we couldn’t help ourselves. But I think that struck a chord with the listeners, because all the badmouthing and every negative thing stopped with that record. We went on tour, we told people to shut the fuck up and just listen to this, and they did shut up. Not completely, but they mostly did.”
‘GRAND DECLARATION OF WAR’
”After that, Blasphemer grew a lot as a songwriter and was able to deliver the masterpiece that is ‘Grand Declaration Of War’. Which no one understood when it came out. Everything was ‘wrong’ to people, we used a synthesizer, that was wrong, we had some clear vocals, that was wrong as fuck, we had a great sound and a good production and that was wrong too, that wasn’t black metal. All the shit we got... of course, now this album is ranked as one of our best. Me, if I have to listen to a Mayhem album, it’s that one. I think we stopped making music that was accessible with that record, and people weren’t ready, mentally speaking, for that kind of challenge. It hit them like a big bomb. It’s funny that a lot of people who are into mathematics, physics and structured sciences like that saw that album properly much faster than most metal fans did, they recognized value in it more easily, some of the journalists who spent more time with the album got it too. I think it’s a milestone.”
‘CHIMERA’
”After that, we toured extensively around the world. We had different live second guitarists filling in. When the ‘Chimera’ album came out, we had come off a very heavy world tour. The party side of it, with all the drinking and all the other stuff, it was just too much going on, and that album was made in that aftermath and in that state of mind. You can hear and sense it on that album that we were way out there on that one, even if there are some great songs on it, like ‘My Death’ or ‘Dark Night Of The Soul’ that we still play live sometimes. After that, it was time for a new world tour, with Attila in the place of Maniac who left after the album came out, and we just continued with too much partying, too much drinking, too much everything, and it led to us getting on each others nerves. All the stuff that should have united us, divided us, and we started to blame everyone else for things that went wrong, pointing fingers at each other all the time. Everything was going fine for us as a band, there was no reason for any of that, but it happened.”
‘ORDO AD CHAO’
”This culminated on ‘Ordo Ad Chao’, which is a totally inaccessible album, our biggest challenge ever. We were like, “figure this out, fuckers”. I think it’s a crazy album, very cold and aggressive, it’s easy to hear on it that we had reached the end of this musical path Blasphemer was on. He told me this was his end of extreme music and that he could not go further. I don’t know if he didn’t know how to go further, or if you really can’t go further than that, but in his mind, he was finished. He told me stuff like he didn’t even want to write extreme music anymore, he was just empty, he had reached a wall, and so he decided to leave the band. It was inevitable, really, I had seen it coming for five or six years. And from there we started the process that led to where we are now, with ‘Esoteric Warfare’.”
“I can talk for a few weeks more, but consider this the pocket book version of Mayhem’s history.”