CELTIC FROST: Switzerland of the dead…

M: That happened in I999 when Noise Records reissued our four first albums remasterised, there was the first time in years when Tom and I got together again and talked about the past and asked ourselves questions that were on both our minds: Did we have success only because it was the right moment, at the right time in the right place, or did the creative chemistry we had, and which was very important, still work today, would we still be able to get sparks flying that would light the fire that was burning in Celtic Frost in years, and of course we really didn’t have time in 1999 to talk about it, because Tom was busy with Apollonian Sun. But when we met again in 2OO1, he came to me and asked me if I would be willing or daring to take the risk and reform Celtic Frost, and I said yes!

-I’ve read you own a bar: did you miss the stage and the recordings and the life with a band?

M: I definitely missed the stage, playing live was something I missed very much, but recording, yes and no, it was something that I really felt pressured with, more than playing live. You know, I didn’t only take care of a bar, which I do actually, but I’m involved in several enterprises, several bars, but after Celtic Frost, I had to take some time off to find out who I was and what was the problem with me and Celtic Frost, which has been really a burn-out. And I started organizing concerts and parties during those last fifteen years, something over six or seven hundred shows, I organized concerts, and so, I stayed in the business, in a sort of way, I just changed style, It’s not something I had completely lost track of, I was still involved in it, on some level.

-‘Monotheist’ in on Century Media, after Sanctuary: what attracted you with this new label?

M: Sanctuary wasn’t a label we chose, it was because Noise records was sold to Sanctuary, and basically, they had the same rights that Noise records had, which means that everything we recorded in the eighties, all the classic Celtic Frost material belongs now to Sanctuary till seventy five years after we die, which basically is…a long time! The reason why we signed with Century Media is, first of all, we wanted to produce this record on our own and take the time that was needed, do it the way we want to, and then find our partner. And with Century Media, we have found the partner that was really interested in the record, we started to negotiate and it was also their enthusiasm that made us sign the deal, because we realised that they were willing to get into a lot of requests we had, a lot of requests potentially, that they probably wouldn't have if they hadn't liked the record that much. We are like equal partners: There’s a licensing deal that we have, and we are really glad to be able to work with them, because they are really nice and professional.

-Monotheist is the first record for Celtic Frost in I3 years: what has been the general inspiration for it, lyrically speaking? Did this inspiration change over time?

M: I don’t think there’s a real evolution, since the old days, we have grown older, we have matured, but I don’t think we’ve become much wiser, at least talking about the way we come to react about each other, but I think we have approached it on a much more personal and intimate level. Lyrical themes are a question often asked, but we are much more daring in our inner being and our very own thoughts, and maybe reflecting them throughout historical or fantastic stories that we tell. Tom is singing about himself now.

-Can this title be taken as a critic of the current resurgence of religions throughout the world?

M: It has to do with that, but I think it is open to interpretation, ‘cause first of all, monotheist, which means a person who believes in one god, but it doesn't say which god, and it doesn't say what person, it's deliberately open to interpretation, but that can be taken critically. But we also of course refer mostly to the Christian monotheist belief system, and that’s why we used the cross in the title as well, even though it's inverted. But the inverted cross is also Saint Peter’s cross, the pope’s personal cross, because reportedly Saint Peter, the first pope, the rock that Jesus tried to build the church upon, was crucified upside down, so before being a Satanic symbol, it is always a Christian symbol!

-Talking about sound, how did you choose Peter Tagtgren for co-production, recording and mixing?

M: We were looking for a producer and checked a lot of people that we could co produce the record with, knowing the band, knowing us as a the band, knowing where we came from in the past, and we realised that what we were trying to achieve now, was quite a difficult task. Peter Tagtgren was suggested by our management, and when we got to meet him, it clicked immediately, we realised very fast that he would be the good person because first of all, he exactly knows where we’re coming from, he knew all our records, he started as a fan, listening to our records, and second, he’s a really accomplished musician himself and a creator, who writes songs, sings, plays guitar, has two bands, he knows how the process works and how difficult it can be, and he can relate to one having to play an instrument at the precise moment, at the precise time, and he knows it will be on the album and the pressure that one feels in that situation. And third of all, he’s an accomplished technician, as far as studio technology is concerned: He built up his own studio, Abyss Studios, and he produced some classic death and black metal records, so he was just the perfect person, and it worked out like a charm in the studio, because it wasn’t really easy to work with us, but Peter didn’t only have a good time in the studio, there was a lot of pressure, and sometime we were really quite harsh with each other, and it took a person like Peter that has that much knowledge that was secure enough to pull this through, to lead us through that time or to basically confront ourselves with our own ideas that we wanted to bring up to the record.

-Are you concerned about the fans' reactions to this new LP, or did you do it for yourselves first?

M: We did it for ourselves first, that’s why it took four or five years, this is why we isolated ourselves from the public as much as we did, and I think this is what we did in the past as well: if we had been afraid of the reactions of the public, that would have never been ‘Into the Pandemonium’, ‘Morbid Tales’ or even a record like ‘Cold Lake’. This time around, even more so, we were saying that this thing has to be us and first we will have to be able to work it out with us and say this is what we want, how we feel, before we can release it to the public.

We realised at the same time that of course there were expectations, high expectations, because this band has got a past and has grown from it. It's a quite lucky situation for us, that we can come back after fifteen years and find so much interest in this band. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t make things easier. We knew about that, and we knew that once we’d have that record released, it wouldn’t be ours to judge anymore, it would be for the likes of like…you, Jean Paul, you are the one who is deciding if this record of Celtic Frost is good or not. We think so, but, in the end, it’s not ours anymore, once it’s released.

-Mid February, Erol Unala left the band, for family reasons: how will you manage to work without him in the near future, with Franco Sesa on drums?

-M: There’s a question that we are pondering as well: it took four or five years to form the band, to become unique, and Erol was a big part of it as well, a big creative part, he featured in every way on the record, "Monotheist" is his just as much as it is ours, but we are in a different world, right now: When we started recording that album, it was just the three of us, Tom, Erol and me. We asked Reed St Mark, who has already recorded ‘Into the Pandemonium’ and ‘To Mega Therion‘ if he wanted to join in, but, for several reasons, he couldn’t, so, if it had only been the three of us, we would never have been able to pull this off. At the end of the recording, Erol was in a completely different state of mind: he was married once we got together with the band, and four years later, he got two kids, so it’s a different responsibility. So we are wondering how we can get a new guitarist and go out on the road with him in two months. It would take some time to find somebody that could actually be a member of this band. We are auditioning guitarists, and one or two of them, we might think would possibly be part of the coming band, be a permanent member or at least be able to play alongside of us, so we could go out as a four piece, because the difficulty is that some of the material that we have written, especially on ‘Into the Pandemonium’ and ‘Monotheist’ is written for two guitars but we also consider doing it as a three-piece, because most of the material written for ‘Morbid Tales’, ‘Into the Pandemonium’, ‘To Mega Therion’ even some material from ‘Monotheist’ can easily be performed as a three-piece: we haven’t decided yet.

-There are two bonus tracks for ‘Monotheist’, one for the ltd digipack edition, ‘Temple of Depression’, and the other ‘Incantation against you’ for the vinyl version…

M: They couldn’t fit in the main body of work that made up the album in the end, but we both thought they are both interesting songs, good songs, maybe strong songs, that people would consider, that we wanted to show, and of course to make it worthwhile for those people that would be first of all vinyl junkies and buy all extras which cost more money, it's a double vinyl because it has 7O minutes of music, it costs more money, and so we thought to make the package worthwhile and gonna add that song, and for the digipack, in a normal jewel case CD, you have your inlay card and your booklet, maybe 16 pages or so, and this is as much as you can use for artwork and for showing visually, putting across the music, and this is why we offer it for the digipack, which is quite a lot for a packaging, and then again, we offer an extra song, because the digipack is gonna be more expensive, and we thought that those who would buy it and everything would be the fans of the first hour, the ones who want that record, so why wouldn’t we get them something for free. If somebody only buys the vinyl for the extra track, it will be available for download, somebody will put it on the Internet for download, don't buy the vinyl if you don't have any other vinyl, just to get the extra track: nowadays, if somebody complains that he'll have to buy three versions for one song, even I would think about doing it. But, if you’re really a true fan and want something special and extra, go buy the digipack, you’ll get what you need. ‘Temple of the Depression’ was one of the earlier songs we have written, 2OO1 or 2OO2, we were working as three-piece as we had still no drummer. We worked with computer drums, synthetic rhythms, so you might say there’s a more industrial feeling to it, some people might say it’s more ‘Appolyon Sun’ oriented in that case, which I don’t think it is, because it started out with a riff, and not computer programming oriented like that. And ‘Incantation Against you’ is exactly the opposite, it’s the first a capella song that this band has done, which means that it required a male choir, giving the bass sound, and there's also a female vocalist. The themes are basically ancient punishment rituals, put into lyrical form: we wanted to try to keep a feeling that you could think that it could have been performed two thousand years ago or now, the kind of timeless feeling, and of course only working with the human voice to get that kind of feeling, because, even in the stone age, when people communicated only with the voice, the first instrument was most probably the voice for singing. Even before people were able to speak, to communicate, speak a language, they were singing to each other, to communicate their emotions. So we thought is was a nice touch.

-About ‘Temple of depression’, Ravn, from I349, is doing backing vocals: what bands do you appreciate today?

M: I’m an old guy! I mean, and if I talk about Morbid Angel, I would talk about the past, and most people would take it to be old, if you see what I mean. I listen to all different kind of music. Over the last fifteen years, a lot of things happened, a lot of great bands, in my opinion, like Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride or Morbid Angel, Unleashed, Entombed, great bands for the Norwegian black metal scene, Gorgoroth has issued great records, as Satyricon, and I consider ‘Volcano’ as an absolute and fantastic metal or rock record. And of course bands like Nile, from the USA, which is as technical and emotional at the same time as death metal can even get, I think. And also Electric Wizard, from Lee Dorian’s Rise above label, Downfall, greatest doom records ever made, and some more experimental bands like sludgy Sun O, or Justin Broadrick's Jesu and a band called Bohren & der club of gore, it’s like doom jazz, like Chet Baker meeting Saint Vitus and taking lot of drugs and play as slow as possible. This band is great. And Tool too, I can’t wait to get the new album, and also a German black metal band called Dark Fortress, great dark atmospheric music, which definitely goes beyond the normal black metal boundaries, their use of classical arrangements and music is of the highest quality. There are a lot of different styles of music, and I don’t care if it’s black or death or any form of metal as long as I feel emotionally touched by it.

-How do you feel about being yourself such a huge influence on many extreme metal bands since when you started with Hellhammer till today?

M: Well, there’s a question I used to answer quite carefully, but by now I say: ’what the fuck, I don’t care!’ We didn’t do it because we wanted to influence people to begin with, and, let's face it, our first record, ‘Morbid Tales’, was a complete fuck, we received a complete flogging from a big part of the music press: Kerrang gave us only one K, which means pretty much shit, compost. We didn’t influence anybody back then, but we didn’t do it for that reason. I don’t care about influences. What the fuck are influences for? I don’t know. If Peter Tagtgren is influenced by Crazy Frog to create ‘Roswell 467" and creates the biggest death metal epic ever, so be it if the song is good, I don’t care where he was influenced by. A lot of time nowadays, I think influence are used to tell people where you come from and what your style of music is about and how it works, but I don’t care. If people are influenced by something and are able to create something of their own out of it, ok, that’s fair enough, otherwise, I don’t give a flying fuck.

-By the way, what bands influenced you before you formed Hellhammer?

M: When we started playing music, there were several aspects. For Tom, who is 3 years older than me, the major influences were Black Sabbath and the Who, Pete Townsend and Tommy Iommi, to start with, guitar wise. For me, as I was younger, I started of course with Motorhead and Judas Priest for heavy metal and AC/DC was the first rock band, hard rock band, that I’ve ever heard, esp. "Highway to hell". We’re talking about 1978, and I was eleven years old. But the point when we both got into metal was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, with Iron Maiden, Angel Witch, Witchfinder General, Raven, Tygers of Pan Tang, but one band, the main influence that definitely got us going and, without them, there wouldn’t have been Hellhammer at all, was Venom, with ‘Welcome to Hell’, with which it all completely took off. When you hear Hellhammer, even when you hear Celtic Frost afterwards, you don’t hear Venom, with all due respect to them, we haven't been the only band influenced, without them, there wouldn’t have been Bathory, Sodom and a whole lot of other bands. But I think all the bands such as Bathory or Sodom or else have been creating their own music, and I think that was the point.

-Talking about Peter Tagtgren, Dimmu Borgir said you were essential for them, and they covered one of your songs in a tribute album some years ago: what do you think of their music?

M: Well I like it. I won’t say it’s my favourite, but I definitely enjoy their music, I like the latest one and the one with the great video clip, and I think they've definitely reached a new level of theatrics and sometimes I think maybe it's a bit too much in one song: we tried to go with this album exactly the opposite way, we tried to take as much out of the songs as possible. Minimalize. Why use three notes in one riff, if you can have only one note? Why use three riffs, when you can use only one riff? Why put an entire string section where only one violin would give the right touch to create the basic atmosphere, if you would do something like that, this time around. But there’s a lot of great and different bands out there, with different reasons and different styles, that would a response for why the records that Peter Tagtgren has produced us to date, that I listen to a lot, and that's the main reason that we said ok, we want to do it was the ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’ by Immortal, a definitely great heavy and black metal album, full of epic songs, like Judas Priest turning completely evil and having to come to that hellish netherworld. It’s a one of a kind album, with a very bleak atmosphere but at the same time a Gargantuan epic wasteness, a kind of wasteland they created, it’s a great Immortal album, ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’.

-With hindsight, do Celtic Frost regret to have issued an album like ‘Cold Lake’, which changed completely the style and image of Celtic Frost?

M: With hindsight, there’s no normal step, this band is definitely not normal in the way it progresses, I would say. I could understand what Tom did, because I knew where it was coming from, because that was the point of Celtic Frost falling apart after ‘Into the Pandemonium’: already like musically, you could hear the falling apart on the album. We were very close to going completely crazy and losing ourselves in the experimentations and anything on that record, and you really have those elements that were afterward those in ‘Cold Lake’, a song like ‘Iron Death’ is melodic metal, and it's got this kind of like hockey chorus line, but it's only one song. But then again I can understand where it’s coming from. I think it was completely overdone, and it wasn’t taken care of well enough. It was a commercial suicide that was committed back then: everybody said it was a commercial sell out, but it was totally the opposite, it was total commercial suicide!

How do you want to shock, how do you want to get away as much as possible from people who are not afraid of death or the Devil? How do you want to shock people on the black and death metal scene the most? Create an album like ‘Cold Lake’!!!

-Do you intend to record a video for this album, and a DVD later?

M: Yes, there are plans for a video, and of course, we would get involved in creating a DVD, as a lot of people are asking that. But we’ll take our time, like we did for the record. The videoclip is going to happen in the next couple of months, because we need it to promote the album as such. But we want to get the right person to work with, so we are still reading treatments, checking out directors and productions companies. The DVD would be the first for Celtic Frost, and we definitely want to take our time, and it’s not like we’re gonna record a couple of shows and festivals and put it on a DVD. We’re considering how we could get that done and how we could treat the history of Celtic Frost on our first DVD that we would like to release. So I don’t know when that will happen.

-How do you see the future for Celtic Frost? I suppose you want to go on after that?

M: Yes! And that’s why we took our time, why we worked so long on it, and why we’re going up the road to really try to play live: we’ve got 55 shows confirmed in North America so far, and an European tour is already practically dated. Afterward, if everything works out, if we can really get to terms with each other, if this unity that we have tried to form over the last four or five years is strong enough to survive tours and everything, and that chemistry between Tom and me is not going to end up exploding again, I think there will be a next record, I think it will come much faster and in a much easier way than before, because we have formed the band, we know what we're doing and we've got a basis to work with as artists, so I definitely hope that we will get to the point, definitely looking forward to maybe do another record with this band.

-‘Necronomicon’ LP will be the title of the last Celtic Frost album ever, Tom said: when did this choice happen?

M: That was after ‘Morbid Tales’, ‘To Mega Therion’ and ‘Into the Pandemonium’ it would have been the fourth release and would have been the end of the band. It never happened. Therefore, here we are back again, somebody should force us to record ‘Necronomicon so we’d have to shut our mouths and never be able to come back again!

(After performing at the Hellfest festival in June, Celtic Frost will be back in Europe between January and March 2OO7 for a series of headlining gigs. Info: www.celticfrost.com)

Interview made by phone on April 2Oth, 2OO6.

Thanks to Valérie Reux for her efficiency and kindness.

Thanks to Celtic Frost for being back!!!

Photo: Jozo Palkovits