"Norway, 1984." "A group of friends inspired by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal decided to form a band of their own." "Their main influence was the British Heavy Metal band Venom, who had just released an album titled "Black Metal"." "They took their name from one of Venoms songs titled  Mayhem with Mercy." "They even took stage names as Venom had done." "Jorn Stubberud, the bassist, chose Necro Butcher," "Kjetil Manheim, the drummer took his last name Manheim and Oystein Aarseth, the guitarist, took Euronymous which means in Greek for The Prince of Death." "How prophetic this name would be, the young Oystein had no idea, nor did the world of what was to become Norwegian Black Metal." "We started as all other bands too, I guess." "Couple of friends had the same musical interests." "We were more than only fans." "We played instruments too." "So we decided to start a band." "The old story you might say." "What we were trying to do within our universe, with our expression..." "Our expression was of course Heavy Metal." "We wanted to do something really aggressive, dark and take the music genre to the extreme." "I guess the most influencial bands that we were listening to, that benchmarked us, to get to the more extreme were bands like Slayer and Celtic Frost." "I think that we learned to play our instruments while rehearsing with Mayhem." "So it's a progression, musically, instrumentalwise all the time." "Even today." "We started more like a punk band, not playing punk but like Venom covers," "Motörhead covers and then started to write our own music." "Building the image of Mayhem, building the satanic expression has always intrigued people or offended people and was what a lot of people think of when the name Mayhem comes up or Norwegian Black Metal comes up." "If you look into what kind of literature that made us interested are works from Aleister Crowley, kind of nocturnal, dark texts." "But it's not like I read Poe and decided to go dark and aggressive in music." "But that was a part of our swear and we also liked the goth expression." "Vampires, the dark, kind of romantic style." "That was a lifestyle." "It wasn't a lifestyle we actually decided to dress up in, because it didn't exist." "It just became what people that was involved in it in that time, decided to wear, decided to use as symbols or effects around the theatrical part of the genre, which is of course dark, satanic crosses et cetera..." "Much the same that Heavy Metal has done for ages." "We just took it a bit futher." "After several months of intense rehearsals the band released a demotape, the now legendary "Pure Fucking Armageddon"." "This was traded through the underground Metal network that was just in its infancy." "We did a lot of recordings actually." "This is before the internet, for viewers, who can try imagine that." "Probably many can imagine, because they lived at that time." "We didn't have a good distribution net, we didn't have this global network." "We were bound to send letters, cassette tapes, videos et cetera." "And of course that had to be recorded." "And we did a lot of recordings in the rehearsal room." "I think we produced three." "One was the "Pure Fucking Armageddon"." "That was the late one." "We had one before that with "Ghoul" on it and couple of other rarities." "Then we had two demo tapes close to "Deathcrush"." "One was actually the "Deathcrush" score." "The band had big ideas from day one." "They even traveled to Germany and England to promote their rough demo tapes." "It's a lot of rehearsal tapes and we sent it back and forth all over the world." "And it was great fun." "We also got tapes from different bands around," "Napalm Death, Sepultura, bands just forming, that were looking for something unique and aggressive." "So we were not alone in the world trying to do something unique at that time." "As the band had no permanent vocalist or frontman they used two friends as session singers," "Billy Messiah and Sven Erik Kristiansen with the name Maniac." "At that time we were a small community and Norway is a small country so we tend to notice where the interesting people are for us." "I guess that goes with any interest you have, you find the people that share that specific interest." "We were kind of loud about what we were doing." "We were talking about being the best band in the world, not even having one song written." "So people heard about us and were interested in what it was all about." "So, Billy showed up through that network, just visiting and listening to our rehearsal." "He played in a band and we were told that he was kind of good." "We tried him out and he was." "That's Billy, he is a strange, funny guy and a very likeable guy." "Today he is running a pub in Lillehammer." "Maniac was a maniac." "The artist name follows the person in this issue." "He was so full of ideas, so full of energy." "I'm sure that a doctor would have diagnosed him today as a hyperchild." "He was so full of energy and so full of ideas." "In April of 1 986 they had their first gig in Ski." "And now the band started to shape and they were in hundreds of underground magazines worldwide." "The concert is special in a way, because it's recorded." "I've seen it on youtube." "It's the first time that Black Metal expression, as I know it, was exposed on stage." "Pretty bad of course, lot of loose sense, no pig heads or anything on that stage." "But there were crosses and red light, aggression, the makeup and of course, Oystein showed his ass to the audience, which is a classic!" "1 987 was the year that Mayhem was truly to arrive onto the Metal scene with the self released minialbum "Deathcrush"." "The young guitarist Euronymous went to Germany again to contact Conrad Schnitzler, a musician from Tangerine Dream." "They two became friends and Schnitzler later sent Mayhem a piece of music that they could use on their "Deathcrush" album." "Still, 20years later, the piece "Sylvester Anfang"" "is instantly recognizable as the Mayhem introduction." "So I think "Deathcrush" was very primitive, but we had our own sound and our own expression and just building on that ever since." "We made the cover ourselves." "It was supposed to be red and kind of cool, came back pink and lots of missing stuff." "So we had to sit down, it was just 1 .000 copies, so it wasn't that much, but there were some nights, we were sitting there." "Oystein was the steady hand." "So he filled in all that needed to be aligned within the printings." "And then we numbered them all." "That's why the first 1 .000 are numbered." "After so many years and I was doing a lot of things, I wasn't just the drummer in Mayhem." "I did other stuff too." "To me Mayhem was the main band and that was where l developed myself, but after so many years and we were turning 1 8, it was time to do some decision." "I felt "Deathcrush" was an artistic success." "To me that was more than enough." "I was never interested in being a rock star, I was never interested touring round Europe." "And besides, at that point, who knew what Mayhem could be?" "We didn't know anything." "Actually the only thing we knew was that there were a lot of people around the world, who really liked us." "We had fans down in Japan who tattooed the Mayhem logo on their shoulder blades." "But we thought that they were kind of crazy people." "We never thought that Black Metal as such should become what it later became as a genre." "You can imagine, you've been working on the same songs, and there were not many of them, but working on the same songs for three or four years... every night." "And we were not that Christian." "So we did have a rehearsal on Christmas day too." "Every day, every available time, it was Mayhem." "We continued rehearsing without vocalist." "Then Manheim choosed to quit the band and we got Hellhammer on drums 1 988." "At the same time we got in touch with a Swede named Pelle from a band called Morbid." "The gore and the splatter influenced lyrics were soon the be replaced by a much darker and sinister theme with the arrival of the young Swedish guy Pelle Ohlin." "A curse was layed upon the band as soon as he arrived." "He called himself Dead." "Things were about to become very ugly for Mayhem and all involved the Black Metal scene." "He sent me a tape with his band, and a letter with a crucified mouse." "I had a pickup truck at that time and I picked up the mail at our post office." "The mouse had started to disintegrate." "So it had started to smell a little bit." "So I put the letter and the dead mouse in the back of the truck." "I put the tape in my car stereo." "Of course the letter had blown away, but luckily I had written down his address on the tape itself." "So, kind of funny story." "So he decided, he would come over and join us." "That was around Christmas time 1987..." "1 988." "At this point Mayhem had a permanent singer, but still they continued to search for a new drummer to complete the group." "It was a friend of Oystein, that had a demo tape from Hellhammer when he is playing drums." "Then they hooked up." "Oystein drove Hellhammer out to my place and left him there." "So we could talk." "We ended up taking all kind of drugs I had." "And 8 o'clock in the morning he was out playing football with the kids in his stockings outside of the block." "Then I knew he was the man for the job." "Very crazy guy." "He is from the mountains in Norway, a place called Trysil, a place in the middle of nowhere." "Dead was living on wellfare in Norway and was living in a house in Krakstad, a small village outside Oslo." "Mayhem used this house as rehearsal and as meeting place." "After some time the other members realized how odd Dead really was." "Dead was a thinker and quiet as a person with a lot of black humour in him." "He was also a great artist." "He combined his black humour with his drawings and came up with a lot of good drawings and also wrote very good lyrics." "Very deep lyrics, because they were personal to him." "You know tracks like "Life Eternal", and "Freezing Moon", when he dies and fall up to the freezing moon." "He was suicidal already from childhood, when he had a near-death-experience after an ice skating accident." "He had tripped and fell on the ice while ice skating and his milt had sprung open." "They drove him to the hospital." "And he was dead at arrival, but they got him back to life." "He remembered the eternal and was very fascinated by that." "He was only 10 years at that time." "That was his path." "I'm not sure if I knew Pelle, the other Pelle." "Dead-Pelle we knew very well." "I guess the whole world which are interested in Mayhem or Black Metal in general, they know the image of Dead in Mayhem and his lyrics and what he stood for." "The private Pelle was a strange guy." "The first time I met him I got angry, because I am a lightminded person, I am enjoying life." "He did not." "Really did not." "He was kind of depressed." "I do think, that the real Pelle was a great part of Dead." "The figure Dead." "But not in the extreme way." "But that was something he just dressed up and became, but he was also that on a regular daily basis." "He slept with dead birds under his bed, because he wanted to smell death." "It was an image." "He was depressed." "He was looking for death." "He was different in all ways." "I was fascinated by his stories, his visions about an afterlife." "I think most of his lyrics are also based on those visions." "he was not fond of cats at all." "He hated cats." "So if a cat came to the Mayhem house at that time, he had a spear outside to kill it as soon as possible." "So he went straight out from his bed and tried to hunt it down and kill it but I think he never succeeded." "And it was this dark personality with him." "He thought he didn't belong in this world, like he was meant to be in another dimension or in another world." "I don't know." "So his dark side is a different thing." "With this new lineup the band took a new direction." "This to ultimate the Black Metal concept." "Mayhem recorded two studio tracks," ""Carnage" and "Freezing Moon"." "Dead started to write all the lyrics for the upcoming album" ""De Mysteriis Dom." "Sathanas"." "The band played their first show in 5 years." "The new vocalist appeared on stage smeared in black and white face paint and shredded rotten clothes like he just crawled out of a grave." "He liked the skinny look." "It was a part of the whole thing of the Dead concept." "A dead person should be skinny and with his corpse paint, which wasn't a corpse paint to look cool like Kiss or evil like King Diamond." "It was more like to look dead." "He draw snot down from his nose and stuff like that." "Also another thing he did was that he used to bury his stage clothes and let them lay in the ground for a couple of days to get the rotting process into the fabrics that he had on stage while performing." "Also dead animals were a big thing for him." "He used to collect dead animals, he found, dead squirells, dead birds and stuff like that." "He kept them." "In front of some concerts he brought this dead animals in a plastic bag and inhaled, as he said, the dead stench to have the right feeling of death, the smell of death." "He tried to keep his concept." "To be as quite as he was private, when he was on stage he acted out his role totally." "He was a great performer." "Pretty wild, but only in a sense that he lived himself into his lyrics." "When you sing about death and torture... you can imagine what you look like on stage." "Dead had a tendency to selfmutilate and would cut his arms badly at each show, letting the blood drip on the audience." "In 1990 this kind of performance was unheard of." "At some concerts the band brought pig heads impaled on spikes." "After a couple of songs Dead started to throw the pig heads at the audience." "Many left in disgust." "We did two shows in Norway with Dead." "One in Jessheim and one in Sarpsborg." "The Jessheim gig was done by a friend of mine that had a radio station." "And the only reason why we did it, was because it was a Christian radio station and they were against alcohol." "So they had this campaign against alcohol." "So we turned that into a party for alcohol and kind of to fuck them a little bit." "We saw the potential of the humour in it and that's why we did that show." "The second one was in Sarpsborg." "Afriend of mine has a magazine called "Slayer Magazine"" "and every time he releases it, he's in financial problems to get it printed." "He wanted us to do a gig to raise the money for the printing for his fifth issue." "Wild." "His performance, wild." "Cut himself and did all these things that don't have been done in Norway before." "He had the ability to do it and he had the audience to do it in front of." "I think he liked to see how people reacted, when he cut himself up." "After that we did 3 gigs in East Germany, or former East Germany, because they had just torn down the Berlin wall the year before." "And we did a gig in Turkey." "This was back in the days when this kind of music was pretty fresh, 1 990." "We were probably the first extreme band to come to Turkey and I knew there would be problems, but we did it anyway." "And we did it by rail." "I remember that Dead was nosebleeding the whole time on the train for twelve hours." "We came to the border and had to jump out and got all our equipment thrown out of the train." "There was a lot of shit going on and we were so fucking pissed off by the whole thing that we ended up getting arrested, at least I got handcuffed." "They cut the show after 4 songs." "There were a lot ofjournalists there." "Since we were pissed off, when the gig was cancelled and when they cut the power, we were just screaming:" "Fuck you, fuck you, dirty shitty people." "I heard some time afterwards from people that have been on vacation at that place, called Izmir, a holiday place down there, they still talk about it when the crazy people from Norway and Sweden when they came down." "After that we decided to never play in Turkey again." "Take a look at their toilets, et cetera..." "After the tour with Mayhem, Dead got even more bizarre." "He told Hellhammer that, he bought a new knife, a very sharp one." "Hellhammer didn't bother Pelles words, but on the 8th of April 1 991 the reason of purchase was inevitable." "Dead wrote his suicide note and the lyrics for the song "Life Eternal"" "and then cut his wrist and his throat." "He walked around his house bleeding, but decided to finish it off with a shotgun." "The other members thought Pelle had no humour, but at the ending of the suicide note he wrote ironically" "Excuse all the blood ." "Euronymous, who found the body, didn't call the police." "Instead he did the unthinkable." "It was a strange thing." "Really, because... I myself have started to long for summer, this was in April, the sun has just come back to Norway after a long and hard winter." "I had a feeling of spring in me." "At that time Dead decided to take his own life." "That was the first feeling, losing a good friend." "I was in grief for a long time after that, a great loss to me." "Unfortunately my guitarist didn't feel the same." "He and Dead were not friends in the end." "Since they've been living together, they got on each others nerves and stuff." "That particular weekend Oystein was out of town and he called me, because he couldn't get into the house and wondered, if Dead was at my place." "And I said: "No"." "Then he said: "He's probably hanging in his room", by meaning hanging in his room meaning that he killed himself." "I was thinking going out there that Saturday to see if everything was ok." "But I decided not to do that." "The day after Oystein called me and said that he had found his dead body." "But he had taken some photos of the dead body." "I told him to get rid of the photos before he could contact me again." "It was not a relationship between ordinary friends." "If you're going to be mean, you can say that Oystein put Pelle into his project." "At that time Necro Butcher also quit the band or decided not to be active." "Pelle and Oystein were living alone." "Oystein had his project that had taken dimension way beyond what we had thought of." "His daily life was a total theatre." "Everything was staged around this archetype of Euronymous," "Mayhem and Black Metal culture." "He tried to be the one who defined everything into it." "The death of Pelle did nothing to calm down the now almost megalomaniac Euronymous." "He was on a pure death trip, phoning, writing and even posting parts of the skull to selected comrades worldwide." "This is a point in the story where Mayhem plunged into sheer madness." "My first reaction when he told me about it, I wasn't shocked, but I didn't like what I heard." "I couldn't understand why he did it." "Later I didn't mind much." "It's a minor detail, people tend to make a big thing of it, but it's only a big thing if it gets used in some way or another." "So I wasn't that angry about the pictures, not the skull bits either, but what he did afterwards with the photos I reacted to." "On one of the photos, which is obviously staged afterwards by Euronymous, the knife is carefully laid over the shotgun." "It was Euronymous' intention to publicise the band by using the photos on flyers." "This actually never happened." "But one of the photos did find its way onto the cover of the bootleg album," ""Dawn of the Black Hearts"." "Euronymous even claimed that he ate parts of Deads brain to proclaim himself as a cannibal." "Euronymous didn't for one moment consider to stop Mayhem." "However, Necro Butcher left almost immediatley, wanting nothing to do with his friends insane acts." "A replacement was quickly recruited from a local obscure band." "He would take over bass and vocals." "His name was Occultus." "Euronymous told me that they needed a new bass player and a vocalist." "We had been writing letters before that." "He was a kind of person with strong opinions about things." "He never used to drink so he got his message out in different ways." "He had strong opinions about things that stuck with him for his life." "It was an unusual, but interesting way of life." "In the meantime a live album was released by the Italian label Obscure Plasma." "This would be a lasting tribute to Dead and was also keeping Mayhem in the now disgusted public eye." "Euronymous opened his own record store in Oslo which he named "Helvete", the Norwegian word for hell." "It was back in 1 991 and it was the first of its kind in Norway." "We wanted to create something related to the Black Metal music and" "Heavy Metal also in what all that concerns." "We painted the walls black at the very first moment, because we liked it that way." "I think, it was a good idea, because it was the first shop of its kind in Norway." "Later I heard it about shops that have been influenced by Helvete made in USA and in other countries." "It was an interesting period of my life." "It was a wild time actually." "It was a party time, most of the time." "Me and a friend used to buy couple of beers in the morning," "We had black humour, bizarre humour, crazy humour..." "So, it was written on the flyers:" ""no fun", that is definitely wrong." "Things later went wrong between Occultus and Euronymous." "The usual death threats and inner conflicts between Mayhem members were once again on the rise." "Euronymous sent Occultus a death threat and Occultus left Mayhem." "Euronymous's record label, Deathlike Silence Productions, a label that was to sign some of the most prominent Black Metal bands of the time, such as Abruptum, Sigh, Enslaved was now actually beginning to grow." "With the help of a new arrival on the scene," "Varg Vikernes from Bergen, impressed Euronymous with his primitive and raw project, Burzum." "I was introduced to Kristian, or Varg, or whatever, when he was coming down from Bergen and stayed a couple of days at Oystein place." "He had this Burzum project, I do have the original first copy if you want to buy it, ...just kidding." "I disliked the person and his music, I am sorry to say." "He was not a person I liked and I still think that Burzum is a hype." "It is totally sheit, (*slang for shit) that is my honest opinion." "But Oystein disagreed." "He really liked it." "I can understand why he liked it." "He wasn't that fascinated by the music, more of the project around this Kristian and the type of figur." "because he was a one-man-show, doing everything himself with all these ideas about darkness and aggression." "Oystein taking his wings around Varg and defending him, promoting him, did everything available for him to put it out." "Oystein was interested in the money and tried to build an industry and giving out the right sort of bands, the real bands not all the rubbish." "Varg Vikernes was full of big ideas and had already recorded several albums worth of material." "To get maximum publicity for Burzum he hit an idea like no other." "He declared a personal war against Christianity." "And not only in words, but as an act." "Churches started to burn down to the ground." "Varg took a photo of one of these churches and used it on his album "Aske"." "The headlines gained from the church fires forced Euronymous to close Helvete, but still he saw himself as the leader of the so-called satanic terrorists." "Varg however had an another opinion." "Besides Euronymous's Deathlike Silence label, the band Mayhem was still active." "Since now there were two members left, Euronymous let Varg be the new bassist and got in contact with a bizarre character from Hungary to do the vocals on the album." "His name was Attila." "Oystein, Euronymous, the guitarist of Mayhem by that time, reached me." "It was first time I actually heard about Mayhem and same time if I could join the band and sing for their upcoming album." "The vocals were a bit experimental, I know." "People probably would expect the screaming vocals like Dead lay down before." "But when we were in the studio and in the rehearsal room, especially in the studio, we just tried different ways." "The others really liked this dark melodic kind of vocals, but still very dark and evil alien-kind vocals." "I asked for a curtain, a black room with candles, it was a nice atmosphere." "That was cool." "The album "De Mysteriis Dom." "Sathanas" was now recorded, but still a dispute between Varg and Euronymous grew." "Euronymous did what he always did, send a death threat to Varg." "On the night of the 1 0th of August, 1 993 the dispute would reach its climax." "It's interesting, because so far we were together, we were really ok." "Varg was another kind of guy, he was younger and really intelligent, clean, sharpminded and sharpway of thinking." "Very spinning and active." "At the same time he was calm, too." "So there were no big shoutings or arguments at least at that time." "So that's why it's a bit confusing the whole thing and what happened later." "Especially for me it was kind of shocking news, because I din't expected that." "I was in Hungary and suddenly I just lost all contact." "Varg made a visit at Euronymous apartment." "On the pretext to discuss the contract related to Burzum, he convinced him to open the door." "The arguments that ensued became more and more heated until Varg pursued a knife and stabbed Euronymous." "Euronymous attempted to escape, but Varg chased him eventually delivering the fatal blow to his head." "The knife was so deeply embedded, that Varg had to use his foot to lever it out." "Euronymous, the Prince of Death, and the self-proclaimed leader of the Norwegian Black Metal circle, died on the stairs outside his apartment, aged just 25." "The next day the death of Euronymous was headline news in Norway." "Mayhems name was in every news bulletin." "The band that had started as a hobby, was now a nation nightmare." "First of all it was a shock to me and I didn't knew it before. I saw it in the morning paper that day." "Right then I didn't know, who did it." "So I thought, Shit, maybe they're coming after me, too."" "So I borrowed a shotgun from a friend first week to feel safe." "Then I realised what happened." "And what happened was that Euronymous signed up a band called Burzum from Bergen and apparently fucked him for money and rights." "When Count Grischnackh, the guy behind Burzum, wanted to leave Deathlike Silence Productions," "Euronymous had told him that he owned his four next albums and was laughing in his face about it." "In the end they started to send death threats in between each other." "For Euronymous death threats ... he was always like that, sending death threats to everybody all the time. lt wasn't so much behind it." "But if you send death threats to a person like Varg Vikernes, he probably thought, "Better him than me"." "So he went down and killed him." "So if I was in the same shoes, been fucked financially and laughed at I would be pretty pissed off." "I can understand it." "Sorry that it happened to a friend of mine, but I don't feel any bad feelings to Varg Vikernes today." "But of course I lost a good friend, again." "Everything goes back to those who create something, so I don't believe it was very smart." "The police had their eye on Varg Vikernes almost immediatly, however he seemed to have an alibi, but this didn't take long to fall apart." "The trial of Varg Vikernes was a media circus, the biggest ever trial in Norway." "Burzum and Mayhem were the words on everybodys lips." "Yet Burzum were soon dissolved when the 21year old Varg Vikernes, the enigmatic Count Grishnackh, was given Norways longest sentence in history, 21 years." "It's very strange to describe all what you feel in a such case." "For me and us, the band is very important, when you play music you put your soul into it and it's some kind of unity and it's more than a simple friendship." "We created something together." "It's always shit to lose friends, but especially with this conditions and surroundings." "It was kind of dissapointing for sure, but shit can happen." "I didn't follow the relationship that much, so I dont know when it went from good to bad or why it went from good to bad, I know a bit why, but you have to ask the kid himself," "he has done some years now." "He probably, probably not, I have read some interviews, he should have thought things through." "But when that is said, Oystein was not an innocent person in this story." "Of course no one should seriously get killed, but Oystein was not a lovable guy towards people around him, which of course can trigger a kid to do extreme things." "In Euronymous funeral I talked to Hellhammer and I was already in a band with Maniac, called Fleshwound," "We decided to find a new guitarist to continue and we searched for one year and we found Rune, calls himself Blasphemer." "He was very young, only 1 9 years old, but had all the potential and was as crazy as us." "So he fitted the crew." "He has making the songs since 1 997 and we are very happy with the way everything is going." "Mayhem was now back on the feet." "They recruited their first session singer Maniac, who sang on the minialbum "Deathcrush"." "He had evolved his earlier primtive vocals to a more insane and wicked voice." "Mayhem took the world by storm, and they released a minialbum titled "Wolf's Lair Abyss"." ""Wolf's Lair Abyss" reflects our personalities in 1995 to 1 997 the years we worked on it and the year it was released." "It's a very aggressive record." "It's very representative for who we were as persons and the way we felt at the time." "Mayhem had not played live since the days when Dead was in the band and they made their first concert in seven years in a place of middle of nowhere in Germany." "Mayhem started to grow again as a band thanks to the great guitarist Blasphemer." "He had different views than other guitarists in the Norwegian Black Metal scene." "Mayhem who always had one step ahead started in the year 2000 to create one of the most complexe albums out to date, the "Grand Declaration of War"." "This album wasn't even close to what expectations were from fans." "And if you compare it to previous albums you would think that it would be a very aggressive album, but instead Mayhem made a concept album." "The "Grand Declaration of War" is more wellthought and not that aggressive, but more wellcomposed." "Mayhem worked together with the Norwegian artist Rene M Hamel, the artist behind Spacebrain and he designed the concept and visualised the look of Mayhems futuristic war theme." "Because of Mayhems new concept, some fans turned their backs against them." "But even so, this was one of Mayhems most creative times, for writing and recording new music." "In 2004 Mayhem and their frustrated guitarist Blasphemer recorded "Chimera"." ""Chimera", a progression from "Grand Declaration of War", but in a different way." "Not in the progressive way, not that technically that complex maybe more simplicistic in a way, but still very complex." "Since everybody has been fucking with us all the time, that's the reason why we maintain this aggressivity in the band." "You can see that in other bands like Rolling Stones, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards hate each other." "And when they hated each other the most, and Keith Richards did the most drugs the greatest albums came out." "Same thing with Paul McCartney and John Lennon, same thing with The Police and Sting and so on." "When you have two strong individuals going to different ways and creating a tension in band, that's when the magic comes up." "Especially with an aggressive band like Mayhem it really comes up to the surface and that's what we release." "After this album release Mayhem toured frequently and this constant concept with music, alcohol and drugs wore the leadsinger Maniac slowly down." "I would say that he wasn't kicked out." "He had a problem." "The problem became bigger and bigger." "In the end it was a little bit hard to realize for him, that he had a problem, but when we put it down on the knife edge and tried to sort out what we were going to do for the future" "and what Mayhem was going to do like next 6 months he realized that he could not continue." "So he was not kicked out, it was more an understanding between us that he had to leave the band." "The last six years I've been in contact with our latest singer Attila, who sang on the "De Mysteriis Dom." "Sathanas"." "We had an agreement that he would step in if anything would happen to Maniac and 5-6 years ago I saw that Maniac was going downhill." "That belongs to the story that I was in contact with Mayhem from 98, and especially with Necro Butcher." "We already kind of agreed if anything happens I would be the first to be asked to join back in." "Of course it was an unforeseen thing, nobody could tell when it will happen." "Of course I said "Yes"," "Mayhem is a part of my life." "Once I belonged to them." "I still feel in the family, because all the time we kept a good relationship." "Mayhem was now back with the Hungerian singer Attila and he wanted a more chaotic structure in the music." "It's coming from Black Metal roots however in the beginning it was a brutal Black thing it turns into complete Black Metal at  De Mysteriis... and the "Wolf's Lair Abyss" period." "Then it comes suddenly into a technocratical, clinical world for me." "And now with "Chimera" it's again another direction." "It's hard to say, it's extreme Metal music played extremely well and it's extremely unique." "It's like a black diamond, a crystal and working on it." "And this is how I feel." "Mayhem plays extreme music and will always take new paths and directions." "By adding new band members" "Mayhem will continue to broaden the spectra of Black Metal." "It just tend to be ok, it's working now." "So we recorded a new album and that's pretty rusty, pretty dirty, not polished anymore and... kind of  uncomfortable, finally, to listen, which is I think good." "It's called correctly "Ordo Ad Chao"." "It has a complex meaning." "It's first of all the two words, the order and the chaos." "Two oppositions." "And Ordo Ad Chao means order into the chaos or into a chaotic structure." "It has many meanings, but I think in Mayhems history it's just like "fuck everything and lets go ahead and don't give a shit anymore about anything and we do what we want to do"." "Since the band is chaotic itself, we are different persons and we still play the same music." "And everybody has their artistic view." "Personally I like chaos." "For me it means a lot of things and a lot of layers." "We just ended up to chose this title and everybody liked it." "Actually the structure of the songs is kind of chaotic, but always controlled." "It's never improvised, nothing on the album." "It's really a structured chaos in a way or a chaotic structure." "So, it's an order and a chaos together." "You can project it into many things about the word too." "Like... inventing this chaos and taking control on the word." "It's good to have many meanings." "I like to leave it open for the people, I don't like to define titles or lyrics, because they are just coming to me." "I don't want always to explain, because then it will be more limited." "I like, if the words have more meanings and more layers." "We deliver the aggressive music and let all the other wimpbands deliver the elevator music." "People need to have a release of aggression and we, Mayhem, musically deliver that." "Releasing aggression and making headlines are one of Mayhems specialities." "In the summer of 2006 they entered the stage of "Gates of Metal" in Sweden and made a concert beyond what human society accepts." "This concert made many headlines the day after and this continued for several days." "As usual Mayhem brought pigheads and other dead animalparts on stage." "We didn't think of the media at all when we did this show." "It was a chaotic period of Mayhem that we don't have any wellstructured directions or any rules we should keep." "So when this show came, we were just thinking what to do and this idea came up the day before about the pig things and all that shit." "I had a few more ideas and all fit together and it seemed that we could realize it." "We fixed everything in advance and I had to tell all the details to the stage manager, the security boss and the festival boss." "We told everything about the show elements and it included the animal parts." "I think it's normal in Mayhem shows." "It's not the first time you see these kind of things, but then the media pick it up pretty much." "It was a surprise, because we thought everything was alright and fixed in advance." "It wasn't about making any attention in the media." "We just wanted to do a cool show." "That's it." "Today I hate the media and I'm in a very good position, because they want us, we don't want them." "It gives us the upper hand." "We don't need any more publicity, especially not here in Norway where we sell 4.000-5.000 copies anyway." "We could jump off the biggest building without a parachute without selling any more records." "It was just to pick up this sensation." "And like usually the media they try to pick everything with what they can impress the people and selling more of course." "I don't no man." "I heard about some animal protectors but it's shit, just to make a small thing big." "I don't know exactly, what happened there." "But personally I'm a friend of the animals, so I don't give a shit about what animal protectors say." "That's my point of view." "Every now and then Mayhem is touring around the globe headlining big festivals." "They try to make new directions, but they are and probably always will be haunted by their dark past." "I think that if Messiah didn't leave us in 1 985 we would be the biggest Death/thrash/Black Metal band in Europe." "Maybe we would have Slayers role in Europe." "So thinking about that in comparison to the press attention we got of the tragedies of the deaths in my band, it can't come near to the losses that we had to start all over with new people all the time." "What would happened to Mayhem without all the fuss, but then again it is hypothetical." "The whole idea when we built Mayhem was to build a story, to put out rumours." "to never comment rumours." "You will probably get more comments now then it has given out for the past 20 years." "It was a project, it was a theatre." "it was more real than a theatre, but that have stuck with Mayhem even without the tragedies." "I think the tabloids and the tragedy and the whole thing around Mayhem and a couple of other bands, it was what made Norwegian Black Metal legendary." "Without it, it probably would be a genre with some interest for some people who were into that corner of Heavy Metal or whatever it would have been called." "It wouldn't have been that much focus on the Norwegian Black Metal scene." "Because we had that focus." "When you light a light in the dark you get all sorts of people coming in." "In the Black Metal scene it has been a positive thing." "Another shitty thing is that the police started focus on the scene and the people in the scene and today the secret police watches over me constantly." "Ihad a meeting with them four months ago." "I never get rid of them after that." "I try to keep a low profile, but the media in Norway they..." "We are in flames sometimes." "It's the part of the art." "It's very important, I think, to have the control." "It's not hard to lose control, when you play this kind of music or live this kind of life."