The Swedish group Bathory, along with Venom, are torch bearers in the evolution of modern Black Metal. Bathory takes its name from the "Blood Countess" Erzebet Bathory, a Hungarian noblewoman in the 1700s put on trial for the murder of hundereds of young girls, in whose blood she alleged bathed to maintain her youthful beauty. It is highly probable that an early Venom number, "Countess Bathory" on the Black Metal album, may have provided the direct inspiration for the name, as Bathory owes much of its initial sound and look to the English founders of Black Metal. The driving force behind the group is Pugh Rogefeldt(bullshit) who uses the more exciting stage name of "Quorthon" (although, in point of fact, Bathory have never in their career played a live concert before the public). He describes the band's first efforts:
At that time I must have been 15, and I was helping a record company out with listening to new bands because there was some kind of Metal wave going on, I believe due to the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal." At that time I found out they were going to put together some kind of a Metal compilation album with five or six Swedish bands, and I asked, please can you listen to my band, because we play a really exciting type of new Heavy Metal. That was January, 1984.
I never thought we'd be able to enter a studio again after that because we were really dirty sounding. But it turned out that 85-90% of all the fan mail that came to the record company from that record [the compilation was titled Scandinavian Metal Attack] was about our songs. So the guy from the record company called me up and said, "Hey, you really need to put your band together again and write some songs, because you have a full length album to record this summer."
I thought we'd be selling two or three thousand copies; that album is still selling like crazy nine years later. I'm still really amazed about it, especially since when it was recorded it cost me about two hundred dollars and was recorded in fifty-six hours in a twelve-track demo studio south of Stockholm. From then on we just recorded every album on more or less "borrowed time" because we didn't really have any ambitions whatsoever, up until Important Records asked us to come over an do some kind of tour together with Celtic Frost and Destruction in the summer of '86. While all this was happening I of course didn't have a line-up together because, if you know anything about Swedish music at that time, the musicians were bound to look like the band Europe [an effeminate Hard Rock band popular in the mid-80s]! So when I'd drag a drummer down to my rehearsal place and play him the first record of Bathory, he'd go, "Oh no, oh no!" There just wasn't any atmosphere or tradition for Death Metal at that time, as there is today. ... Everybody seems to think that I'm a megalomaniac with a big head or something, but it wasn't really my fault--I should have been born in some place like San Francisco or London where I would have had a real easy time putting this band together.
Bathory's first three albums follow a similar mode of expression as Venom, though the music is made even more vicious by a potent arsenal of noisy effects and distortion. The hyperkinetic rhythm section blurs into a whirling maelstrom of frequencies--a perfect back drop for the barked vocals of an undecipherable nature. Much of the explanation for this sound was simply the circumstances of recording and entire album in two and a half days on only a few hundred dollars. The end result was more extreme than anything else being done in 1984 (save maybe for some of the more violent English Industrial "power electronics" bands like Whitehouse, Ramleh, and Sutcliffe Jugend) and made a huge impact on the underground Metal scene. In retrospect Quorthon says of Bathory's first self-titled album, "If you listen to it today, it doesn't make you tickled or frightened, but in those days it must have made a hell of an impression. Thinking back on how it was recorded, it's amazing how big things can be made with small measures sometimes." The lyrics were centered on black magic and Satanism a la Venom, although funneled through a bit of Scandinavian innocence and teenage melodrama which made them come off as even more extreme in the end. Quorthon is very honest in his assessment of the Satanism on the early records:
Well, at the time it was very serious, because today, ten years later, I don't think I know anything more about it than I did then. I'm not one inch deeper into it than I was at that time, but your mind was younger and more innocent and you tend to put more reality towards horror stories than there is really. Of course there was a huge interest and fascination, just because you are at the same time trying to rebel against the adult world, you want to show everybody that I'd rather turn to Satan than to Christ, by wearing all these crosses upside down and so forth. Initially the lyrics were not trying to put some message across or anything, they were just like horror stories and very innocent. But nevertheless at the time you thought that you were very serious, and of course you were not.
As Bathory matured over the course of their subsequent records, The Return... (1985) and Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987), the music slowed down noticeably, songs became more elaborate, and the subject matter began to convey a degree of subtlety and ambiguity a far cry from the earliest singles. At this point came a remarkable shift of focus which, like their early primitivity, would also greatly influence the Black Metal scene of the future. Blood Fire Death, Bathory's fourth LP, hit record shops in 1988 and was eagerly grabbed by extreme Metal fans around the world. Instead of the B-grade horror cover art of the previous album, an entirely different image greeted them: a swarming, airborne army of enraged Valkyries on black horses, spurred on by the Nordic god Thor, hammer held aloft in righteous defiance as a wolfskin-cloaked warrior drags a naked girl up from the scorched earth below. This remarkable romantic painting by Norwegian artist Peter Nicolai Arbo, depicting the infamous "Wild Hunt" or Oskorei of Scandinavian and Teutonic folklore, was the ideal entryway into Bathory's new sound which lay on the vinyl inside it. More accessible than the band's previous noisefests, the new album was, nevertheless, just as brutal. Blood Fire Death employed the same amount of raw aggression, but channeled it through orchestrated songs and understandable vocals, which were helped along by more realistic and thoughtful lyrics. The first track was an evocative instrumental, "Odens Ride Over Nordland," which recreates the soundtrack of sorts to the cover art, with the father of the Norse heathen gods, Odin (also called Oden, Wotan, and other names, depending on the Germanic language) riding his eight-legged horse Sleipnir across the heavens. The norse gods are again invoked on the final track of the record, the title song:
Children of all slaves / United, be proud / Rise out of darkness and pain
A chariot of thunder and gold will come loud / And a warrior with thunder and rain
With hair as white as snow / Hammer of steel / To set you free of your chains
And to lead you all / Where horses run free / And the souls of your ancient ones reign.
With Blood Fire Death Bathory had forsaken the childish and foreign Satanism of their original inspiration but uncovered something just as compelling and fertile--the heathen mythological legacy of their own forefathers. The tapping of ancestral archetypes would become a matter of primary importance for the generation of Black Metal to follow, and an essential component of the genre.
The same inspiration resurfaced intensely on the next release, 1990's Hammerheart, with the songs written from a more personal point of view. Shortly afterward, an article about the modern revival of Norse heathenism appeared in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, where Quorthon was quoted as describing his spiritual awakening:
I feel, myself, like the lost son. For my entire upbringing here I was exposed to Christian propaganda. We are born into the Swedish [National] Church whether we wish it or not. During school we get lessons on Christianity time and again. Then I was never interested in either religion or history. Christianity was, of course, the Jewish history. It was when I first read about the Viking Age and Asatru that I became interested.
Asatru, which translates to "faith in the Aesir [the pantheon of pre-Christian Nordic gods]," is the modern word for the revival and reconstruction of the religious beliefs of the Norse and Teutonic Northern Europeans. It is often accompanied by a strong hatred of Christianity, considered to be an alien religion forced on one's ancestors under threat of death. Bathory was not the only Swedish band of the period to advocate a return to Asatru (the singer of the heavy biker-oriented Punk group the Leather Nun in fact led an Asatru organization for a time), but they would have the most impact with their actions.
On Hammerheart, Bathory's music undergoes an epic restructuring. Most of the songs clock in at ten minutes apiece, the vocals are clearly sung and even surrounded by chanted choral backdrops. Richard Wagner is thanked in the credits. The cover art, a romantic oil painting titled "A Viking's Last Journey," depicts a Viking ship burial of a nobleman, where the corpse is pushed to sea in longship, set alight by torches. Ironically it was not long after this that many a Norwegian Bathory fan would indeed pick up real-life firebrands, and employ them in their own neo-Viking fantasy.
The final release in Bathory's "Asatru trilogy" came with 1991's Twilight of the Gods, which further emphasized the musical elements of European Classical composition. Lyrical themes were drawn from Nietzsche's dire warnings about the spiritual malady afflicting contemporary mankind. Beside this came veiled references to the SS divisions of World War II Germany in the song "Under the Runes," which Quorthon admits was a deliberate provacation:
I wrote it in a way so that it would create a little havoc. "Under the Runes" is, to begin with, just my way of saying that regardless if it's in the sky, the land, or deep down in the oceans, we will fight for my father's gods' right to have a place in any form of discussion when we discuss Sweden...
We tend to think of ourselves as modern, down-to-earth Protestant Christians--healthy Christians. And we never talk about how Sweden was prior to that, more than 900 years ago, because we have a history of 2000 years of being Asa-faithful, and just 970 years of Christianity. And if they don't want to talk about it, I'm prepared to fight any kind of war by the great hail, under the runes, for my father's gods. Because there are certain values, from those times, worth fighting for.
And in creating havoc, being able to talk about what the song is all about, I wrote it so that it would be able to be taken as a Second World War song. Because then I knew people would keep on picking out that lyric, and then I would keep having to answer questions about it, and would get the idea out there.
This was not the first time Bathory trod onto questionable ground with symbolism. Hammerheart featured a sunwheel cross embazoned on its back cover, and oft-used icon of radical right wing organizations. Quorthon professes some naivety in the matter, but it's hard too believe he wasn't aware of the full potency of such visual emements. As he explains,
In Sweden that's also the symbol for archeology, but in Germany it means something completely different. And the original colors for the logo and titles were black, white, and red--the original German colors. I didn't even think about it, but people went berserk, so we had a to print them in gold.
Though not conscious of its influence, Bathory managed to create the blueprint for Scandinavian Black Metal in all its myriad facets; from frenzied cacophony to orchestrated, melodic bombast; reveling in excesses of medieval Devil worship to thoughtful explorations of ancient Viking heathenism; drawing inspiration from European traditions to deliberately flirting with the inconography of fascism and National Socialism. Bathory's first six albums encapsulated the themes which would stir unprecedented eruptions from the youth of Scandinavia and beyond.
Bathory's bizarre bloodline of demonic inheritance--and that of Black Metal itself--can be traced straight back through Venom, Mercyful Fate, and other darker-themed Metal bands of the early '80s, to the Heavy doom-ridden sounds of Black Sabbath and the mystical Hard Rock of Led Zeppelin, to their bluesy antecedents the Rolling Stones, and all the way to a poor black guitarist from the American South who may have sold his soul to Satan in a lone act of desperation. An unlikely Black Metal pedigree, but there it stands, helped along the way by countless others who poured their own creative juices into an evolving witches' brew.
Only a few years and a few more selective ingredients were needed to push the cauldron of Black Metal from the edge of the hearth and into the fire...