u/GHOSTALICE

“My first trips to Helvete were when I was still in secondary school. The shop was only a few weeks old. There were some boxes of used records on the floor. For me, being so young and impressionable, it was powerful to get a sense of esoteric insight into what was cool and what wasn’t. Øystein has gained a reputation for being so cool, but he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for certain things. He was very talkative - but when the bigger and cooler guys came in, he tightened up. We were still death metal-oriented at the time, but the environment gave us insight into what was happening. In addition to the 80s bands that Øystein had a fondness for - such as Bathory and Venom - the Norwegian scene was influenced by bands like Samael, Masters Hammer and Root. There was also enthusiasm for Cathedral, who played more classic heavy metal. In 1992, the demo cassettes with Emperor and Enslaved came to Helvete. Idljarn had some cassettes lying around there. Satyricon came later, but it was the second demo that counted.”

Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver)

“Øystein started Helvete as a meeting place. In the beginning, there were almost no records there. [...]People came from all over the country. Most of those who were active in the scene came from small, rotten places. I think coming from a small, boring place creates a strong drive and creativity - in a metropolis, there’s so much else going on. People came to Helvete and listened to what  Øystein (Euronymous) thought was good and bad. Remember:  We were 20-21, while the others were often five or six years younger. Young people need a catalyst, someone to give them a kick up the backside and get them to start doing their own thing.”

Metalion

“Helvete was a hangout for a bohemian culture. There were lots of regulars there, and some who dropped in. They had some decorations, but there weren’t many records, so I don’t think sales were particularly high. It was more like a leisure club for black metal people. I remember showing Ivar from Ensalved riffing and picking techniques in the back room.”

Snorre Ruch (Thorns)

“Guys came to Helvete from all over the country, plus Sweden - Dissection, Marduk and Abruptum. They partied and slept in the basement. When a Swedish car came up Schweigaards gate, we knew there was party time.”

Bård/Faust

“Helvete was a revelation, but not a place where just anyone felt at home. The first time I was there, it was a real kick: I came in a leather jacket - the same one I’m wearing now, by the way - and an upside-down cross on a chain around my neck, I was already into the dark and hard stuff. This was in 1991, and I was visiting from Lillehammer.  Helvete was dimly lit, with dark music. There were huge, inverted crucifixes hanging on the walls - and human bones. The people who were there reinforced the dark atmosphere: silent, dressed in black and wearing cartridge belts. I felt at home there.”

Frost

From the book 666 Shades of Black by Harald Fossberg, 2026

“People became more aware of the black metal scene after Pelle took his own life. It was a suicide that changed the scene.”

Necrobutcher

“Before Pelle came along, it was just fun. Then I realized that I didn’t want to be part of this. People who were simply crazy, like Vikernes, started pouring in. And Øystein became stranger and stranger. It was a shame he turned out the way he did. It probably had something to do with the status he gained within the scene. He was very small, maybe five feet three inches. I think he made up for it by being mean and evil.”

Torben Grue (From Vomit, temporary drummer before Hellhammer came)

“There was a paradigm shift when Pelle died. Øystein became aware of his position and began to dictate what people should like. That was when the black metal scene became preoccupied with everything that was satanic and evil.”

Bård/Faust

Excerpt from 666 Shades of Black by Harald Fossberg, 2026

“I think the biggest, at least most lasting, contribution was to bring De Mysteriis…to the black metal fans and artists of that day, because the riffs and general musical quality on that album was so highly influential to the rest of us, that it made us try harder as well. Not to mention that the guitar riffs on that record laid the foundation for a sound that a lot of other artists would be very influenced by. If you think Emperor was influential, where do you think we got it from?”

Mortiis

“Euro was driven. He was always there with diehard ideas. In times of much distraction, he was always there. He was always encouraging people to listen to anything extreme of any genre. I think it was sad to see all the people coming into black metal after he died. I think many of them thought that only black metal was real and didn’t have much perspective and shunned other styles. It was very bad for black metal, actually, that a lot of copy bands without any backbone came out of those people.”

Fenriz

“Euronymous said to me that in the Norwegian black metal scene, all of us need to be completely unique. It wasn’t good enough for us to be like these death metal bands, to be a great band. That goes without saying; every single band had its role to play, where we all had to have something completely unique to offer. When we had this conversation, Satyricon was still in the demo stage. I remember working on my music and thinking that was an interesting idea and thinking really hard and deep about what was it that I had inside me that had not been expressed by any of the other bands, but something which was uniquely Satyricon.”

Satyr

From the book "Born for Burning" by Matías Gallardo

“When I booked the Mayhem Ordo ad Chao tour, in France we were happy when we had 150 people coming to every show. People don’t realize, but back then they were fucking poor. They were poor as shit. And they had to soldier on and tour and tour and tour just to make minimum wage at best.”

Michael Berberian (Season of Mist, their label)

“I am a very stubborn person and I always keep going even if I feel that my situation is unbearable or is really shitty. I reached the bottom that was possible to reach in terms of the mind and in terms of negativity. I think you can hear that on the album; that it was going to be hard to go deeper than that, at least for me. After Ordo ad Chao, I just realized that I was not that person anymore. I always go 100% to the end, and that basically was the end. But I realized that only during the touring cycle. I think everything from Wolf’s Lair Abyss up until Ordo ad Chao was like building up to a volcano, and that eruption was the release of Ordo ad Chao. I felt that there were so many things that I needed to rediscover, redo, to rethink, to re feel…I’m happy I went out when I started not feeling it. If going on stage cannot be 100% what I do, then it’s time to go. I don’t fool the fans. You have to be honest to yourself and have self-respect, so that was it, that was the final chapter.”

“Me and Attila had a really exceptional connection, and for me that was the roughest thing, because I really, really admired his talent. But the others…we were not a unity anymore. When we were on tour, I was always drinking wine with the supports instead of sitting around talking to the other guys in the band. There was already a rift, something that separated us. There were some uncomfortable moments and I’m not really sure of what Hellhammer and Necro thought, but for sure it was a blow. But at the same time, we didn’t really get that well along, especially with Hellhammer in the end. When I look back at it, I feel like everybody kind of felt we had all this coming. The unity started to break already back in 2003 and never really got back. Too many things happened between people and we were not really respecting each other. I think it was a great feeling to have Attila in the band. Also, he motivated us, because there was not much motivation during the Chimera period. But for Ordo ad Chao me and Attila were on fire all the time. We had a lot of fun and a lot of serious talks. For me that was the saddest thing of leaving: my relationship with him and the chemistry we had. It could have gone really, really far because we had the same fucked up mentality. But the last tour I was drunk all the time, in a really miserable way, just partying with the support acts and creating a bigger space or vacuum between me and the band. And suddenly I just popped out. Everything was a bit strange. Even after the last show I didn’t shake anybody’s hand except for Attila. We got out of the plane and we separated.”

Blasphemer

From the book "Born for Burning" by Matías Gallardo

“He [Maniac] was in a really horrible state. I remember that when we were in the studio, he always showed up with two six-packs of beer and a bottle of liquor, and he was shitfaced. He recorded vocals from the album drunk, and he became difficult to deal with as well. I remember we had to drive him everywhere. He was supposed to stay overnight in the studio, but the guy in the studio didn’t dare to have him there in fear of what could happen to his equipment. So we drove Maniac back to Oslo every day, which was a one and a half hour drive. He was in a really dark place.”

“It was clear that something had to come to an end, and Maniac was the first one to go. It escalated to a point where we were having actual fistfights on tours. I remember I even kicked him down a staircase in London because he always fucked up every show. He couldn’t even sing anymore. He just fucked up the words and started to sing where it was not supposed to, and that happened every night. He also drank vodka from the early morning. So did I, but somehow, I managed to get in shape on stage. We were supposed to go to South America and I remember we confronted him with this idea and he said ‘yeah guys, I think I have enough touring and I think I have to step out’. He knew what was in the air.”

Blasphemer

“I saw that coming before Chimera. It was just too much for him. His nerves and his alcohol abuse taking its toll, so I asked Blasphemer if Attila could come in and do the album because I knew that Maniac was not gonna be able to tour the world. Blasphemer wanted to try one more time, one more album with Maniac, but when we were on the road it was apparent that he was not able to do it professionally, so after that he was fired.”

Necro

“For Maniac, it was that or dying. Getting kicked out of Mayhem was the necessary wake up call to get his shit together and live. Because if he had stayed in Mayhem, he would be dead now.”

Michael Berberian (Season of Mist, their label)

From the book "Born for Burning" by Matías Gallardo

“I weighed absolutely nothing and I was thin as a feather, like a shadow of who I formerly was,” adds the guitarist who went so far as to suffer two overdoses in one day. “One night I was sitting outside a concert venue where Maniac was playing with his punk band Bomberos, and I woke up outside puking these white things that looked like marshmallows. I guess then I realized that it couldn’t go for that much longer or otherwise I wouldn’t survive that lifestyle. This was prior to the recording of Chimera. I was losing my apartment as well, so I went to live in a house with two other people. Then everybody was moving out and all the furniture went, so I got the place for myself. I rented it for two more months until I went to the studio to record. I lived in the studio for several weeks during the recording.”

“Chimera was kind of a collection of skeletons, a lot of loose ends that I had been working on for quite some time. For me it’s absurd that it took me four years to compile enough material for an album, so that means I was in a really bad state.”

“It was a very important album, though. I think it needed to come out, it was crucial to get something out, but it was a totally different chemistry. Everything was negative in the wrong way. In Wolf’s Lair Abyss we had used the negativity in a positive way, to get it out to the people, but on Chimera I guess the negativity started to go inwards, which really caused conflicts. It was an introverted album as well, and it was really dark, especially in Maniac’s lyrics.”

From the book "Born for Burning" by Matías Gallardo

“I wasn’t every day in the tour bus with them, but I knew they hated each other. Mayhem wasn’t a band: it was four people, and the negativity and dislike they had for each other translated into great albums in the studio. Every album was like…why make something simple if you can make it painful and difficult? That was Mayhem. But somehow from this constant bitching and hate and negativity and drugs and drunk, they managed to put this negative energy live and in the studio. And that’s what we wanted.”

Michael Berberian (Season of Mist, their label)

“The year 2003 was a really terrible one. I don’t think anybody really got along that well and the chemistry we had was kind of fading a bit. There was more extremity, but negative extremity. Excess of substances, alcohol abuse…a lot of negativity was blooming in the band. We were not a unit anymore. Maniac and I grew apart from the rest of the band. There was more internal fighting as well, which was not so common before Grand Declaration of War. There was more clashing of egos that started to happen. Personally, 2003 was also a really dark year. Living in Oslo I was really heavily influenced by drugs and I was a very negative and miserable person.”

Blasphemer

From the book "Born for Burning" by Matías Gallardo

Can you tell a few things about this Deathcrush album? I think you were quite young at the time.

“Yes, I was really young. It was ten years ago in 1987 when I was 17 and I’m not sure if I like the album. I don’t like the lyrics on the album at all but I like the brutality of it and it was one of the first BM albums that came out, you know.”

Maniac in Nightwalk #1, 1997

You wrote all the lyrics on ‘Wolf’s Lair Abyss’. Did the other band members have any input?

“No, they fit right in. Actually Blasphemer is a really big fan of my lyrics, you know. I have much lyrics lying around from older days and what I did was take out some lines that I’d written ages ago and combine with some new ones. I remember there was one line that Necro Butcher didn’t like from ‘The Fall of Serpahs’ which says ‘A serpent kiss I give to woman’. He didn’t really fancy the word ‘kiss’ in a Mayhem-lyric, but otherwise they really liked it. I also had some other lyrics which I had never planned to use with Mayhem, but I had them with me at rehearsal. Necro Butcher was like, ‘are you really going to use these fucking lyrics on a Mayhem record?’. ‘Don’t worry’, I said. I even used the word ‘love’ in one of them.”

From Descent #5, 1999

Did they just take a Thorns riff (from the song "Lovely Children") and basically...not credit Snorre?

Most people probably know the riff from "From the Dark Past" by Mayhem.

I like Celestial Bloodshed and I don't want to shit on them or anything, but I was wondering if anyone knows more about this...?