by Jorge Patacas
The British author and music journalist Dayal Patterson has recently released “Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult – The Restored, Expanded & Definitive Edition”, a new version of the original book from 2013, coinciding with its 10th anniversary. He was in Oslo to attend Inferno Festival this year, so it was an ideal occasion to sit down with him and talk in depth about the book, his publishing house Cult Never Dies, his take on AI, and more.
RISE!: – You’ve recently released an expanded version of “Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult”, the book originally released in 2013. Why do you think this was the right time to do it? Was it because of the 10th anniversary or just a coincidence?
Dayal Patterson: It was largely because of the 10th year anniversary, but it was also by coincidence. I managed to get the rights back in late 2022, and as soon as I knew I had them, I felt a burning desire to just dedicate myself to this.
R!: – What’s the story? What happened?
DP: Well, the rights were owned by Feral House, who published the original book. I wasn’t very happy with the way it came out, so I’ve always dreamt that one day I’m gonna get the rights back to this book. I didn’t have the money, it’s very expensive to buy the rights for a book like that. There hadn’t been a discussion with the publisher about buying the rights, so I didn’t even know if they would be interested, but Albert Mudrian from Decibel bought his rights back for his Choosing Death book from Feral House, and that kind of made me think that one day maybe they’ll be happy to sell the rights to me, and I think I spoke to them about that in 2022, and they gave me a figure, and I think I got the loan and made it happen in late 2022. So in a way, the sensible thing to do would have been to wait to start working on it and release it in late 2024, but it became a kind of an all-encompassing project, and I just had to do it and get it out and dedicate myself to it. So I basically stopped working on everything else. On “Cult Never Dies”, as company, we normally do at least one book every quarter and release new merch and albums and so on, but last year we didn’t do anything apart from “Evolution of the Cult” and one record by Trivax. That was just because all my time was devoted to the book and it just sort of became my life for a year, I was doing up to sixteen hours a day on it, I didn’t have time to work on anything else. At that point, the release date had to be within 2023 because firstly, it hit the anniversary but also because I had already spent twelve months almost solely working on that and there had to be a limit, because there was so many other projects and I wasn’t really doing the job I normally do. I had other people running the mail order, so that’s kind of taking care of itself, but still, I need to be doing my job, and I wasn’t.
R!: – What was your goal with this book? Did you want to update the content to current times, or did you feel that there were important things that had been left out in the first edition?
DP: The latter. Even at the time, there was a lot of stuff that had to be cut out. The idea wasn’t really to update, that became part of it. The subtitle is “The Restored, Expanded and Definitive Edition”, so the first step was restoring chapters that the original publisher hadn’t had space for. Then it became about expanding what was there, sort of, for my own satisfaction and improving upon what I’d done ten years earlier or longer in some cases because some of the book was written in 2009 and 2010, so I obviously improved as a writer, you learn some new things. There were some small mistakes in the book, things I’d left out, and things that I didn’t like and had to change. So it was about making the book the way I wanted it to be back in 2013, but then also having the freedom to add things to make the book the best it could be. For example, you have a whole chapter on Immortal, Satyricon, Winterfylleth, Profanatica, Absu, Impaled Nazarene, Deathspell Omega… These are all brand new chapters, but as well as that, for example, the Thorns chapter originally was an interview with Snorre (Ruch), but for the new book I was able to speak to Marius Vold exactly one year ago in this room I think. As a co-founder he could add his story to the Thorns chapter, and then because I was talking to him and he was talking about living with Faust and Snorre, then he was able to talk about some of the criminal aspects and how that affected the scene. He was also a co-founder of Helvete, so each time I would add something, I often found that it drew the other chapters and I would get somebody’s opinions for one chapter and it would expand the story in other parts of the book, so I kind of had the freedom which you wouldn’t normally have to just keep expanding each part of it and making each chapter bigger if necessary. So yeah, it was a case of adding totally new parts, but also gently expanding each chapter and making it more definitive.
R!: – How long have you been working on this new edition? It was only last year or you started before?
DP: I worked on the original book between 2009 and 2012, and it was published in 2013. The new edition has some of the work done during that time. For example, the Satyricon chapter was worked on in 2014 and 2015, and then I spent about thirteen months on the new edition. But I did so much work in 2023, I probably wrote as much in that one year as I had done in two years when I first wrote the book. So things moved very quickly. I think it’s 340.000 words and 140.000 words that I wrote in one year and 200.000 of them I wrote over maybe three or four years, so I was moving quite quickly, partly because I was working very long hours and partly because it was built in all the information I had over the last ten years. There were interviews I’ve done after the original book for the sequels, but there were parts I hadn’t used and there was lots of material to draw around and also there was a lot of stuff that was in my head, so I didn’t have to do the same level of research as the first time around. I knew what parts were missing and where I was going with it, and that made a big difference to the whole dynamic.
R!: – As you said, you’ve been working on this for a long time, so at some point you had to say, “ok, this is it, I cannot keep adding things”. When did you get to that point? Because there’s always something left…
DP: Absolutely. Well, there had to be a limit. I think most of the limits were defined before I started expanding it. I knew that I couldn’t have every chapter on every band in black metal obviously, that would be a physical limit. So I kind of planned out the extra chapters. It went from being 50 to 75 chapters, so I kind of planned out what that would be, but it did grow a little bit more than I expected because I think there were sections where I felt it needed to be expanded a little bit. When I did the American section, I think I always planned to have Absu, Profanatica, Black Witchery and Agalloch, but I think originally I would have had three American chapters, then I can’t remember which one it was, but I felt like it needed to be a little bit more representative of the whole picture. There were a few things like that. It was kind of making sure that things were more balanced, and even then, there’s space for the sequels to complete the picture. For example, the two sequels that I released in 2015 and 2016, those are still the sequels, if you know what I mean, I didn’t take those books and put them into the new “Evolution of the Cult”, those are still the sequels and there’s probably going to be more sequels to talk about certain areas in more detail, but at the same time I wanted the “Evolution of the Cult” definitive edition to have as much importance to represent as much of a complete story as possible. You don’t have to read the sequels to get the whole picture. I think if somebody reads the new edition of “Evolution…”, they would get a very complete picture of black metal and it had to be like that for it to be a worth release, something that was complete on its own.
R!: – You and visual artist David Thiérrée have worked together for a few years now, so perhaps it was natural to ask him to work on the cover artwork this time. The illustration is based on the cover of the first edition which is basically the corpse paint. Did you want this artwork originally because it’s one of the visual elements that define the genre?
DP: I had no control over the original cover of the book. So this was part of the reason that I wasn’t really happy with the original edition. I’ve designed the cover of every book that I’ve released and also designed the cover of the 27 books that we released through Cult Never Dies, so this is really important to me, and having a book where I didn’t have to do the cover, it never really felt like my book even though that was just one small part of it. When I looked at it, I couldn’t connect. I did design covers for the original, but the publisher decided to use this picture and I changed some things because originally it had a really ridiculous font. Luckily they changed that for me, but they didn’t want to change the cover. I have no idea about that picture, I think it was just the designer or a friend of the designer, but I never liked that cover. To me it was very lazy and looked like a cartoon take on corpse paint. So when I came to do the new cover, I kind of wanted the corpse-painted face for two reasons. Firstly, because that had sort of been my original idea. And secondly, because now the original cover was sort of set in stone, it needed to be something that referenced the old cover, you know? I think the original is a photoshop photo and I wanted it to be much more analog and drawn piece, so that was one of the reasons to use David, and secondly, we worked together on six or seven covers, so I trusted his vision. He’s from the black metal scene and I wanted somebody who understood. He came up with the idea of having the landscape and the trees, that was totally him, but there were little things that I changed on the drawing. I wanted to slightly change some of the corpse paint and change the eyes a little bit.
R!: – Did you ask him to change those things or you changed them yourself?
DP: I worked on it. There was a few things that I got him to change, but there were few things that I did myself. I’m not sure if he’s aware of that.
R!: – He’ll find out when he reads this… (laughs)
DP: Yeah, he’ll find out when he reads this. I don’t normally interfere with an artist’s work, but this book is a bit different. It had to be exactly as I saw it, so there were a few things like the eye… I think when you look at the book cover on the right eye, you can see these two trees that cross over, so it’s more like a cross on the face paint, and that was something I added. It doesn’t sound like something important, but it was important to me. I need to feel that it’s my thing.
R!: – Were there any musicians who were difficult to contact or that didn’t want to participate?
DP: Not really actually. I would have expected it to be much more of that. There were a few people that weren’t available like It from Abruptum. He said he couldn’t take part because he was writing his own book and then he died. There were very few people that never got back to me, but they weren’t particularly… not to be rude, but they weren’t super important part of the story, so maybe they wouldn’t have made the final cut anyway. I definitely would have had It from Abruptum if he’d been up for doing the story. Originally, back in 2013, Deathspell Omega very politely said that they didn’t want to be part of it, but I was quite lucky because in the meantime they had done an interview for Cult Never Dies with another writer called Roy Kristensen, so we could reference that, so that was helpful. There were things like that, and to be honest, the biggest change between the original book and the new one was that it was so much quicker to get people involved and to reach them. When I did the original book, there were bands I emailed and it would take them months to reply. There was none of that this time, for two reasons. Firstly, social media, because a lot of the people had Facebook, so I could literally had a quick call or message them to have an interview. That made things so much quicker. The second thing was that when I wrote the original, there were quite a lot of people who weren’t aware of who I am or what I do, so there were quite suspicious. They didn’t have any point of reference on why I would do this book about black metal. They were worried that it would be like Lords of Chaos, so I had to kind of talk to them about what the book is gonna be like, so all this took time, you know? Convincing people to be part of it. But with the new book was different because ten years have passed and most people have read the old book or at least knew about it, and if they hadn’t, I could say “well, here’s the sequel that I published”, this is how it’s going to be, so it was much more easy to get people to be part of it. In some cases, bands approached me saying they wanted to be part of it. It became much more comfortable to reach out and deal with these people because there was not that distance. For some of these people, there wasn’t a distance the first time around, but there were definitely some bands where I had no contact at all. I was a stranger to them and I was trying to convince them as a stranger whereas some of the bands now we do the merch for, distribute their records… It was much more comfortable.
R!: – Were there any that surprised you in terms of how they opened up to tell the stories?
DP: Everyone I think. I was surprised how opened people were. I didn’t think so many people would be involved originally and I didn’t think that so many people would be so open. I did another interview this week about the book and someone asked me who was the hardest person to interview. There really wasn’t anyone that was tough. There have been people I’ve interviewed that were tough to interview for magazines and so on, but for the book I think by the time somebody decided to be part of the project, they were probably ready to be open and tell their story. It wouldn’t make sense to say that they will be part of the book and then hold back. In general, everyone was very open and I think that’s kind of what makes the book worth. It has artists speaking straight to the reader and I think people were aware maybe that they didn’t have that platform and that was an opportunity to set the record straight. That was good for people to take advantage of that and approach the book in that spirit.
R!: – I suppose you already know this, but there are lots of black metal fans in Latin America for example. Have you ever thought of releasing the book in different languages? Spanish for example?
DP: Yeah, definitely. The original “Evolution of the Cult” and other books on the Cult Never Dies publishing house have been released in German, Japanese, Polish, Czech, Russian, French… so quite a few languages. The challenge we’ve always had is Spanish and Portuguese…
R!: – Why is that?
DP: Not that there’s a lack of translators, but a lack of publishers. Spanish and Portuguese are obviously the most important because of the huge number of people that speak those languages. We have the Rotting Christ book available in Spanish. That was published in Colombia. The original edition of “Evolution of the Cult” was published in Portuguese in Brazil. So we have done it a little bit, but it’s always been tricky, you know? As I said, I think we have four books in German, five books in Russian, so we would definitely like more translations, but the problem with Portugal and Spain is that we got the translators, but we don’t have publishers in those countries or in Latin America who seem to be interested. The difficulty is always having some company that has the budget and distribution, and will to actually publish the book. This has been a challenge.
R!: – A couple of days ago you had a panel here at Inferno with Harald Fossberg who also wrote a book about black metal. There you mentioned that the idea of what black metal is, is quite different from person to person, and you mentioned Frost (Satyricon, 1349) and Erik Danielsson (Watain) as an example. But what’s your personal take on what black metal is?
DP: That’s the million dollar question. The phrase “black metal” has so much weight of history and culture, so to say what black metal is is a little reductive because it’s not just about defining what the black metal as a style is. It’s like saying “what is hip hop?”, right? You can say “hip hop” is a Jay-Z song, but obviously it’s much more than that song. It’s a culture, graffiti, breakdance originally, and it has become a huge business. Or you can say “what is Oslo?” and then you can mention the geographical location, but then talk about the economy and infrastructure. So, without sounding too pretentious, if you say black metal is music that sounds like this, that’s part of it, but at this point you have to say that black metal is a genre of music and a subculture which has existed for forty years and has a greater artistic, ideological and musical ambition than any other form of heavy music and perhaps any other form of modern music, in my opinion. I think there are very few art or music forms that compare to black metal in terms of variety, depth and ambition in terms of meaning and culture. It’s not just a music form. If we reduce it to music, I think black metal should be metal music which has something sinister, dark and it should also have an atmosphere and the atmosphere should have the effect upon the listener that is something greater than the listener. This isn’t music about the streets or everyday reality. This is something where you listen to it and it should evoke something that you’re in touch with or aware of. Something bigger than yourself whether that’s nature or Satan or an ideology. Just something that you feel you’re connecting to something greater. As I said, it needs to be dark, sinister, negative, something along those lines. It shouldn’t be happy music. It could have uplifting parts, but still there’s a range of emotions that are perhaps outside of what black metal music is about and that’s why I think some bands today that people want to describe as black metal I would probably not describe as black metal because it’s too happy. I think black metal also needs to be anti religious and anti society at some level, and again, these are quite hard things to pen down, but I don’t think you can have a Christian black metal band or a black metal band which is too political, left or right, I think that makes it something different. So yeah, there’s a lot of caveats about what black metal is, in my opinion. I think those words describe more than just the music that’s being played. They describe a counterculture to some extent.
R!: – Another panel here at Inferno was related to AI where some visual artists discussed how they’re being affected by this and how it’s going to get worse. Cult Never Dies supports this “Stop the Madness” campaign against the use of AI art, so what’s your personal opinion on where this is going and what do you think we can do to stop it if that were possible?
DP: When I made that “Stop the AI Madness”, of course there was a little bit of humor in it because obviously we do Mysticum merchandise and that was a reference to the “Never Stop the Madness” campaign. But there’s a serious point behind it. I think to some degree AI domination is inevitable within society and I think we shall see quite a few jobs and livelihoods replaced with AI, that’s how things are set. Well, AI is a brought term, but let’s say by greater automation. Most people have seen how the supermarkets have reduced the number of people employed as cashiers because they were replaced by machines. This is a very early example of this kind of replacement and of course factories largely replaced people through robots and machines in that sense. I think we will see much more of that whether it’s self-replicating code or writers being replaced by new sites using AI for news pieces. I think all of that is kind of inevitable, but there were two points that I was making about AI in extreme metal. The first was a practical one and it’s that the technology isn’t quite ready to replace the human, so if you use it, it’s just a bad business decision because people would laugh at your work. We saw that with Decide, Hour of Penance and Pestilence. The story of those albums will always be people laughing at the artwork and that’s bad for the band. When I made that graphic, I was trying to speak to young bands who would be tempted to use it because it’s free, but you’re creating something that’s bad business because you may save a few hundred dollars on an artist, but you will lose that money through merch sales because nobody wants to wear a t-shirt with AI art. That’s the good side of it in a sense, because I think in a few years you wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s AI and then it becomes a matter of ethics. I think the benefits of extreme metal culture as opposed to video game culture or certain other forms of music, is that there’s quite a strong code of ethics inherent to the genre and you can therefore voice resistance to certain things that will be practical because in a sense all of the underground extreme metal scene is impractical if we talk from a capital or efficiency point of view. Making extreme metal to begin with is not the most cost-effective thing to do if you’re just interested in making money. By its definition, extreme and underground metal is an area where people should make creative decisions based on something more than just wanting to make money. It’s based on passions, ideologies and so on. I think that gives us some hope in a sense. It’s self-evident really that it’s better not to have AI art at least in terms of people using just AI art. You can never detect if somebody who’s an artist is using it for ideas and then working on it, that’s something different. But in terms of just creating a piece of Midjourney art or something, that’s bad on an aesthetical and economic level because extreme metal is always short of money and has been even more short of money since the late 2000’s when the music industry collapsed. If you don’t allow people to make back some of their money or to survive on an economic level, things fall apart. We might not like the fact that the extreme metal scene needs money to survive. You need money to make physical products, to put on concerts, to record… and if we have talented visual artists that work in our field probably reducing their earning capability by working on the metal scene instead of a more commercial field, then if we don’t support those people, they will have to get normal jobs and make less art and less music and the scene will suffer. So we were lucky in a sense that when bands like Pestilence and Deicide posted up this obviously AI art, that people said something. It might seem a little mean or spirited to laugh at the band for their terrible artwork, but it’s actually quite important because it sends a message to other bands, specially younger bands, that this isn’t something which is celebrated within the scene. My hope would be that as AI dominates more and more in society, that within certain subcultures, in this case underground metal, that that will be a some sort of oasis where it’s not dominating. Of course it will be around, but I hope there’s a resistance in the same way that we have a resistance to some other values that dominate in society, that’s why we can be hopeful. I see people posting AI art in other fields and you see the comments and it’s not full of resistance. The wider issue maybe is that just as artists now use AI for ideas which is fair enough, I think you can’t really tell people not to do that, in any case you’ll never know, but I think what a lot of metal people don’t realize yet is that bands will be using AI for the music and lyrics. I already know of artists who are using AI to generate music, so this will be the same thing I think. If you generate music with AI, probably it will be detectable if you just put it out as it is, but I think the way this is going to be used is the same way as some of those visual artists where you perhaps get the AI to write a riff for your songs, and then you relearn to play them so it’s not detectable. People already use ChatGPT for lyrics in some cases, and again, if you just use that directly probably it’s detectable, but if you make a few changes… so in a sense I think AI will become a bit dominating even within our world without us necessarily being aware. I think specially young people who are growing up with ChatGPT, they will ask why would you not do it. I think that side is much harder to resist or even being aware of.
R!: – You have also written other books over the last few years, which one was the most challenging for you?
DP: This new version of “Evolution of the Cult” was the most challenging in terms of stress, time, money and energy. I don’t think I’ll ever need to spend four or five years on a book in the future. I’ll never write a book as big as this one. Also, it’s not just the writing of the book, it’s the gathering of pictures, you know? This book has 650 images and on the box set edition there’s maybe another 300. There’s so much work involved in that. That seems like an easy thing to do in a way, but of course you have to find photographers, get the pictures in a printable size…
R!: – And that can be difficult with the old pictures…
DP: Exactly. And there’s also so much sort of admin writing a book. I think that’s the thing that people might not be aware of, is that it’s not just about writing the chapters. There’s so much planning involved, and kind of having to speak to the right people, and making sure that all the chapters float together. There’s a hell lot of editing as well. So it would definitely be this book. Nothing else comes closer.
R!: – You mentioned earlier the Rotting Christ book you wrote with Sakis Tolis (guitarist/vocalist) and that’s of course different because it’s a band and not a genre. So, how was the process there?
DP: That was quite challenging to write because of the nature of the people involved in Rotting Christ.
R!: – Because of the members involved in different eras or what do you mean?
DP: I would dare to say that Greek people are a little bit harder to manage than Norwegian people when it comes to deadlines. Writing that book was a bit like herding kittens, or something like that, you know? They have a relaxed approach when it comes to things like time tables and facts and stuff like that. And also, they’re very busy people, specially Sakis, he’s always working. So that was the challenging part of that book, but the easier part of it was that you ain’t starting from scratch with each chapter, so if you think about “Evolution…”, it’s been 75 chapters on different bands and scenes with very little overlap. You’re almost writing 75 short stories. But the positive thing with the Rotting Christ book was that you had the whole story and had to split it up into different bits and pieces. So there was a lot less work in terms of planning and getting different people involved because once you have the key people like Sakis, Themis (drummer), Jim Mutilator (former bass player), once you have them, you can just talk about everything and have more interviews if necessary. I had a good relationship with the main members of the band, it wouldn’t have worked without that. These guys kind of became friends. So again, if I needed some information, I could just phone Sakis and Jim as well. Having him involved was a big thing I think, specially because it kind of coincided with him coming back to music. In fact, he even said his comeback was with Yoth Iria. Magus from Necromantia has a book and I was reading it recently, and he says that he ended up getting Magus as a vocalist because I suggested it and I’ve forgotten that I suggested that. And we also put out the first Yoth Iria EP, so we became quite close and that made things quite easier. I think it was also the first proper interview that Themis had ever done in thirty years. That was very good as well, to have his voice in the story of Rotting Christ, and again, he’s not the easiest person to arrangements. We were able to make that happen through visiting him in Athens and so on. Also it was difficult when it comes to dates and facts that you use as a framework for the story, they were not recorded in the same way like Scandinavian bands where you can generally find. There were quite a lot of things that took a lot of research because you ask them and they have no idea really, so you have to contact other people and so on.
R!: – How did Cult Never Dies come about? How did you come up with the idea of creating your own publishing company and what advantages did you see when evaluating the possibility of doing so?
DP: The birth of Cult Never Dies was really very basic. Feral House published the first edition of “Evolution of the Cult” and they were paying me barely anything in terms of royalties. But I was allowed to buy the books for 50% of the sales price. So I started buying the books for ten pounds and selling them for twenty and I signed them. I did this because, firstly, I wanted to sell more copies of the book and it wasn’t really being promoted. Secondly, I was not making any money from the book, because my contract was quite bad, but I could then make ten pounds profit. So that was the first part. At the same time, I wanted to release some of the stuff that had been cut from the book, so the very first release on Cult Never Dies was “Black Metal: Prelude to the Cult” which is a 60 page companion mini book to “Evolution…”. I released that the same day as a photocopied fanzine format. So now, I’ve managed to get material out that was not going to be seen, I was doing a fanzine again, which I’d done years before, so I had experience in that. And now I could sell for twenty-five pounds. So I bought it for twenty, it costs maybe one pound to make the fanzine, sold it for five. So in every sale, I was making fourteen pounds. That was the start of Cult Never Dies because all that money just went back into the company, so I could make new things. So quite quickly, I asked some of the bands I was friendly with like Rotting Christ, Manes and Beherit if I could make some shirts because I’ve always liked merchandise and I wanted to do my own, so I put fourteen pounds in a bank account and I could use that to produce t-shirts and that made a little bit of money that went back in. It was that basic really. Cult Never Dies started with no money. Everything that it was built on, was built on the success of the previous release, so in a sense “Evolution…” provided an economic foundation. By the time that I wanted to release a sequel which was “Cult Never Dies: Volume One” in early 2015, I had some basic infrastructure in place like a basic website and a basic webstore with five items, a P.O.Box and a bank account. So it was as basic and DIY as it could be, and I didn’t imagine it to become what it is now. It was just a way of me being able to distribute my own books and some merchandise without any interference, and it grew. The year where things changed was 2016 because I released two books that year, “Black Metal: Into the Abyss” and “Cult Never Dies: The MegaZine”, and also because that year I was too busy to do my part-time job, so I was working part-time and doing Cult Never Dies. And at some point I stopped working in my normal job. Also “Cult Never Dies: The MegaZine” had two chapters by a different writer, so that was the first time we published someone else’s work. The same year David Thiérrée had contacted me about doing a book with him, so now this was the start of doing our first work which was essentially not my book. And also I took on a staff member to run the mail order to do the practical stuff. Originally, I was writing the books, designing, editing, printing, packing, it was just impossible to continue like that. So that’s really when Cult Never Dies became a more serious thing around late 2016/early 2017. By 2017 we had the start of what we have now, a small staff, a webstore, we were also distributing other people’s fanzines which would become an important thing and we were selling more merchandise. Another big leap was around 2020 when we started distributing vinyl, CDs and tapes. That was another big step forward. It was very organic, there was not a long term plan.
R!: – What are the most sold items in the webstore?
DP: The most sold items are actually my books. The best selling item would be “Evolution of the Cult” and the two sequels, but very high sellers would also be the Rotting Christ book. That sold a lot. The Finnish Death Metal book, that one sold way more than I expected. The Paradise Lost book did well. Certain items of merchandise like Ulver’s “Bergtatt” t-shirt, some of the Mysticum, Dødheimsgard and Beherit t-shirts. But the most selling items are the books which is very encouraging. I think the other thing is that it’s much harder to get books in other places. We opened an EU store last year and this is an attempt to have the books more easily available and Decibel are distributing more of our books, so this is helpful as well. We don’t want it to be that you have to go to our mail order to buy the books. They need to be distributed in a more practical way.
R!: – I read that some stuff is available in a store in London for example…
DP: Yes, Raven Records. Also Black City Records in Bristol. We obviously sell books through Season of Mist and all these kind of people. So it’s an important thing to have the books available in more places.
R!: – How did you get into Black Metal? How did you discover the genre?
DP: I got first into Guns N’ Roses when I was around 11 and then I got into things like Metallica and Megadeth, the normal gateway. Then Sepultura, then got into early Bolt Thrower, Carcass and Entombed. So black metal wasn’t a shock for me in terms of heaviness because I’d already listened to that death metal stuff. I did see the sort of satanic panic stuff, but I was quite young. When that stuff happened I was like 12 years old, so I didn’t really connect to that. It wasn’t until ’95 I guess. I stopped going to school and I used to hang out in the town during the day. I would hang out at the record store and I would meet kids that were a bit older and from a different college, and I would have my Paradise Lost t-shirt or something and I guess they saw this young kid who was enthusiastic about metal, but haven’t yet gone to the dark side, so they gave me cassettes. The funny thing is that none of the record stores had black metal in them, they would have some death metal like Autopsy and Deicide. Even Cradle of Filth was not that easy to find in normal shops back then. So I didn’t know how any of these bands looked like. I had dubbed cassettes with bands like Gorgoroth, Cradle of Filth, Hecate Enthroned, Gehenna, Emperor and maybe Darkthrone… those were the first ones. Then I got into Impaled Nazarene, Marduk, Mayhem, Dissection, Thorns, Enslaved, the key bands. But it was a few months between me getting those dubbed cassettes and then knowing what the bands looked like. I remember the first time a few of us went around to a friend’s house and I saw his wall and it was covered in black metal pictures, and it was the first time I knew they wore corpse paint. I didn’t know any of the stories either because even though I had seen the Kerrang! article, I didn’t connect it. I think I remember the photo of Varg, but didn’t remember the guys wearing face paint. So it was a shock for me when I discovered they all had corpse paint. When I saw the Cradle of Filth artwork, I didn’t realize they would have this vampiric themes. I mean, a lot of the lyrics in the first album were not about vampiric stuff. With Gehenna I didn’t necessarily know about the forest imagery, so I got into the music and then I discovered the aesthetics and then the stories. It was a kind of innocent way of discovering it all.
R!: – Yeah, but at the same time that was kind of the magic, you know? These days you can just Google it and you get everything, but back in the day you could imagine how they look like and so on. Same thing with the way of how we discovered music. As you said, it could be through people a bit older than you for example.
DP: Yeah, I think that’s something that probably wouldn’t happen now. It’s almost impossible in an internet age to hear a band before you see it, because even if you just search it on YouTube, you’ll probably get a little picture or something. I’m not sure about how the teenagers who are passionate about music engage now… but maybe they have a better chance to see the bands live.
R!: – Yeah, that’s for sure. Thanks a lot for the interview!
DP: Thank you for your time!
