Choosing Death Read online

  Well, one thing led to another. At one of those Ipswich gigs, ENT were joined by the even faster Napalm Death, at another by the short-lived but murderous Intense Degree. All three bands recorded sessions for my radio programmes and most of the tracks they recorded ended up on the Hardcore Holocaust compilations. Almost everyone I knew who heard these compilations, or tracks from them, thought they were all crap. A result, I thought. Then along came Carcass. Who could have failed to be appalled by titles such as “Exhume to Consume” or even the essentially meaningless “Empathological Necroticism,” both recorded and broadcast repeatedly by the BBC?

  Then, early in the 1990s, something went wrong, for me at least. The willfulness, the wild-eyed exuberance went out of the music, to be replaced with… with what? Well, I suppose it was, to a degree, heavy metal. I’d really had enough of that in the ’70s to last me several lifetimes, so Slayer, Metallica, those bands never meant a thing to me, I’m afraid. There was also the breaking down of the music into subgenre after subgenre, to the point at which it became somehow incomprehensible. The same thing happens, to be honest, in dance music. Take happy hardcore, for example. Ludicrously fast, basic to a fault, oafish and wonderful, dance purists hated it. Now it is called hard trance—or was last week anyway—and they still hate it. They’re missing the point.

  So it’s 2004, and I’m still wandering the record shops, still standing amongst the boys searching the racks marked “metal,” boys who probably assume that this old feller is there to touch their pert, young bottoms, and I’m still hoping to hear something that will thrill me and make me laugh out loud as Carcass, Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror did. Current favourites include several of the Relapse bands and Teen Cthulu—great name, great band—and only last night, in a programme I was recording for Radio Eins in Potsdam, Germany, I played a couple of raging tracks from the cover-mounted CD with issue 108 of Terrorizer magazine.

  I don’t know why Terrorizer is called Terrorizer rather than, in the British spelling, Terroriser, but it is right that it is. That Z just looks better than a mere S. The tracks I played were “Clotted Cryptic Writings” (what can that possibly mean?) lifted from the LP Three on a Meathook by the Ravenous and “Flesh for the Twelfth Omnipotent” (who’s He? Or She?) by Japan’s Intestinal Baalism. I mean, how could you not play them? Of course, people will warn me, as they have warned me about so many other things, from Little Richard to Run-DMC (“You shouldn’t play that. That’s the music of black criminals,” a colleague told me), stuff like that can be damaging to impressionable young minds. What, more damaging than the diet of war, rape, pestilence and unearned celebrity they’re fed daily by the media? I don’t think so.

  “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” anyone? Come on in. The blood’s fine…

  Foreword by

  Nick Terry

  I could emulate Peelie’s reminiscences and tell you a few stories by way of a foreword. Sure I have some fond memories of death metal and grindcore. Who wouldn’t? Things like watching Carcass supporting Death at the London Astoria in ’91, entranced by Mike Amott and Bill Steer hair-twirling in time to “Pedigree Butchery.” Or picking up the latest issue of the New Musical Express in November ’88 and wondering just who the hell these guys Napalm Death were, what this thing called “Britcore” was and whether I’d like it. Or, years later, meeting Glen Benton from Deicide in a basement in his record company offices that looked exactly like the legendary cellar in Evil Dead II…

  But the reminiscences we have to tell about ourselves are rarely the whole picture, especially of something as complex and organic as the story of the rise, fall and resurrection of the musical forms known as death metal and grindcore. For starters, it’s a story that spans both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, in America, Britain, Brazil, Japan, Poland and Sweden, to name just a few of the countries which have spawned bands who have contributed to these genres.

  Ever since punk opened up the possibilities of do-it-yourself, cheap recording and independent labels in the mid-’70s and blew apart the dominance of the major record labels, underground music of any kind has scattered its seeds farther afield than ever before. Death metal and grindcore raised—or perhaps more appropriately, sunk—what it meant to be underground to another level altogether. Just as US hardcore and punk depended on a circuit of squat venues to bring their heroes to their audience, so death metal depended on tape trading, letter writing and mutual acquaintanceship. If it hadn’t been for the demo tape-trading underground, death metal and grindcore wouldn’t have reached the attention of their audiences, of the record companies who signed the bands, or of the musicians themselves. Time and time again in this book, you’ll read about how musician X finally got a hold of the demo tape by musician Y and suddenly saw new possibilities for his music open up before his very eyes. The mutual influence of one death metal band on the next can only be described as “scenius.”

  Also, with just as much aptness as “genius,” if you think in terms of “generation.” For the story described in this book so eloquently by Albert Mudrian is largely the tale of a very specific generation of musicians, who grew up on traditional heavy metal, thrash and speed metal, punk, industrial and hardcore, imbibing freely from all these wells, who went on to devastate the world between approximately 1988 and 1993. Many a band from before this time can rightly claim to have influenced death metal in some primeval fashion, whether it’s the deathgrunt vocals of Tom G. Warrior of Swiss cuckoos Celtic Frost, or the brutality and speed of Slayer’s thrash metal. But this book isn’t about them, nor should it be. Possessed may have come up with the very term “death metal” and delivered the hugely influential Seven Churches album in 1985, but this isn’t a Possessed biography; they’re in here, but so are other undoubted godfathers of death metal and grindcore such as UK punks Discharge. Nor is this book an encyclopaedia of all things death metal and grindcore. If you’re flicking through looking for an honourable mention in dispatches for your favourite underground band, or for your own band even, who ruled the roost in the back of half of a dozen fanzines for a brief moment in 1994, you shouldn’t expect to find it here. Such a way of telling the story might have the virtue of comprehensiveness, but what it would gain in pseudo democracy, it would lose in clarity and focus.

  That focus is on the musicians who made up the ever-changing ranks of bands like Napalm Death, Death, Morbid Angel, Carcass, Obituary, Deicide, Entombed and Cannibal Corpse. They’ve all been described as the heavyweights of their genre a thousand times in ’zines all over the world, and that’s exactly right: they are and were the bands who kick-started the mass appeal madness of death metal. But this book also goes deeper, and tells the hitherto unheard stories of the largely unsung progenitors—Siege, Repulsion, Terrorizer—as well as the tales of the producers, record company bosses and A&Rs who helped sign, shape and sell the music. If you’re a death metal obsessive who has been following the genre for a decade or more, you’ll still find out things inside this book about people you’ve read interviews with a dozen times that you never knew before; you’ll also meet a few characters who you probably never even heard of, learn about previously unknown friendships and feuds, not to mention a few surprise connections. Who’d have thought that singer/songwriter Aimee Mann, formerly of ’80s popsters ’Til Tuesday, could have had anything to do with grindcore? But she does, even if it isn’t what you might think.

  Since its heyday in the early ’90s, death metal has returned to the native soil of the birthplace that nurtured it—the underground. And just in case you thought that should read “grave,” then this book will also tell you about the remarkable comeback made by the genre in the late ’90s and through to the present day. The mid ’90s explosion of black metal in Scandinavia might have grabbed the headlines at the time, but without the death metal and grindcore scenes, black metal would most probably never have existed. By the end of the decade, parts of the two styles practically converged into one common genre of extreme metal. B
ands like Emperor, Vader or Akercocke owe as much to death metal as they do to black metal. But that’s not all that death metal has had to offer in recent years. Not only has the genre thrown up bands—such as Nile—every bit as good as the classic forefathers, death metal has also infiltrated just about every other style of underground and mainstream rock and heavy metal. You can find gothic, melodic, atmospheric and hardcore-style death metal; you can find grindcore in abundance in every nook and cranny of the hardcore and noisecore scenes; you can even find nü death metal behind the masks of megastars Slipknot.

  The enduring influence and continued vitality of death metal and grindcore owes its causes above all to the power of the music. Long before “shock and awe” became a Pentagon slogan for bombing a city back to the stone age, death metal and grindcore bands were engaged in an arms race to produce the fastest, heaviest, most brutal music on the planet. The nicknames of drummers like Mick “Human Tornado” Harris of Napalm Death and Pete “Commando” Sandoval of Morbid Angel speak volumes about the dedication and ability of the players. It’s this musical ferocity that marks out death metal and grindcore, not the lyrics, attitude or imagery. The extremism of death metal and grindcore comes down to inhuman vocals, grinding guitars and vicious blast beats, not to any political or religious ideology. And in contrast to black metal or hip-hop, no death metal musician ever murdered another, or their record company boss, much as some of them might have liked to at one point or another.

  The story of death metal and grindcore, then, is a human one. Even if you never heard these musics before, I guarantee you that you’ll be intrigued by their secret histories. Those tales took well over 100 interviews and two years of obsessive research by the author to tease out, but that’s the kind of hard work it takes to get to the bottom of the story. After reading this book, you’ll agree with me that it’s also hard work that ultimately pays off in terms of a truly fascinating read.

  Nick Terry

  Editor, Terrorizer magazine (1996—2000)

  1

  Punk is a Rotting Corpse

  HOME TO NEARLY ONE MILLION PEOPLE, Birmingham, England is second only in population to the country’s capital city of London. Located in the country’s West Midlands region, Birmingham is surrounded by a ring of industrial towns within a 50-mile radius where approximately six million more people reside.

  A considerable percentage of those residents work in the car industry, as both Jaguar and Land Rover have based automobile assembly plants in the city for decades. As a result, Birmingham is very much a working-class town, which is why the rule of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government in the late 1970s had such an acute impact on the city’s populace. The lack of workers’ rights and continual cutting of public services were some of the concerns that were helping birth the punk rock explosion throughout the rest of the United Kingdom in 1977. But beyond Johnny Rotten’s snarl of “I wanna be—anarchy,” noisier sounds became the vehicle for social and political protest of truly disgruntled English youth. Soon a faster and more confrontational second wave of UK punk in the form of anarchist bands such as Crass, the Exploited and Discharge were unleashing their filth and fury in the city’s small club circuit.

  Musical proficiency was generally an afterthought to the bands; velocity and urgency colored with a righteous anger were what mattered. Ultimately, this form of aggressive music was the only manner in which these adolescents could properly express themselves.

  Those reverberations traveled about eight miles outside the Birmingham city limits to a place called Meriden. Surrounded by evergreen woodlands on two sides, the small village of about 600 people is reputed to be the “Center of England,” marked by a stone monument in the exact geographic middle of the country. It’s also where a young Nicholas Bullen was raised.

  “We lived in a caravan for a few years while my mom and dad built a house out of this old cottage,” recalls Bullen. “So there was lots of time to get into things. By 1978 I was 10, and punk music was on the TV and the radio. That’s when I bought my first singles. To that point, I really liked pop music—my mother’s ‘50s and ‘60s pop singles. We had a great all-in-one mono record player portable that had every speed. I used to play my mom’s old movie theme records and classical records. I used to tape them and loop them, the parts I liked. I’m still not a big fan of key changes and bridges. I’ve never been a great believer in counterpoint in music. I think it destroys the mood. I didn’t know that then. I just taped the bits I liked.”

  By late 1979, Bullen and a friend named Miles Ratledge—affectionately known as “Rat”—formed their first band, which, according to Bullen, was nothing more than “just acoustic guitar and some tubs.” Over the next year, the duo was joined by a revolving door of young fellow musicians (Simon Oppenhiemer, Finbar Quinn, Gram “Robo” Robertson and Daryl “Sid” Fideski among them) and began playing sporadic gigs in the Birmingham area under various monikers such as The Mess, Undead Hatred and Civil Defence.

  “I suppose that we had a kinda stable lineup at the end of ‘81/early ‘82 when we started calling ourselves Napalm Death,” says Bullen, who began playing guitar and singing while Rat manned the drums. “I think it was probably Rat that came up with it. We both really liked films like Apocalypse Now and The Ninth Configuration , which is probably why Napalm Death eventually stuck.”

  Their musical inspiration was equally contemporary, closely mirroring the atavistic sounds of the first wave of anarcho (short for anarchist) punk bands.

  “We were more influenced by hardcore punk and especially Crass—that was our main focus. At the time, the music was rudimentary and also more melodic, but I just wanted to move the band more towards Discharge.”

  For Bullen and many others, Discharge was the ultimate crossover act, marrying the passion and intensity of punk with the speed and extremity of heavy metal.

  “There are a lot of angry people over here,” says Discharge guitarist and co-founder Tony “Bones” Roberts. “For them, the Sex Pistols and the Clash just didn’t cut it. It was the same for us. When we first started we sounded like the Sex Pistols. But we just started rehearsing more and came up with something different, something heavier and faster. I’ve talked to a lot of people that were playing in bands that just sounded like Clash and the Sex Pistols at the time but when they heard us they started playing more hardcore, like the Discharge stuff.

  “Nobody said to us, ‘You’ve gotta go faster and faster!,’” Roberts continues. “Because there was nobody doing that stuff then anyway. There was nobody to copy it and say, ‘We’ve gotta go as fast as this.’ There was no competition. We just did what we wanted to do.”

  Despite their developing Discharge-isms, Napalm Death’s first hint of recognition came with a little help from the band’s earliest influence, Crass. Released on Crass’ own Crass Records, the Bullshit Detector#3 compilation gave Napalm their first bit of exposure with the track “The Crucifixion of Possessions.” Before long the group’s earliest demo and rehearsal recordings began circulating not only at local gigs but also via pen pals and underground fanzine editors whom they were making contact with throughout Europe and North America.

  “We had done about three or four demos before that, just recorded on four-tracks,” says Bullen, who along with Rat also edited their own fanzines. “It wasn’t really for record companies—you just made a tape. We’d write six letters a night and get together and do tape-trading with people. Me and Rat had been trading tapes for two or three years by ‘82 with people from all around the world. So we had a lot of things like Swedish thrash and American thrash stuff and old American punk, and had a lot of friends in the tape-trading scene.”

  One of those people who heard some of the early recordings was a young English hardcore promoter named Digby Pearson. In 1982, Pearson began booking shows throughout his hometown of Nottingham, simply as a fan of underground music. Soon Pearson was intimately familiar with the anarcho punk scene.

  “I promoted shows by my
favorite bands—political UK hardcore bands like Flux of Pink Indians, Antisect, Subhumans, and like-minded US bands like Millions of Dead Cops, Crucifux and Toxic Reasons when they toured the UK,” recalls Pearson, who, at only 22 years old, was one of the elder statesmen of the scene. “None of the regular clubs in town would let an outsider book a show, so I had to seek out alternative venues, usually hiring out community centers in Nottingham, like Queens Walk, Sherwood and Beeston.”

  In April of 1983, Pearson tapped Napalm Death to play its first show outside of the immediate Birmingham area at the Nottingham Boat Club, a rowing club next to the banks of the river Trent that held only 150 people.

  “The lineup,” remembers Pearson, “was a who’s-who of the scene at the time—Chaos UK, Subhumans, Amebix, Antisect, Disorder. And opening the show, I booked one of my favorite new bands, Napalm Death. At the time, they were all like 14 or 15 years old.

  “This gig is also notable because it was the first time I used the word ‘Earache’ anywhere,” Pearson adds. “It proudly says ‘Earache Presents’ at the top of the flyer.”

  Over the next few months, however, Napalm began fading from the scene, playing only a handful of gigs before nearly taking a sabbatical through all of 1984, save one gig. “We all had girlfriends and stuff. We were going to gigs with them and taking drugs and things like that,” explains Bullen, who, in true punk fashion had recently eliminated the letter c from his first name. “We never had an American ethos of practicing five or six days a week.”

  During Napalm’s hiatus, another British punk band began making noise of its own in the city of Nottingham. Initially dubbed Plasmid in late 1984, the band was rechristened Heresy the next year after enlisting local Kalv Piper to play bass. Before long the group of youths was garnering sterling reviews for their rapid hardcore in the underground punk digest Maximum Rock n’ Roll.