Choosing Death Read online

  “At first it was like a more sped-up Discharge pace, but then I wanted to pick it up a bit more,” recalls Heresy drummer Steve Charlesworth, just 15 years old at the time of the band’s formation. “Kalv and I were definitely interested in getting faster like a lot of the US bands we were just listening to at that time, like Siege and Deep Wound.”

  “Heresy were friends of mine,” says Digby Pearson, “and I would always give them the fastest hardcore band tape that I would trade at the time, and Steve would try to play faster than that.”

  Another ridiculously fast band rose from the scene in 1985. Based in Ipswich—approximately four hours’ drive from Birmingham—vocalist Phil Vane and guitarist Pete Hurley cut their teeth in a variety of Discharge-style punk bands such as Victims of War and Freestate before regrouping as the fiercely political Extreme Noise Terror.

  “The [band] name was taken from a small picture on an insert to an album from the Dutch band Larm,” says ENT guitarist Hurley. “It featured a bandanna-ed hardcore kid with ‘Extreme Noise Terror’ surrounding him. Those three words summed up exactly what we were aiming at. The scene in the UK at that point was saturated with bands that wanted to just play mindlessly—as fast as was humanly possible. We never really came from that stable. As a band, we really favored the Discharge way of doing things. We were primarily a hardcore punk band.”

  It was clear, however, by possessing ear-shredding dual vocalists in Vane and Dean Jones and the rapid beats of drummer Pig Killer, ENT were far more extreme than the typical anarcho punk outfit. In fact, after performing just a single gig opening for Chaos UK, Extreme Noise Terror signed a record contract with the tiny UK-based indie label Manic Ears. “After that night,” says Hurley, “things seemed to go mental.”

  While Heresy and Extreme Noise Terror were busy abusing British ears, Napalm Death slowly began regrouping. In the spring of 1985, Nik Bullen recruited Napalm’s newest member, guitarist and Birmingham native Justin Broadrick, whom he had first met two years earlier.

  “There was a place in Birmingham called the ‘Rag Market,’” Broadrick explains, “which was this real shithole—a great big indoor market that sold secondhand clothes and stuff. And in there were a couple of guys who ran a bootleg tape store. I was down there one day browsing through the Throbbing Gristle tapes and saw a kid next to me that was doing the same thing. You’d literally talk to anyone that was looking at a similar thing and if they were a similar age you’d feel like, ‘Shit, I’ve got a potential friend!’ And it was Nik Bullen that turned around and said, ‘Are you into this Throbbing Gristle?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s awesome.’ And we just started talking and he mentioned that he had a band called Napalm Death.”

  “Then we kept in touch and lost touch for a little, and then in ‘85 we met up again,” says Bullen. “We did a gig with his band that was grinding to a halt so we said, ‘Do you wanna come and join us?’”

  “At first, I was awful,” says Broadrick, who was only 14 years old when he became a member of the band. “I couldn’t even play fast riffs. I remember playing one of our first shows when I was in the band and people were openly laughing at my guitar playing—it was fucking terrible. But anyway, the big turning point for Nik Bullen and I was when we heard Siege from Boston and we heard DRI, and we were just like, ‘Holy fucking shit, man. This is faster than anything we’d been listening to for years.’ We thought Discharge was lightning speed, and we were just like, ‘This is what we wanna do.’”

  At the same time, metal—particularly thrash—was no longer considered a dirty word within the punk community. Early American thrashers like Slayer and Metallica balanced their high-velocity attack with a technically sound approach to performing, while European thrash acts like Kreator, Destruction and Celtic Frost tuned down their instruments, stripped down their sound and delivered a simpler—and altogether sloppier—approach with which most punks could easily identify.

  “When it came to Celtic Frost, for some reason, we were just utterly blown away,” says Broadrick. “And that was when me and Nik Bullen came up with the idea of the whole style we wanted to purvey. We wanted to put together a mixture of Siege and Celtic Frost. We wanted that hardcore energy meeting slowed-down, primitive metal riffs, and to basically marry that to a political message.

  “By now, we were like 15, and it wasn’t even that focused,” he continues. “It sounds like we had some grand master plan and that we were gonna take over the world with this new style, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.”

  With Bullen, Broadrick, Rat and a new bassist simply referred to as Peanut aboard, Napalm Death recorded a new demo, Hatred Surge, in September of 1985. The tape marked a much faster and more aggressive direction for the band, which was now regularly playing shows in Coventry and Nottingham, but still concentrating on gigs in their hometown of Birmingham. Moreover, October 1985 marked the first time that Napalm Death played the infamous Mermaid Pub, a bar located in the low-income Sparkhill area of Birmingham.

  “It was a dive,” offers Pearson. “Downstairs was the pub. Upstairs it was just basically a function room of the pub that you could hire out because it would affect the downstairs and the bar. The pub was friendly enough to have punks and crusty kind of people frequenting the bar and the upstairs room. You could ram maybe between 200 and 250 people in there.”

  “It was the roughest, dirtiest shithole you could imagine,” Broadrick concurs. “It was really just a shitty pub in a really shitty area, which just meant that you could get away with a lot more. Any commercial venue at the time would just not have any of the music that we were involved with. There was no way on earth that anyone would accommodate it for commercial reasons, and for the fact that we were all just a bunch of little kids, as far as everyone was concerned, playing stupid, sped-up punk rock. So it was just like a laugh for a lot of people. Even for us at the time, we tried to be serious, but because of our ages it wasn’t so focused. It was all purely accidental. But by the time the Mermaid was [regularly having gigs] anyone could set up a show there. The landlords of the pub didn’t give two shits. You could just literally go in there and say, ‘I wanna put a show on in here in two weeks time.’ And they’d just say, ‘Yeah, what day?’”

  While there were sporadic gigs hosted at the venue for years prior, it was local promoter Daz Russell who was booking nearly all of the punk and hardcore shows at the club for the autumn of 1985, often adding locals like Heresy, Concrete Sox and Napalm Death to bills already featuring international touring bands like DRI, Antisect and MDC.

  “Daz Russell was good in some ways because he would try and get bands on,” recalls Bullen, “but he wouldn’t always pay them.”

  “True enough there was often no money to pay everyone or anyone sometimes,” says Russell. “But don’t think I was some rich promoter with a big car and house. I was 18 and worked in a carpet warehouse at the time earning £50 a week. These gigs were cheap—like £1.50 for nine bands. I didn’t do it for the money. I just enjoyed it and wanted to see bands play in Birmingham. I did make money sometimes, but I also lost it sometimes.”

  One of the newest paying Mermaid patrons was a young Birmingham punker by the name of Mick Harris.

  “I discovered the Mermaid and Napalm Death at the same time, and it was an instant magnetic attraction,” recalls Harris. “I don’t know what I heard in Napalm—there was just something there that attracted me to them. I used to go watch them every fucking weekend and I just got heavily, heavily into it. I would go to dance to them, to the faster songs. There were particular tracks I was waiting for every time. I was living for it. I was loving it.”

  “He just came up to us at the Mermaid and he had this psychobilly haircut, which is like a flattop, this little guy who was covered in tattoos, and he just said, ‘I fucking love this stuff that Napalm Death do,’” says Broadrick. “And we were like, ‘Oh, right, yeah, great.’ Like any kid that would come up, you’d just be like, ‘Thanks.’ And we were still talking abou
t a handful of people. We were legends in our own backyard and that was it.”

  Harris’ enthusiasm, however, clearly set him apart from other fans of the band. Though he already played drums in a punk band of his own called Anorexia, which also featured future Head of David bass player Dave Cochran, Harris actually first offered Bullen and Broadick his musical services as a vocalist and then as a drummer during that initial conversation with the pair.

  “We didn’t want to use him as a singer, but he also said, ‘I drum as well and I drum fast,’” Broadrick relates. “So I went down to a rehearsal to see Anorexia, and basically they were pretty backwards punk shit, but I noticed this psychobilly guy that had come up to us, Mick Harris, was playing very, very fast. And at the end of the rehearsal, he was like, ‘Check this out.’ And he just played really fucking fast.”

  “At the time, Peanut was already gone and Rat wasn’t that interested in playing fast, really,” Bullen recalls. “He was interested in a certain velocity and no more.”

  Further intrigued with Harris’ abilities, Bullen and Broadrick put the young drummer through some informal exams.

  “We played him tapes of Siege and DRI, and he didn’t know this stuff,” says Broadrick.

  “But after we played him it and he could play it within about two days, then we were like, ‘We’re unfortunately gonna have to get rid of Rat. This is what we wanna go for. This is definitely it.’”

  After only one rehearsal in November of 1985, Harris was officially the new drummer of Napalm Death.

  “I started rehearsing with Justin in my bedroom in December of ‘85,” Harris explains. “By then he’d turned me on to a few things like Sodom and Destruction. I didn’t know that side of things. I had heard some stuff, but I had never owned any rock records in my youth. I just didn’t grow up with it. So that was my first turn on to metal. It wasn’t really what I knew of metal. This was punk. This was aggressive.”

  A handful of practices later, Napalm were ready for their first Rat-free performance on January 17th at the Mermaid. Harris made an immediate impact on fans of the band.

  “I remember listening to the slow parts in the Napalm Death songs out on the dancefloor, and then Mick would start the beat and we would all look at each other because, the floorboards would literally vibrate from the kick drum,” recalls Pearson, who would regularly make the 50-mile journey from Nottingham to the Birmingham club.

  “I can still remember how it hit me. It was just phenomenal. You could just feel the floor move to the pace of the bass drum. You could feel the speed. You knew it wasn’t just hitting on the snare. There’s a big difference. The power comes from the kick drum when they play so fast. It was new to the scene.”

  So original, in fact, that Harris even developed the idiom “blast beat” for the wickedly fast 64th notes he played on the snare drum. Additionally, the drummer coined the term “grindcore” to properly represent this rapidly developing new genre of music.

  “Grindcore came from ‘grind,’ which was the only word I could use to describe Swans after buying their first record in ’84,” Harris explains. “Then with this new hardcore movement that started to really bloom in ‘85, I thought ‘grind’ really fit because of the speed so I started to call it grindcore.”

  Moreover, Harris’ initial show with Napalm Death also marked the first time the band played on the same Mermaid bill with breakneck contemporaries Heresy, whose drummer Steve Charlesworth would enter into a friendly rivalry with Harris.

  “I suppose there might have been a bit of competition, but I think it wasn’t anything that boiled up,” says Charlesworth. “It wasn’t necessarily just playing fast for me. Micky just went for the full-on, just as fast as possible, whereas we wanted to get it as intense as possible with fills, as well. The speed was foremost, but it had it be with something else more—I won’t say technical—but more controlled, at least.”

  “Heresy would play, and then Mick Harris would try to play faster than Steve,” contends Pearson. “It was kind of a little competition. Then the next time Heresy played the Mermaid, Steve would drum for Heresy as fast as he could, then Mick Harris would get up on the stage with Napalm Death and be faster. Watching that was half the appeal of going to the club—just to see the drum war going on. That was kinda how grindcore started in that little club, those two guys egging each other on because there was no one else around playing so fast—not that we knew anyway.”

  “At first, most people weren’t that interested,” says Bullen of the band’s first few Mermaid gigs. “We were vaguely a laughingstock in some respects. To most people, it was kinda like, ‘That’s just racket.’”

  “We’d be like, ‘How fast can we play this?’” says Broadrick. “About half of the songs that were written before Mick Harris joined were slower, then we just sped them all up. We simply sped everything up, apart from the slow breaks. Literally, we were laughing in rehearsal—we were on the floor. That’s how we wrote ‘You Suffer.’ We would play at gigs in front of maybe 70 people at the Mermaid and we’d play ‘You Suffer,’ since it was just over a second long, like, 50 times. People would just be yelling, ‘Again, again, again!’ It was pure comedy. Obviously, we had a serious political message and everything, but we were still just kids.”

  Over the next few months, however, Napalm Death began drawing larger crowds and, thanks in significant part to Daz Russell, playing the Mermaid up to four times a week.

  “By about March of ‘86 it sorta dawned on us that loads and loads of people were coming to see us play,” says Bullen. “And they were actually people we didn’t know.”

  Among those new attendees was the pair of Mitch Dickinson and Shane Embury from the small town of Broseley, located 40 miles from Birmingham.

  “Completely by accident I met Justin Broadrick and Nik Bullen in a Virgin Records in Birmingham, and they were impressed with the fact that I had Celtic Frost and Siege written on the same jacket,” recalls Dickinson. “So they said, ‘We’re in a band called Napalm Death and we’re kinda like a mixture of those bands.’ And they gave me a flyer, and Shane and I were off a week later on March 22nd of 1986—I still remember the exact date—to see them. We walked in and it was just a room full of guys with mohawks and dreadlocks and green hair, and there was us metal guys in leather jackets with our own paintings on them. We stood out like sore thumbs, but because of our enthusiasm and genuine interest in that scene we quickly got accepted.”

  Ultimately, Embury and Dickinson’s warm reception was symbolic of the metal and hardcore scenes’ developing bond, which was further strengthened by tape-trading between the genres.

  “It was good because we were tape-trading with lots of Americans at the time,” says Embury, “and all of a sudden we found our own scene that we would trade in, so we were trading English demos for American bands.”

  In fact, to most people involved in the scene, Embury was the most active tape trader in all of England.

  “There was a magazine called Metal Forces back in ‘85,” he explains. “It was the only magazine then that used to feature bands like Slayer and Mercyful Fate. There was a section in the back of the magazine called ‘Pen Bangers,’ and it was little ads for pen pals where kids would list the bands they were into such as Slayer and Possessed and Venom. And Mitch and I picked out a couple guys and we wrote to them and they wrote back, and we started swapping tapes of loads of things that I’d never heard. After a little while we amassed a little of our own, which was like 30 or 40 demo tapes. And then we put our little ads in the back of Metal Forces, and kids started writing to us, and it snowballed from there.

  “At the time I wasn’t working,” Embury continues. “I had a couple of jobs that hadn’t lasted very long because I always was getting fired for going to see bands play in London. So during the day, I was literally living in front of the tape deck, sometimes up to eight hours a day. I know at one point, from about January of ‘86 to about August of ‘86, I must have sent out between 30 and 40 casse
ttes under the door per week.”

  “I remember Shane giving me these tape lists, and I was like, ‘Wow, look at all this stuff.’ I had heard of this stuff—Genocide and Death—but I could never get my hands on it. It was heavier and more underground than what Sodom is and what Destruction is and what Slayer is. This seems to be what I need to get into. I was turning Shane on to hardcore, Japanese hardcore and other extreme hardcore and the D.C. stuff that he liked, like the faster end. So we really fucking hit it off.”

  Soon Embury and Dickinson were inviting metal friends of their own to experience the noisy sounds of the club, two of whom were the young Bill Steer and Ken Owen, natives of a group of small towns just outside of Liverpool known as the Wirral.

  “At the Mermaid, there were loads of bands and people, and, in a way, everybody knew each other,” recalls Steer. “So there was a load of people just a bit sluggish from drinking too much, and these bands aren’t necessarily supposed to try that hard. Generally, it all blends into one thing and nobody stands out. But that first day I saw Napalm Death, I thought Mick did. There was just so much power. I was just blown away by what the guy was doing. Steve from Heresy was a great drummer that had an incredible amount of respect from everybody. But with Mick, the guy was just a force of nature. It wasn’t just like watching a great drummer—it was kinda terrifying how much intensity was there.”

  With a growing demand for new recorded material featuring Harris in the lineup, the band scraped together £120—largely financed by promoter Daz Russell—and booked two days worth of time at Rich Bitch studios in Birmingham in August of 1986. The group didn’t know it at the time, but that 12-track recording would one day become the A-side of Napalm Death’s debut album Scum.