live review: mayhem. rockheim, trondheim, norway. 18 october 2011.
ed note:i know this isn’t the usual type of band that you’d see reviewed on here, but come the fuck on. this is mayhem. they’re proper legendary. what’s more, this was in their home country of norway. i haven’t checked it out, but i’m pretty sure this must be a uk exclusive. let’s assume it is.
it is 17 years since de mysteriis dom sathanas, the album that, in the wake of mayhem’s murders, suicides and church burnings, put black metal on an obscure part of the northern european map.
atilla csisar, the norwegian band’s hungarian front man looks like he’s had a few goulashes since then, but still puts his sometimes operatic voice though the tonsil cheese grater. he’s daubed in bloody-faced corpse paint and black cape, and performs to the skull he holds in his hand. the noose which hangs from the high ceiling looks tight around his neck. he sways around the stage, pulling the rope yet tighter on his throat as he fights imaginary demons with some kind of pissed-up martial art. at his best he’s like a drunk boxing-announcer, vomiting sandpaper onto a broken microphone.
beside him, the band’s living co-founder and bassist, necro butcher, still shirtless and buff after all these years, allows himself the occasional smile on the stage while the two session guitarists thrash with the black metal look of pained determination. at the back of the stage, the band’s iconic mentalist drummer, hellhammer, hammers away with artful violence.
today’s black metal bands work hard with professionals to achieve the genre’s signature unprofessional sound. mayhem practically invented it with that 1994 album. but mayhem’s core members are regarded as atistes and the trondheim club, rockheim, has the best acoustics in northern norway. (it is, says the roadie, effectively a large recording studio.) so the dose of unprofessionalism comes from a weird shaky-cam, back-stage interview with the band after the gig, broadcast onto the club’s big screen. csisar doesn’t understand the norwegian questions so just growls drunkenly into the microphone to the audience’s delight.
hellhammer is pissed off, he tells me later, that the pig’s heads, which the band like to fling at the audience, did not arrive in time for the gig. the crowd don’t seem to mind. a huge, grimy, fat guy at the front of the club punches nearby strangers in the arm in what he imagines is a black metal approximation of a pill-head hugging a stranger in an early 90s warehouse. one guy faints. a young girl, no older than 18, with coiffured hair and fashionable jeans, wears bright yellow ear plugs. she is far too hot for the ugly, raw sound coming from the stage, and the sweaty headbangers stinking up the floor.
she may not even have been alive when varg vikernes, mayhem’s then session bassist, murdered band-mate euronymous in a frenzied, 32-stab, knife attack in 1994 – nor even when hellhammer released the album later that year with the murdered and murderer playing together on the same record. she was no more than an idea when dead, the band’s aptly-named front man blew his brains out in euronymous’s flat in 1993. in 1992, when vikernes was burning down 12th century churches, the young reveller’s dad was probably just plucking up the courage to feel up her mum-to-be in a shitty trondheim cinema. and her parents had probably not even met when necrobutcher and euronymous started the band in 1984.
but when csisar dedicates a song from de mysteriis sataanis to dead, the young girl headbangs enthusiastically with the rest. even if her hair doesn’t move very much.
words by mark lewis (twitter)
