Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (79 page)

NIK BULLEN:
We played a show in Leeds with Justin just before he left, and after every song, all the people did was shout, “Play faster!” I felt like we were performing bears in a zoo and that nobody was listening to the content of the songs in terms of the politics.

JUSTIN BROADRICK:
I got fed up and gave the tape of side one of
Scum
to Digby [Pearson] at Earache [Records] and said, “Just take it off my hands,” because at the moment it seemed like no one was interested. Nik and Mick had a falling out; it looked like the band was over. I was offered the chance to join Head of David playing drums, and I viewed that as a safer option and something I was a bit more musically interested in.

Unable to get along with Mick Harris and feeling isolated without Broadrick, Bullen quit Napalm Death. Undeterred, Harris hired greenhorn vocalist Lee Dorrian and started writing new material. At the end of 1986, Pearson contacted Harris and offered to put Napalm Death back in the studio to record side B of
Scum
. In February 1987, Harris recruited guitarist Bill Steer, and the revitalized Napalm practiced in Steer’s parents’ house for a few weeks before heading back into the studio on Pearson’s dime. To say they were flying by the seat of their pants would be an understatement. At first, Dorrian didn’t even want to make the record.

LEE DORRIAN (ex–Napalm Death, Cathedral):
I never wanted to sing. I had no intentions on joining a band. We were friends, and I just got asked and I thought, “Well why not?” I had zero experience. I had been a fanzine writer and a concert promoter in Coventry when I was sixteen. So I had booked Napalm Death and written about them. But I didn’t know how to sing for them. My obvious [vocal] influences were [Kelvin] “Cal” [Morris] from Discharge and Pete [Boyce] from Antisect. So I kind of copied their style and tried to make it deeper, more extreme and manic, with some Japanese hardcore thrown in. When we did the B-side of
Scum
, I was totally unprepared. Mick had to cue me when to come in.

DAN LILKER:
I was working at Important Distribution, which gave me and [Nuclear Assault vocalist] John Connelly jobs at the warehouse picking records for the distributor when we weren’t on tour.
Scum
had just come in and somebody ran it to the warehouse and said, “Man you gotta hear this.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” I had heard stuff like Repulsion before, which, ironically, Napalm had taken a lot of influence from. But to hear it presented in that context—even faster and noisier, with forty songs on a record—that was a big moment for me, almost as huge as the first time I heard Black Sabbath.

LEE DORRIAN:
I made my mind up [to quit Napalm Death] in Japan, [which] was one place I had always wanted to visit. I got so drunk on the plane going home; I was awakened by a Japanese air hostess who was shaking me whilst I was asleep with my head in the toilet, my hair and face covered in puke. The next half of the journey back to the UK was quite possibly the most painful twelve hours of my life.

Napalm Death didn’t just lead the charge for UK extreme metal; the members it shed along the way started their own equally influential outfits. Broadrick played in Head of David and launched pioneering industrial metal group Godflesh and post-rock outfit Jesu; Dorrian formed doom band Cathedral and launched Rise Above Records; Mick Harris created isolationist ambient bands Scorn and Lull. And perhaps most significantly for the continued development of grindcore and death metal, Bill Steer started Carcass, a gory grindcore outfit whose lyrics were culled from medical texts.

JEFF WALKER (ex-Carcass):
In 1985, I was in Electro Hippies, which was a crossover hardcore band like Siege, MDC, and D.R.I. The guitarist [Andy Barnard] was a total metalhead, and I was a punker who had started getting back into metal again. I got ejected from that band because they said I wasn’t contributing enough, but I think it was really because the drummer, Simon, who was originally the vocalist, wanted to be a vocalist again. So I met up with [guitarist] Bill [Steer], who was playing in a Discharge-type punk band called Disattack. They asked me to join, and they went in a more metal direction. Then we had a coup d’état by getting rid of the drummer and the vocalist, and we got Ken [Owen] in, and that’s how Carcass was born [in 1986].

MATT HARVEY (Exhumed):
When Carcass came out, that total medical gore fascination was just perfect. I thought, “Fuck, why didn’t I think of that when I was fourteen.”

JEFF WALKER:
My sister was a nurse, and she had a medical dictionary. I used to sit there and try to sound articulate and intelligent by using this dictionary as a source of inspiration. Carcass was meant to be a scientific approach to death metal because it was so boring listening to lyrics that would say “I’m gonna kill you” in fifty different ways.

BILL STEER (ex-Carcass):
The intention from the start was to take advantage of the English language. There’s a lot of vocabulary there. Perhaps early on we felt it was a compliment if people read our lyrics and then picked up a dictionary to try and figure out what they meant.

JEFF WALKER:
An English journalist came up with the idea that we all went to medical school then formed a band, and for the longest time people really believed it. In reality, 1988’s
Reek of Putrefaction
was meant to be the ultimate death metal album, the album that killed Slayer’s
Reign in Blood
. But, of course, no one ever said that because the production was so raw. In fact, the only good reviews we got in the beginning were from [late BBC radio legend] John Peel. And I think part of that was because Bill and Ken are from the same area where he grew up, and he wanted to support us.

ANGELA GOSSOW (Arch Enemy):
I worked as a journalist for a while, and the reason I did it was just so I could interview Carcass. I loved them more than anything else. And they were slagged off by almost everyone.

JEFF WALKER:
All the heavy metal mags hated us. Our second album,
Symphonies of Sickness
, got such a bad review in
Metal Forces
—1 out of 100. The woman who reviewed it was so offended.

JIM WELCH:
Bill went on a mission to become the most amazing guitar player and that’s when Mike [Amott of Arch Enemy] joined the band, which gave them a dual guitar approach, and that’s when their musicianship got noticed by metal bands all over the world—not just grindcore bands and death metal bands. Carcass became one of the most important metal bands of that time.

JEFF WALKER:
Our music was extreme, but we weren’t these maniacs. We were very boring. We should have been out partying, getting girls, and doing drugs, but we weren’t. Everyone in that [British grindcore] scene was the same. We used to go to the Mermaid in Birmingham to the gigs and just see bands. I was so poor I couldn’t afford to drink.

BARNEY GREENWAY:
For a band and the scene that we came from that was never meant to have icons or put people on pedestals, they sure made a big song and dance about Lee [Dorrian] not being in Napalm Death anymore, and about me stepping into his shoes [in 1989]. People were like, “Oh, it’s not Lee and Bill anymore. That was the band.” It used to really get to me in the old days because I was like, “I’m really trying my hardest to contribute to the ethos and the musical heritage of the band,” and I was being met with this negativity. The lesson I learned from that was, “Fuck those people.”

The only way to upstage the ferocity of UK grindcore was to take the violence and brutality from the music directly into the crowd. For better or worse, Massachusetts brawler Seth Putnam was the master. While his band, Anal Cunt, wrote sloppy, unremarkable songs that dripped with bad riffs and sick humor, their performances were filled with palpable danger—brief, sonic melees of chaos and destruction that often ended in riots.

SETH PUTNAM (1968–2011) (Anal Cunt):
When we started in 1988, we wanted to be the least musical band possible. If you take death metal and hardcore to its furthest extreme, that’s basically what we were doing. The original lineup from ’88 to ’90 [which featured Putnam, guitarist Mike Mahan, and drummer Tim Morse] was really intense, but the shows weren’t as violent as when we reformed in ’91 [with guitarist Fred Ordonez replacing Mahan]. During the year we had off I became a total alcoholic. And the new shows basically were just me and the guitarist going out and punching everyone in the crowd in the face while the drummer kept playing. The guitar would get unplugged and my mic would get broken. That’s why we got a second guitarist [John Kozik]—so we could keep the noise going when Fred’s guitar became unplugged and my mic wasn’t on.

ALBERT MUDRIAN:
Musically, I don’t have much time for Anal Cunt. I have one record because the song titles crack me up. But it’s just button-pushing. I will never have the urge to listen to any music Seth Putnam created.

KEVIN SHARP (Primate, Brutal Truth):
Anal Cunt were the masters of blur grind. It was chaotic and noisy and no one will ever touch them, not any gore grind or porno grind band—no one.

SETH PUTNAM:
We used to beat up people who took videos of us because they never sent us copies of the videos. Once there was a guy standing on a bar stool videotaping, and I went to Fred [Ordonez], “Okay, I’ll get him from the left, you get him from the right.” We fuckin’ crunched him. The guy fuckin’ fell on the ground, his camera broke, and we kicked his camera and kicked him in the face.

RANDY BLYTHE (Lamb of God):
Anal Cunt was on tour with Eyehategod, and I took a road trip to see them in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Seth had this 10-foot-tall stepladder. He opened it up, sang two songs on top of the ladder. Then he got down, closed the ladder, and threw it feet first at the bartender, who was this fifty-year-old woman. It smashed her head into the glass mirror behind the bar and the mirror shattered everywhere. I was like, “Dude, you are fucked up!” I’m not advocating violence towards bartenders or women. I love both of them, but it
was
pretty intense.

MIKE WILLIAMS (Eyehategod):
One time I saw them, the band starts playing the first song, and he comes out and punches this girl in the face and that was the show. He even attacked me on that tour. We were in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m standing out in the crowd just watching A.C., and the next thing I know, Seth fucking picks up a chair and swings it wrestling style into my back. I had a beer in my hand, apparently. He knocked me completely unconscious, and as soon as I came to, I was asking, “Where did my beer go?”

SETH PUTNAM:
After we reformed in ’91 I played every show fuckin’ wrecked. I blacked out at half the shows. I don’t remember what happened. Some of the best stuff we ever came up with happened when I was blacked out. The alcohol and drugs were a huge part of what I did. Mostly, I was doing coke, speed, or meth. I was really into shooting cocaine. I’d usually only shoot heroin after being up for five days straight shooting cocaine. I just wanted to come down because I was bored of being up for five days. Or I’d do speedballs. I just did heroin every now and then, but it wasn’t one of my main choices.

KEVIN SHARP (Brutal Truth):
I saw Seth throw a mic stand like a javelin at [guitarist] Terry [Savastano] from Grief—flattened his face like a fuckin’ coin. Seth was an original. PC he wasn’t. Get over it. He wasn’t claiming to be anything other than what he was—a fuckin’ lunatic.

SETH PUTNAM:
In Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1998, I OD’ed on heroin and was pronounced dead. An ambulance came and the paramedics [used a defibrillator] on me, and it didn’t work. They tried it again for the fuck of it and I woke up in my kitchen with no idea where the fuck I was. On the ambulance ride to the hospital, one of the paramedics said, “You’ll probably have brain damage for the rest of your life.” And by the time I got to the hospital my thoughts were completely back to normal and I saw a shitload of cops in the hallway, so I ran away from the hospital and went home because I thought they would arrest me for having heroin. I’ve been arrested ten times. The first time was in San Francisco for punching a lesbian in the face. Back then we weren’t really getting paid for shows. We just fucked up every place we played and punched out a bunch of people because we knew we weren’t getting any money. I almost ripped a guy’s ear off with a mic stand. I broke some girl’s arm. After a while, we made a plan. We’d pick a place three blocks away where I’d hide when the cops came. The band would tell the cops, “Sorry, he’s already left,” and then they’d pick me up and we’d leave.

MIKE WILLIAMS [2010 interview]:
Seth is not a nice guy. He’s a fucking son of a bitch and he’s an asshole. He fucked up a lot of people, and I don’t agree with any of that. And I don’t agree with any of his racist shit either. He’s just stupid and I can’t take him seriously at all.