This obsession with image very much comes across in Lords of Chaos: these were teenagers who wanted to control the way the world saw them and gain notoriety.” “When I interviewed Euronymous on the phone at the time,” says Arnopp, “he spoke in cold, hushed tones, as if trying to portray himself as a dark, mysterious character. He also appears in Lords of Chaos, playing his younger self. It was written by Jason Arnopp, now a script-writer and the author of The Last Days of Jack Sparks. Two months later, Britain’s leading heavy-rock magazine, Kerrang!, published a cover story on the same events. His closest associates, he decreed, would be ‘the black circle’, and they alone would be allowed into black metal’s inner sanctum, ie a damp basement room beneath the shop. He then set up his own record label, Deathlike Silence Productions, and opened a record shop in Oslo named Helvete (the Norwegian for ‘Hell’). Before contacting the police, he went out and bought a disposable camera so that he could photograph Ohlin’s remains. But Aarseth saw Ohlin’s death as a chance to promote himself as the leader of a truly dangerous and diabolical music scene. That could have been the end of Norwegian black metal. In April 1991, Aarseth returned to their house to find that Ohlin had killed himself.
But his preoccupation with death wasn’t confined to morbid theatrics. He wore black-and-white ‘corpse paint’ make-up so that his face resembled a skull, and at Mayhem’s concerts, he would self-harm. If Aarseth’s gloomy guitar playing was the archetypal sound of Norwegian black metal, it was Ohlin who developed its own brand of showmanship. Once he had recruited a Swedish singer, Per Yngve Ohlin (stage name: Dead), the band decamped to a house in a forest to live and rehearse. He formed a band called Mayhem, and, just as Venom’s members had given themselves grandly spooky stage names – Cronos, Mantas, Abaddon – Aarseth chose a demonic nom de rock drawn from Greek mythology, Euronymous. One such enthusiast was Øystein Aarseth, a guitarist who is played in the film by Rory Culkin. I remember looking at the burning crucifix in the gatefold sleeve of their 1984 album, At War With Satan, and wondering if this really was a step too far.” This was blatant pledging allegiance to the dark lord. “Satan appeared on the album covers and was namechecked in pretty much all the songs. “It’s hard to explain to younger people just how shocking Venom were back in the early ’80s,” says Chris Kee, a journalist for the magazines Zero Tolerance and Powerplay. But Venom took this unholy relationship further. Before that, popular music had a long history of flirting with satanic imagery, from Robert Johnson’s Hellhound on my Trail to the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil to the provocatively named Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. The story behind it begins not in Norway but in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England, where a heavy-metal trio called Venom recorded its second album, Black Metal, in 1982. – The mystery of the Beatles’ best record Chronicling the outrageous crimes committed by a few Norwegian black metal bands and their hangers-on in the early 1990s, the film probably won’t appeal to lovers of Bohemian Rhapsody – and there have even been calls from some church groups for the film to be banned.
But it is also a grisly, stranger-than-fiction comedy drama about murder, suicide, self-harm, devil worship, and a spate of arson attacks that scandalised a nation. Jonas Åkerlund’s new film, Lords of Chaos, is a rock’n’roll biopic, with all the wigs and gigs that that implies.