“They said, You boys will never do this show again!” The Doors’ Robby Krieger and John Densmore share their memories of being banned from America’s most legendary TV show
(Image credit: CBS Television – The Ed Sullivan Show)
On the evening of September 10, 1967, Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for Los Angeles rock band The Doors, was sitting at home with his fiancee Dorothy Fujikawa, watching America’s most popular TV variety programme, The Ed Sullivan Show.
At the very end of the broadcast, as the musician was about to change channels. host Ed Sullivan said, “Next week we’re going to have… a rock group from California, The Doors, doing their number one hit Light My Fire.”
“We looked at each other, saying, Oh I guess we’re on The Ed Sullivan Show next week,” Manzarek later told the show’s website.
In a new interview with YouTube star Rick Beato, The Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore recall their excitement at being offered a slot on the show.
“There was nothing bigger,” says Densmore. “Elvis, The Beatles, us… great! I remember Mr Sullivan coming around when we were rehearsing, saying, ‘You know, you boys look good when you smile, you should smile.”
The band weren’t smiling, however, when following their rehearsal, and with just 15 minutes until the show was set to go live, a producer called into their dressing room, and informed frontman Jim Morrison that he would need to make a change to the lyrics of Light My Fire, specifically the line, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher”, as it might be interpreted as an endorsement of the use of illegal drugs. Hugely annoyed by this demand, the group nevertheless agreed to play ball…. until the producer left the room.
“I thought they were kidding,to tell you the truth,” Robbie Krieger admits. “Like, really? I said, Fuck it, let’s just do it the way that we do it.”
Which is what they did. And the TV people were absolutely not impressed.
“They said, ‘You boys will never do this show again!’” John Densmore recalls. “And I think Jim said, ‘Well, we just did it, so we don’t care’.”
“No, that was in the movie,” Krieger says with a smile, referring to Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic of the band.
The show’s producers later informed the band that they had been lined up for a further six appearances on the programme. But true to their word, they never invited The Doors back.
Watch The Doors’ Ed Sullivan Show performance, and Densmore and Krieger’s interview with Rick Beato, below.
The Doors – Light My Fire – Ed Sullivan Show 1967 (HD Remastered) – YouTube
Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.
Lacuna Coil vocalist Cristina Scabbia once had so many stalkers that the FBI needed to keep an eye on her.
Talking in the new issue of Metal Hammer, the singer reflects on the highs and lows of making it into metal’s mainstream during the 2000s. One of the unfortunate side-effects of such success was a contingent of over-passionate fans who stalked her and sent her threatening photographs.
Scabbia starts by remembering one fan who gave her his wedding ring. “That was to tell me he had ended a toxic relationship,” she says, “and to thank me for somehow saving him from something bad with my voice.
“That was peculiar, but I did have actual stalkers that were potentially dangerous and would follow me around. I remember them sending me weird pictures of me covered in blood or sending me pictures of a foetus.”
(Image credit: Future (cover photo: Jonathan Weiner))
It eventually became so intense that the singer reported the incidents to the authorities. As a result, on Lacuna Coil’s following tour of North America, Scabbia had an FBI agent checking in on her everywhere the band played.
“I reported it, and for one complete tour I had an FBI agent in every town checking on me,” she continues. “It was not only disturbing, it was also boring for me because I had to be confined on a tour bus every day.”
It wasn’t all bad, however. In the same interview, Scabbia admits that she enjoyed appearing in many contemporary magazines’ lists of the “hottest women in metal”, a practice that’s since become outdated and decried by many as sexist.
Sign up below to get the latest from Metal Hammer, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
“I don’t see the negativity [in those lists] at all,” Scabbia argues. “I know a lot of people are against this because they see it as sexism, but I thought it was just a way to say ‘beautiful’. I didn’t see it as something that objectified me.”
Scabbia also spoke on the topic of “hottest women in metal” lists during a conversation with Hammer in 2022. Back then, she said that being included on such a list can be “empowering” if the subject is “in complete control” of how she is presented.
However, she added: “I hate when the image of a woman is completely sexualised, especially if there is talent behind her […] Put it this way: in the music world, if being sexy is the only thing that you have to offer, that’s kind of sad.”
Lacuna Coil release their 10th studio album, Sleepless Empire, on Friday, February 14. The band’s first album of new material since Black Anima in 2019, it was awarded a glowing four stars in Hammer’s review.
Journalist Holly Wright wrote: “With Sleepless Empire, Lacuna Coil dive headfirst into their heavier side – and it works. This is a band that’s unafraid to evolve, to experiment and to hit hard. Gothic metal’s crown isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.”
Alice Cooper has added another run of shows to his Too Close For Comfort tour. The first leg of of the new 23-date schedule kicks off at the VBC Mark C. Smith Concert Hall in Huntsville, AL, on May 2, and ends at the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, NJ, on May 24.
The band then head to Europe for a run of previously announced shows, before picking up again at the Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, PA, on August 15. The trek wraps up at the Graceland Soundstage in Memphis, TN, on August 30.
“You can never be too close… right?” asks Alice. “That’s why we’ve added more dates to the 2025 Too Close For Comfort Tour this Spring and Summer. Come along for a nightmare you won’t forget!”
Pre-sale tickets and VIP Packages go on sale February 11 at 10am local time with code SICKTHINGS. The general sale begins on Friday.
Cooper has just finished the first US leg of the Too Close For Comfort tour, and will board the Rock Legends Cruise in Miami, FL, later this week. Regular guitarist Nita Strauss sat out the shows due to a scheduling conflict and was initially replaced by Orianthi, who, in turn, was forced out after injuring her knee, with former Guns N’ Roses man Gilby Clarke stepping in.
Cooper arrives in Europe in July. Full dates below.
Alice Cooper: Too Close For Comfort 2025 tour
Feb 13-17: Miami Rock Legends Cruise, FL
May 02: Huntsville VBC Mark C. Smith Concert Hall, AL May 03: Macon Atrium Health Amphitheater, GA May 05: Montgomery Performing Arts Center, AL May 06: Savannah Civic Center: Johnny Mercer Theater, GA May 07: North Charleston Performing Arts Center SC May 09: Columbus Sonic Temple Art & Music Festival 2025, OH May 10: Saginaw Dow Event Center, MI May 13: Moline Vibrant Arena at The MARK, IL May 14: Milwaukee Miller High Life Theatre, WI May 15: Muncie Ball State University: Emens Auditorium, IN May 17: Erie Erie Insurance Arena, PA May 18: Ocean City Boardwalk Rock 2025, MD| May 20: Wilkes-Barre Mohegan Arena, PA May 22: Utica Stanley Performing Arts Center, NY May 23: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT May 24: Atlantic City Ocean Casino Resort, NJ
Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
Jul 05: Hannover Stadium, Germany * Jul 08: Bologna Sequoie Music Park, Italy Jul 11: Athens Rockwave Festival 2025, Greece Jul 13: Mogilovo Midalidare Rock in the Wine Valley, Bulgaria Jul 19: Spalt Strandbad Enderndorf, Germany Jul 22: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK Jul 23: Edinburgh Playhouse, UK Jul 25: London The O2, UK ∞ Jul 26: Mönchengladbach SparkassenPark, Germany Jul 28: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands Jul 30: Schaffhausen Stars in Town 2025, Switzerland
Aug 15: Philadelphia Citizens Bank Park, PA Aug 19: Salem Salem Civic Center, VA Aug 20: Knoxville The Tennessee Theatre, TN Aug 21: Chattanooga Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium, TN Aug 23: Chesterfield The Factory, MO Aug 26: Waukee Vibrant Music Hall, IA Aug 27: Omaha Orpheum Theater, NE Aug 30: Memphis Elvis Presley’s Memphis: Graceland Soundstage, TN
* with Scorpions and Judas Priest ∞ co-headline show with Judas Priest
Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazinesince 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.
(Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
It’s no small feat to single-handedly invent a genre of music. But that’s what the Allman Brothers Band did with southern rock back in the early 1970s. Not that you’d want to say that to certain members of the group. “When I hear people describe us as southern rock I get fighting mad,” said drummer Butch Trucks.
Though they lived in Macon, a city nicknamed “the heart of Georgia,” and spoke with southern accents, when it came to music, the band’s tastes were all over the map: blues, country, rock, gospel, even free jazz.
“We took it to where Cream and the Grateful Dead took it,” said Trucks, “then added John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock to the mix and stirred it a bit, and we were up in places no one else was thinking about.”
Reaching those lofty places took time. The band evolved out of two 1960s-era West Coast ventures, the Allman Joys and Hourglass, in which brothers Gregg and Duane Allman had attempts at everything from blue-eyed soul to psychedelia. It wasn’t until they moved back to Georgia in ’69 that they started clicking. Or, in Allman lingo, “hittin’ the note”.
‘Hittin’ the note’ was all about interplay and musical telepathy. And that’s what made the original line-up of the Allman Brothers Band so exceptional on their early records (the best of which, At Fillmore East, remains a strong contender for the greatest live album of all time).
After Duane’s death in October 1971, what followed was a head-shaking, decades-long tale of deaths, drugs, break-ups, lawsuits and even, amid the 20 or so albums they put out in that time, the occasional triumph.
Until the end, survivors Gregg Allman, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe Johanson kept the flame burning with live shows, until Gregg announced that the band would be wrapping things up for good after their 45th anniversary celebrations in 2014. Just three years later, he was dead.
Even now the spirit of the departed members lives on, with The Brothers – including former members Jaimoe, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks – performing the Allmans’ catalogue live in concert in 2020 and again in 2025.
The real legacy of the Allman Brothers Band lives on not only in classic albums like Eat A Peach and Brothers And Sisters, but also in a sprawling southern songbook that includes Lynyrd Skynyrd, Georgia Satellites, Drive-By Truckers, Kings Of Leon and Alabama Shakes. But they’re still resistant to easy labels.
“I’ve heard that damn expression ‘jam band’ so many times,” Gregg said. “It’s b.s. The Brothers are not a jam band, we’re a band that jams.”
…and one to ignore
You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.
Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
Bill DeMain is a correspondent for BBC Glasgow, a regular contributor to MOJO, Classic Rock and Mental Floss, and the author of six books, including the best-selling Sgt. Pepper At 50. He is also an acclaimed musician and songwriter who’s written for artists including Marshall Crenshaw, Teddy Thompson and Kim Richey. His songs have appeared in TV shows such as Private Practice and Sons of Anarchy. In 2013, he started Walkin’ Nashville, a music history tour that’s been the #1 rated activity on Trip Advisor. An avid bird-watcher, he also makes bird cards and prints.
Kendrick Lamar and SZA have revealed plans to bring their Grand National Tour to the UK and Europe this summer.
The announcement comes in the wake of L:amar’s acclaimed performance at the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show last night, February 9, during which SZA guested with the Los Angeles-born rapper.
Following on from the pair’s 19-date North American tour, the UK/Europe leg of the Grand National Tout will launch on July 2 at Cologne’s RheinEnergieSTADION in Germany. It includes a stop in London at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on July 22.
Kendrick Lamar / SZA The Grand National Tour UK and Europe dates
Jul 02: Cologne RheinEnergieSTADION, Germany Jul 04: Frankfurt Deutsche Bank Park, Germany Jul 08: Glasgow Hampden Park, UK Jul 10: Birmingham Villa Park, UK Jul 13: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff ArenA, Holland Jul 15: Paris La Défense Arena, France Jul 19: Cardiff Principality Stadium, UK Jul 22: London Tottenham Hotspur Stadium , UK Jul 27: Lisbon Estadio do Restelo, Portugal Jul 30: Barcelona Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, Spain
Aug 02: Rome Stadio Olimpico, Italy Aug 06: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland Aug 09: Stockholm Arena, Sweden
Tickets for the Grand Nation Tour will go on sale here on Friday, February 14, at 9am local time. Pre-sales begin on Wednesday, February 12.
Watch Kendrick Lamar’s superb “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto” Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, also featuring Samuel L. Jackson and tennis superstar Serena Williams, below. The show was expected to draw a TV audience in excess of 120 million viewers and has been watched more than 22 million times in less than 24 hours on YouTube.
The latest news, features and interviews direct to your inbox, from the global home of alternative music.
Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show – YouTube
Kid Rock stormed off stage during a Saturday performance at Jon Bon Jovi‘s Nashville bar after scolding the audience for not clapping. You can watch his outburst below.
Rock made a guest appearance at JBJ’s Nashville, where Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan was hosting his birthday party. The “Bawitdaba” singer took the stage for a shambolic cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s “Proud Mary,” struggling to find the right key and mumbling the lyrics as the backup singers did the heavy lifting, before he ultimately halted the song to lambast the audience.
“No, fuck them. Fuck them. Hey, hey, stop, stop. If you ain’t gonna clap, we ain’t gonna sing. That’s how it’s gonna work,” Rock said. The crowd obliged him and began clapping, to which Rock instructed, “Don’t get too fast.”
The band made it through another minute — with several audience members still clapping, mind you — before Rock decided he’d had enough. “You know what, fuck y’all. You ain’t gonna clap, I’m going,” he said before walking past a bemused Bryan and off stage. His unceremonious exit was met with a combination of applause and boos.
Only God knows why Rock couldn’t get a suitable reaction out of the JBJ’s Nashville crowd. Yet he should know better than anybody that every audience member is born free and can exercise their right to clap as they see fit.
Perhaps Rock will have better luck working a crowd on his Rock the Country traveling roadshow, which runs from April through July. Hopefully he doesn’t harbor this resentment all summer long.
“That TV celebrity that I became, I didn’t like it. My heart is in music. I hated every second of it”: How Ozzy Osbourne rediscovered himself with the Scream album
(Image credit: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
Ozzy Osbourne has just announced the news that every fan wants to hear – a one-off all-star farewell gig in his hometown of Aston. But back in 2010, the singer was promoting his new album, Scream – and as Classic Rock discovered, he was expecting the “Jesus freaks” not to be happy about it.
We meet Ozzy Osbourne in a giant room that’s painted entirely white. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, even the trestle table in front of us… everything is bleached-out and colourless. It’s an eerie feeling.
The Prince Of Darkness is perched on a white folding chair, sipping tea from – yes – a white china cup. He presents a stark contrast to the pallid surroundings, dressed as he is in his customary apparel de noir. His dusky outfit is alleviated only by a trusty gold crucifix, which dangles on a somewhat sunken chest, plus customary blue-tinted specs. His long, brown-black, dyed hair, usually rail-straight, is curiously tousled and curly today.
The large anaemic area in which we’re conducting our interview lends an almost spectral air to proceedings. Your Metal Hammer scribe feels like Saint Peter at the Gates Of Heaven, sitting judgment on Ozzy’s evil past and wondering how much commotion he’ll cause if we allow him into our peaceful realm of fluffy clouds and harp-plucking. However, having heard one of his new songs, Diggin’ Me Down, it’s likely the gates will stay firmly shut.
“I’m bound to get some fucking flak for that song, from all the Jesus freaks,” the POFD admits.
Time for a double- take and a dose of reality. We’re actually ensconced in a place called The Worx, in Parsons Green, West London. It’s a sprawling photographic studio and entertainment complex, and Ozzy has taken over the place for the day for a blitz of publicity for his new album, Scream.
At the time of our encounter, Metal Hammer has heard five tracks from the record: the aforementioned Diggin’ Me Down, Let Me Hear You Scream, Let It Die and Soul Sucker, each an out-and-out fist-pumping rocker, plus Time, a typically tormented ballad.
Sign up below to get the latest from Metal Hammer, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
Scream is the first studio record Ozzy has done without guitarist Zakk Wylde since 1986’s The Ultimate Sin, and the first without drummer Mike Bordin since 1995. Gus G of Firewind and Tommy Clefetos (Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper) have taken over. Rounding out the lineup are bassist Blasko and keyboard player Adam Wakeman.
The new album sounds monstrously heavy.
“Unconsciously I can hear my Sabbath roots in it. There’s some thudding Iron Man riffs in there. I’ve got my own ProTools studio at my house. I call it The Bunker. Kevin Churko, the producer, he’s a very clever guy. He and I laid the foundations of it and we put the band on afterwards. Which is a new way for me of doing it.”
Ozzy Osbourne and feathered friend in 2010 (Image credit: Press)
We noticed some interesting lyrics on Diggin’ Me Down: ‘How will I know you, Mr Jesus Christ, how will I know that you’re the Son Of God?’ What’s that all about?
“They say that Jesus is going to come back. Well, how fucking bad is it going to get before he decides to return? There’s been a lot of wars and a lot of people have died in the name of religion. When I was a kid and I found out there wasn’t a Santa Claus and it was all bollocks… it’s a similar thing, isn’t it? Those Jesus freaks, they’re really annoying. Imagine if someone was to come up to me and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m Jesus.’ I’d reply, ‘Yeah, and I’m fucking Hitler.’ I don’t know if you’re the Son Of God, I don’t know if you’re Jesus Christ. The nuthouse is full of them.”
This feature originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 207 (June 2010) (Image credit: Future)
We thought for a moment you’d done an about-turn and become religious.
“No, no. I’ve never got my head around the idea of organised religion. It’s bullshit. When I was a kid I grew up with a load of Catholics and the people around where I lived had no money. There was one woman who had eight kids, her old man had fucked off, she was broke, and she’d send her kids, spick and span, to church every Sunday morning. She’d go into debt to keep them looking good. I don’t get that. I think people believe in God because that’s all they’ve got. It’s a crutch.”
Another of your new songs, Soul Sucker, seems to be about people who always want a piece of you…
“Yeah, people always want something, you know? They want something for nothing. It’s crazy. I just tell them to fuck off, you know? Another interesting song on the album is Let It Die. I quite like it. The lyrics are very repetitive. You know that Billy Joel song? [We Didn’t Start The Fire] The play with words is really clever on it. We wanted to do a song like that. The way it picks up, speeds up, I can really hear Sabbath in it towards the end. And with Gus on guitar, he came in and he did a good job.”
Gus G: he’s Greek, isn’t he?
“Blessed are the Greeks.”
What’s happened to Zakk Wylde?
“I was beginning to sound like Black Label Society, you know? I’m not putting him down at all, I love his stuff, but I’ve been putting off the inevitable, thinking about it for two or three years, trying to find a permanent replacement. Zakk was OK about it.”
OZZY OSBOURNE – “Let Me Hear You Scream” (Official Video) – YouTube
“I used to say better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. With Gus, I’ve got to find out what he’s like to tour with, but at the same time if I needed Zakk for anything I’d just pick up the phone and he’d be there the next day, you know? As he said to me, ‘Our relationship goes beyond music.’ I’m godfather to his son. We went out to dinner, my family and his family, the other day. I don’t want anyone to think we’ve fallen out, that I’ve fired him and he hates me. It’s not true. I just knew I had to get a full- time replacement in the end, because on the last tour Zakk was opening the show with his band and fucking closing it with my band. It was my fault in a lot of ways, I kept going, ‘I can’t go through the fucking audition process again, I can’t do it.’”
What about the reaction to your initial album title: Soul Sucka?
“I thought Soul Sucka was a great title for the album. But then someone told me my website had gone nuts with complaints about it. I said, ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ Apparently people weren’t going to buy the album because they thought I was turning into a hip-hop artist. I didn’t realise the word ‘sucka’ is what they use in fucking hip-hop. I don’t listen to the fucking stuff, you know?”
The actual track. Soul Sucker, now seems to have an ‘er’ at the end.
“I ain’t got a clue. Sharon does all that. I think it’s Suck-A. Or it’s Suck-ER. I don’t fucking know.”
Any other tracks you can tell us about? What about a song we haven’t heard so far, called I Love You All?
“It’s just a three-minute… three-second… it’s only a short thing. You know on stage when I go, ‘Good night, God bless, I love you all’? On the song I go, ‘We all must stand together now, or one by one we fall, to all of you who stood by me, God bless I love you all.’ It’s like a little poem at the end. It doesn’t mean I’m going to quit. It’s just the end, the end of the fucking album.”
What inspires you, as an artist, to keep recording new stuff? Because you could easily rest on your laurels…
“You’ve got to have something to do. In my case it’s a high- profile job but it’s what I do. Most of my time is spent watching a DVD in a hotel room, so the best part is making an album or playing a gig. If I can’t do an album or a gig I’m fucking pissed off.”
Ozzy Osbourne performing at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2009 (Image credit: Jamie McCarthy/WireImage)
Is retirement something you’ve got in your sights?
“If I can still do it and people still want to see me, then great. I’m not going to go from arenas and festivals down to bars and seedy clubs; I don’t want to do that. I’m doing a couple of small shows in London soon – I like doing them from time to time, but I won’t do them if that’s all I’ve got left. I’m not a dummy. I’m not going to go from sell-out shows to playing in front of three people. Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, they’re still doing it, so why can’t I? If people still want to come and see me, then age doesn’t come into it.”
For your previous album, Black Rain, you had a playback for the posh press at Abbey Road. Metal Hammer managed to infiltrate it, but it was a rather high-falutin’ affair. You seem to be going back to your roots with Scream.
“I always wanted to do a varied album; I don’t want to do one with the same headbanging tunes all the way through. I want it to be more like a journey, you know. Rob Halford made an all-out modern metal album and it wasn’t particularly successful, so you can’t really go that far, you’ve got to stick to your roots.”
Are you trying to reclaim your heartland with Scream?
“You know what? That TV celebrity that I became, I fucking didn’t like it. Sharon loves flying around the world and being a TV star. I don’t, I can’t stand it, because my heart is in music. ‘Hi guys, it’s good to be here on TV again.’ Fuck that. Sharon said, ‘I want to do a variety show.’ [The ill-fated Osbournes: Reloaded]. I said, ‘What do you want to do that for?’ She said, ‘Just one time for me.’ I hated every second of it. She kept pushing me into this fucking stuff.”
So, have you finally decided to hold your ground?
“I said, ‘I tell you what, Sharon, don’t even fucking ask me, don’t even go there with me in future, because I don’t want to know.’ If it comes to the point, at the end of my days, I’m going to be remembered as a chat show host or something… well, I don’t want that to happen, you know?”
What are your thoughts on the death of Ronnie James Dio?
“When I heard he was sick, I did send him a message. I bumped into [Heaven & Hell drummer] Vinny Appice at an awards ceremony a few weeks back and I said, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help Ronnie out, please let me know.’ Sharon had cancer a few years back and it’s fucking miserable to watch somebody going downhill.”
Does Ronnie’s death, in a strange way, open doors for you to do anything Black Sabbath- related in future?
“Well, I never say never any more. But I wouldn’t do [a reunion] with anybody but the original three: Bill, Tony and Geezer. That is Black Sabbath. I don’t want to get a stand-in drummer. I think Bill is set in his ways, but I’d imagine he’d do it. We did try and make another album, we’ve still got a bunch of tapes, but the thing about that is, it’s a really dodgy thing because you’re returning to this fucking myth, aren’t you?”
Wouldn’t your lawsuit against Tony Iommi affect a potential Sabbath reunion?
“It’s been settled now. We got 50 per cent of the name or something. I don’t really know too much about it. Sharon was dealing with it. But it has been resolved. I think so, yeah. I don’t want to fall out with Tony, so I don’t know.”
Who would play you in an Ozzy Osbourne movie?
“A lot of people have suggested Johnny Depp. I’d prefer a young, unknown guy from Birmingham. I’m English; I’m from the Midlands, not from fucking Hollywood. Johnny Depp is one of the few Americans who can do a really good English accent but I’d like it to be someone relatively unknown.”
Ozzfest is coming back in the summer of 2010…
“We’re doing a few shows, not that many. There are a lot more festivals out there now.”
You’re doing Ozzfest with Mötley Crüe. Will we see a repeat of the debauch-ery of when you toured with them IN the 1980s?
“No. I’m going to do my gig and fuck off home. That tour was the wildest tour I was ever on. I remember saying to [then Crüe manager] Doc McGhee, ‘I think one of us is going to die on this tour.’ [Mötley Crüe] were bad news; they were out of control. I was with Nikki Sixx a couple of days ago and he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t get stoned any more. We’re all different guys now.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 207, June 2010
Geoff Barton is a British journalist who founded the heavy metal magazine Kerrang! and was an editor of Sounds music magazine. He specialised in covering rock music and helped popularise the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) after using the term for the first time (after editor Alan Lewis coined it) in the May 1979 issue of Sounds.
The LP became a Top 10 international hit and went gold. But more importantly, Plastic Ono Band set a template of frank honesty and sharp introspection that would guide Lennon throughout the ’70s.
He’d reach a commercial peak with Imagine, a more radio-friendly update of the Plastic Ono Band approach that became an international No. 1 smash. The 1970 Top 5 single “Instant Karma” gave Lennon an opportunity to look outward. But gold-selling Top 10 U.S. hits Mind Games and Walls and Bridges followed the same creative path as Imagine, revealing things about Lennon that were illuminative and cathartic.
In fact, as echoed in the following list of Top 25 John Lennon ’70s Songs, the only time he really stumbled was when he focused solely on current events and politics. No songs from 1972’s Some Time in New York City appear as part of this countdown. Also absent are tracks from 1975’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, but that’s only because the album was devoted to cover songs from Lennon’s youth.
That’s where things ended musically in the ’70s, as he memorably sat out the decade’s last years to help raise a child. But Lennon had already fashioned an impressive resume, especially when he avoided Voice of a Generation-style pretense in favor of simply speaking from the heart.
Angry outbursts like “I Found Out” and “Gimme Some Truth” were tempered with an orphan’s visceral dread of dishonesty and rejection. Flights of lyrical fancy like “Mind Games” and “#9 Dream” remained very much rooted in Lennon’s personal time and place. Even “Imagine,” his often-misunderstood paean to a utopian peace, has a decidedly personal admission of doubt buried in its platitudes: “You may say I’m a dreamer.”
That kind of frank, even brutal honesty about his hopes, his fears and his heart gave lasting resonance to music from the first decade after the Beatles split. Here’s a look back at the Top 25 John Lennon ’70s Songs:
No. 25. “Old Dirt Road” From: Walls and Bridges (1974)
John Lennon’s Lost Weekend shenanigans with Harry Nilsson sometimes came to a very bad end. Even the album they produced together during this era, Nilsson’s Pussy Cats, has its share of questionable moments. Then there’s “Old Dirt Road.” Lennon didn’t think much of this Nilsson co-written deep cut, but it’s a delightful little reverie. Nilsson must’ve thought so, too: He recorded his version for 1980’s Flash Harry, the last studio LP released in Nilsson’s lifetime.
No. 24. “Power to the People” From: Shaved Fish (1975)
“Power to the People” previewed the more political bent heard on Some Time in New York City – but took a different approach. Unlike the determinedly newsy songs that followed, Lennon crafted a huge, hooky chorus and leveraged a universal theme. Alan White’s doggedly aggressive rhythm moved everything along. Unfortunately, however, that theme was already a bit passe. Lennon later acknowledged that “Power to the People” probably arrived about a decade too late.
No. 23. “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” From: Walls and Bridges (1974)
One of the first songs attempted for Walls and Bridges, “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” might find Lennon at his most carnal. It’s certainly Lennon in one of his happiest moments. Ironically, the earliest demos were dark ruminations, almost like a ’50s lost-love ballad. (Lennon later cited “Little Darlin'” by the Diamonds as an inspiration.) Now overcome with lusty desire, he makes an improvised vocal reference to the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” as “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” fades.
No. 22. “Working Class Hero” From: Plastic Ono Band (1970)
With this Bob Dylan-esque three-chord call for a revolution in thought, Lennon’s sharply ironic asides (“if you want to be a hero well just follow me“) are often lost. It’s a shame because this populist message clearly meant a lot to Lennon, as he did hundreds of takes over several days at Abbey Road. Frustrated with the results, Lennon inserted the “tortured and scared you for 20-odd years” verse from a different take to complete “Working Class Hero.”
No. 21. “Going Down on Love” From: Walls and Bridges (1974)
As with “Surprise, Surprise” from elsewhere on Walls and Bridges, “Going Down on Love” started out much differently. Early versions matched the gritty stripped-down honesty of 1970’s Plastic Ono Band. Then Lennon started adding parts, most notably a tough little horn section. A song that was once this bleak exploration of the drama surrounding his love life was transformed – in sound, anyway. A check of the lyric sheet confirms that a directionless Lennon was standing at the very edge of an emotional abyss.
No. 20. “Bless You” From: Walls and Bridges (1974)
A long-awaited exhale on a sonically overstuffed album. Lennon, then in the midst of an affair but still heartbroken over Yoko Ono, probably needed one in real life, too. The result was a few minutes of introspection as Lennon returned to his estranged wife – though, at this point, only in dreams.
No. 19. “I Know (I Know)” From: Mind Games (1973)
As Lennon’s relationship with Ono began to falter, he offered a mea culpa in song not unlike “How?” and “Jealous Guy” from Imagine. Curiously, he also might have been reaching out to someone else with whom he was estranged: Paul McCartney debuted his new band Wings with 1971’s Wild Life, and the track list included a song called “Some People Never Know.” The opening riff on “I Know (I Know)” also strongly resembles “I’ve Got a Feeling” from the Beatles’ last-released album, Let It Be.
No. 18. “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)” From: Walls and Bridges, (1974)
Exiled on the other side of the country from Yoko Ono, Lennon finally opened himself to the fear of isolation he once angrily confronted on Plastic Ono Band. But without the closed-fist bravado that marked Lennon’s recordings of five years before. Instead, he submits to the emotions sparked by endings.
No. 17. “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” From: Walls and Bridges (1974)
At this point, Lennon’s flinty solo career hadn’t yet produced a No. 1 single. He broke the spell with a song inspired by a cribbed phrase from TV – this time after channel surfing into a late-night evangelist. Lennon’s friend Elton John was so confident the song would hit that he made a now-famous bet that led Lennon to his last-ever concert performance.
No. 16. “How Do You Sleep?” From: Imagine (1971)
Half of the Beatles took part in this savage assault on McCartney, as Lennon made biting references to “Yesterday,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and McCartney’s solo hit “Another Day.” So, is “How Do You Sleep?” a low point in their very public post-split bickering? Or one of George Harrison’s coolest-ever turns on the slide? Answer: yes
No. 15. “God” From: Plastic Ono Band (1970)
In the album’s most important statement, Lennon blithely pushed aside fallen idols – from Dylan to religion to his old band – flatly declaring that “the dream is over.” He was moving on: After naming and then discarding all of those earlier talismans, Lennon concluded with a quiet affirmation of his love for Ono.
No. 14. “Isolation” From: Plastic Ono Band (1970)
“Isolation” is the flipside of “God,” as Lennon admits deep insecurity surrounding his new post-Beatles existence. At one point, everyone but Starr drops out, and his insistent cadence feels like it’s mimicking Lennon’s terrified arrhythmia.
No. 13. “Out the Blue” From: Mind Games (1973)
Lennon provided a peek into the mounting panic that surrounded his fracturing relationship with Ono on this often-overlooked ballad: “I was born just to get to you. Anyway I survived, long enough to make you my wife.” He completed things with soaring strings that sounded like a sadder, more honest version of Phil Spector’s cloying arrangement for “The Long and Winding Road.”
No. 12. “Love” From: Plastic Ono Band (1970)
Lennon deftly paints a mirror-image portrait of two lovers responding to one another, in one of his simplest, most touching lyrics. Interestingly, Phil Spector – not Lennon – plays the similarly elliptical piano part. “Love” actually started out as a guitar-based demo.
No. 11. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” From: Shaved Fish (1975)
“Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” started out as the theme of a quixotic anti-war billboard campaign during the Vietnam era, then become an unlikely modern holiday standard. Oddly enough, it failed to chart upon release.
No. 10. “Oh My Love” From: Imagine (1971)
Lennon takes a breath between excoriating empty-suited politicians and ex-bandmates to lay bare tender affections for Yoko Ono. “Oh My Love” was the only song on Imagine where she initially earned a co-songwriting credit, though Ono’s name was later added to the title track, too.
No. 9. “Mind Games” From: Mind Games (1973)
What if “I Am the Walrus” had an anti-war thread running through it? You might just get the title track from Mind Games, as Lennon tosses off Lewis Carroll-ish references to “druid dudes” and “mind guerillas” while railing against the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. That careful balance of fantasy and message likely helped it into the U.S. Top 20.
No. 8. “How” From: Imagine (1971)
A song that thematically wouldn’t have felt out of place on Plastic Ono Band, “How” revealed a similar depth of self-doubt and fear, but presented things – like much of the Imagine project – in a sleeker, more approachable way. That doesn’t mean it was boring: Lennon’s jolting syncopations smartly echo his own insecurities.
No. 7. “Jealous Guy” From: Imagine (1971)
“Jealous Guy” eventually became one of the most covered of Lennon’s solo tracks, with more than 100 reinterpretations — most notably by Roxy Music, whose update became a huge U.K. hit after Lennon’s murder. And yet this song still completely belongs to its author. Lennon creates this incredibly atmospheric music bed then sings with an unmatched fragility.
No. 6. “Imagine” From: Imagine (1971)
Lennon himself actually nailed it: This song is “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic – but because it is sugarcoated, it is accepted.”
No. 5. “Mother” From: Plastic Ono Band (1970)
Lennon switched from guitar to piano as he worked out this tortured wail for his missing parents, with Starr providing a smartly economical and fill-free rhythm that only added to the lyric’s stabbing emotion. Lennon recorded the shredding finale in single-line takes to save his voice. His pain is simply excruciating.
No. 4. “Gimme Some Truth” From: Imagine (1971)
Originally demoed during the sessions that produced Let It Be, “Gimme Some Truth” melds Lennon’s love of witty banter with a knack for the devastating take down. As he rails against the hypocrisy and villainy of the day, Harrison can be found brutally sawing on his guitar.
No. 3. “Instant Karma” From: Shaved Fish (1975)
This appropriately named tune, Lennon’s third solo single, was recorded at Abbey Road Studios the same day it was written. “Instant Karma” didn’t, as hoped, hit the shelves at record stores within 24 hours of completion — but it did arrive just 10 days later.
No. 2. “I Found Out” From: Plastic Ono Band (1970)
Lennon unleashes a series of kill shots aimed at politicians, drugs, religion (“from Jesus to Paul“), parents, society – you name it – and Starr’s rugged cadence boldly echoes every rebuke.
No. 1. “#9 Dream” From: Walls and Bridges (1974)
Lennon rarely looked back, which made a return to the sound of his 1967 creative apex with the Beatles as surprising as it was welcome. The narcoleptic mysticism of “#9 Dream” – Lennon said “ah bowakawa pousse, pousse” actually came to him in a dream – would have fit right in on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Magical Mystery Tour. But it didn’t start out that way: Lennon’s original demo – simply titled “So Long” – was based on a contemporary string arrangement he’d written for Harry Nilsson’s cover of “Many Rivers to Cross” from 1974’s Pussy Cats.
Beatles Live Albums Ranked
Beatles live albums didn’t really used to be a thing – then they started arriving in bunches. Let’s count them down.
It arrives on April 4 after they revealed they’d started out with the idea of emulating the partnership between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, before deciding to do something that felt like more of a risk.
“[O]ne day he says, ‘Let’s not be any of that,’” Carlile told the The Guardian in a new interview. “‘Let’s just be ourselves – and we don’t know what that is. Don’t write, don’t do anything in advance.’ And that’s when it got really dangerous.”
John – who was enduring a head injury along with hip and knee surgery at the time – explained that he didn’t want to cancel the studio sessions, helmed by Andrew Watt. “I was tired, I didn’t feel well and I was extremely nervous,” John said. “And that nervousness caused quite a few sparks to fly.”
Carlile added detail: “He smashed his iPad. He smashed headphones. There were really amazing, classic Elton John outbursts. My lyrics got torn up and thrown on the ground – he goes, ‘Fuck off, Brandi.’ He would yell, ‘Predictable! Cliche!’”
John explained: “It wasn’t me being anxious about other people; it was me being anxious about me. Once we got through the first three songs, we knew we had something. And I was much more relaxed… but I was a bit of a nightmare.”
Brandi Carlile Says Elton John Definitely Crossed Line
Carlile said there were “definitely points” when she felt John had crossed a line – but reflected that it provided a certain advantage to working with one of her heroes. “Elton doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal,” she said. “He doesn’t like listening to stories of my childhood love for him. There was so much riding on my perception of Elton, versus who Elton really is.”
She added of the work that delivered the album: “He would start singing and cutting shit or saying words the wrong way, and I would get in and fix the issue… You don’t stop Elton; you frantically replace the lyric in front of him and then he’s singing that. It was really volatile, but really cool.”
Elton John Albums Ranked
Counting down every Elton John album, from worst to best.
“There were death threats flying around. They were burning my effigy at punk bonfires”: The tumultuous story of Peaceville Records, the underground label that helped shape extreme metal
Paradise Lost in the early 1990s(Image credit: Press)
Along with Earache and Relapse, the UK’s Peaceville Records is one of metal’s great independent labels, acting as a launchpad to such extreme metal luminaries as Paradise Lost, At The Gates, Darkthrone and countless more. In 2017, Peaceville founder Hammy looked back on the history of a label that helped metal in the 1990s and beyond.
In his brilliant autobiography Anything For A Peaceville Life, Paul ‘Hammy’ Halmshaw traces the foundational impetus for Peaceville Records to the day he bought his first tape-to-tape boombox in 1981. Then drumming with Dewsbury anarcho-punks the Instigators, this state-of-the-art tech gave him an independent source for producing his band’s early demos, but soon Hammy’s obsessive enthusiasm for DIY music saw him develop a regular schedule of cassette releases by cult punks like the Subhumans, Chumbawumba, MDC, Disorder and the Stupids.
After several lean years of home-dubbed C60s, photocopied inlays and mindbending home brew, Peaceville Tapes became Peaceville Records in 1987, Hammy solidifying his position as UK hardcore scene lynchpin with a string of vinyls by the cream of Britain’s late-80s crust crop. Deviated Instinct, Electro Hippies, Axegrinder, Doom, Decadence Within, Atavistic: these impassioned rackets were Peaceville’s earliest stock-in-trade.
It was dark, loud and aggressive, but it wasn’t heavy metal. Peaceville’s inaugural seven-inch flexi sampler Will Evil Win? was so-named because of the metal vs hardcore controversy raging in the late 80s, when many hard-left punk purists strenuously repudiated the apolitical fantasies of HM. The breaking of metal/punk boundaries was the theme of Hammy’s first appearance in the mainstream media: a two-page feature in RAW magazine, to celebrate Peaceville’s first fully fledged metal release, Bastard Ballads by Bradford headbangers Toranaga.
“I was very scared at first when I came to sign them because I thought that it would bring the whole label down,” confessed the 23-year-old Hammy in 1988.
Hammy still remembers the malice and bitterness of the punk vs metal war: “There were death threats flying around all over the place back then,” he reveals. “They were burning my effigy at punk bonfires. Just about everyone disowned me – well, all the ones who didn’t count. Soon you just think, ‘Why did I ever help these people out?’”
Toranaga were soon poached by major label Chrysalis – before falling apart – but Bastard Ballads hadn’t cemented Peaceville as a bold new force in the metal world. Two very different bands would soon provide that resoundingly powerful breakthrough. One lived 5,000 miles from Peaceville’s Dewsbury office, in sunny California; the other, 10 miles down the road in rainy Halifax.
Sign up below to get the latest from Metal Hammer, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
At The Gates in the early 1990s (Image credit: Press)
The former were Autopsy – ex-Death drummer Chris Reifert’s hot new outfit – who came highly recommended by Carcass/ex-Electro Hippies frontman Jeff Walker. Hammy fell in love with their Critical Madness demo, and Peaceville unleashed Autopsy’s Severed Survival debut in early 1989. This was the big one – not only the beginning of a symbiotic band/label relationship that continues to this day, but also of Peaceville’s extreme metal pedigree. “Autopsy were the real saviours of Peaceville and the main reason Paradise Lost and Darkthrone signed,” affirms Hammy, “so god bless the dopeheads.”
This feature originally appeared in Metal Hammer magazine issue 304 (December 2017) (Image credit: Future)
Around the same time, Hammy introduced himself to Paradise Lost after spotting Nick Holmes wearing a Doom t-shirt at a Bradford metal club. Peaceville’s arch 90s rival label, Earache, were also sniffing around, but after Hammy wangled the band studio time and produced their 1989 Frozen Illusion demo, PL stayed with him for their 1990 debut, Lost Paradise, and 1991’s sublime Gothic, before decamping to Music For Nations and global stardom. PL were also crucial to Peaceville in one other respect: they played Hammy the first two albums by Virginia’s veteran doom warhorse Pentagram. Originally released with limited distribution in the mid-80s, Peaceville gave them iconic new sleeves and mixes in 1993 and secured a reunion album, 1994’s Be Forewarned, rescuing the drug-addled pioneers from obscurity.
Paradise Lost had already flown the Dewsbury coop when Peaceville introduced two other key acts from northern England, later to join PL as the fabled ‘Peaceville Three’: My Dying Bride and Anathema. Both bands immediately brought their own hugely distinct talents to the blossoming form, and since proved equally durable, influential and respected. But to any who remember 1991, a more accurate ‘Peaceville Three’ should involve Autopsy and Darkthrone. Alongside PL, these invaluable maniacs were responsible for blazing three distinct trails – doom, death and black metal – each dominating from leftfield forms that came to define the 90s underground and beyond.
However, when Darkthrone joined Peaceville for Soulside Journey in ’91 (“We sent the demo to seven or eight labels,” recalls Darkthrone drummer Fenriz, “but we wanted Peaceville”), black metal wasn’t what the label or band signed up for. Swiftly disowning their sludgy tech-death debut, these Norwegian iconoclasts perplexed their label with a viscerally raw, jarring new sound on 1992’s A Blaze In The Northern Sky.
Darkthrone ‘A Blaze in the Northern Sky’ from A Blaze in the Northern Sky – YouTube
“We needed to reach another destination and we were hellbent to get there,” asserts Fenriz. “The soundscape was the argument, we had finally gotten the soundscape that we wanted and it was sad to hear that Peaceville wanted to remix. Then we just said we could release it at Deathlike Silence instead… so they decided to try to release it as is.” The result was a seismically important and exciting record, even by early Peaceville’s standards.
In tandem with the progressive intensification of metal at this time, Hammy was also plugging a raft of radical, unclassifiable outfits under the banner of Dreamtime Recordings, after experiencing instrumental Dutch head-manglers Kong live. Subsequent Dreamtimers included spooky industrial duo GGFH, Drug Free America’s acid-trance and Tekton Motor Corporation – Slovenian ambient techno with thrash guitars and Formula One samples. These abstruse impulses alternated with Peaceville’s main metal acts on compilations like Vol 4 and Broaden Your Horizons, the latter title neatly encapsulating the label’s ethos of uniting disparate transgressive sounds under the cohering gaze of Peaceville’s iconic ‘sacred star’.
On these seminal samplers a generation of metalheads had their third eyes thoroughly squeegeed – although few invested in full albums. Hammy estimates that Dreamtime lost him over £100,000, but affirms, “I’d rather not change a single thing, as crazy as it was… Every dumbass costly thing came from a place. Admittedly it was a smoky green boozy place, but it meant something at some point.”
The plug was finally pulled on Dreamtime in 1997; by then Music For Nations had bought a 50% share of Peaceville, the emphasis refocused firmly on metal. However, Darkthrone had been dropped after stirring up a nest of anti-semitic vipers on 1994’s Transilvanian Hunger (“It was a shit year and I didn’t think, just lashed out with my back against the wall,” rues Fenriz), and Autopsy split up in 1995, marginalised after the MFN deal.
On Peaceville’s first website in 1996, new signings being groomed for stardom seemed to have more consciously accessible appeal. The Blood Divine featured Anathema’s former singer, Darren White, alongside Cradle Of Filth alumni, and hopes were clearly high for a new breakthrough artist, but their hippy- goth heavy metal didn’t catch on, despite an enjoyable, well-promoted debut, Awaken. After a less enjoyable, less well- promoted second album, the band fizzled out. An identical fate befell 1996’s other shot at goth-metal glory, Dominion, while promising acts like Blackstar (featuring Carcass’ Jeff Walker) and Acrimony only managed one album for Peaceville before imploding. Did commercial pressure to succeed destroy them?
My Dying Bride (Image credit: Press)
“I just think they were a reflection back of where the scene was at that time,” reflects Hammy. “It’s funny but I see those times as a bit bloated and I don’t think MFN were solely to blame – I think the whole scene had gone off a bit.”
Not all of Peaceville’s late-90s signings were defunct by the millennium. Temperatures soared when Hammy Lisa, his wife and Peaceville co-manager since the earliest days, snagged Opeth for 1999’s majestic Still Life. Alas, the prog-death Swedes were unsportingly poached for MFN’s main roster (briefly returning to Peaceville for 2007’s The Roundhouse Tapes). They had better luck with Mikael Åkerfeldt’s buddies Katatonia: hard-workers of prolific quality, the gloomy Swedes remain a perfect fit for the label after 18 years.
In 2000, Peaceville was bought by Snapper Music, initiating a profile-raising campaign of reissues and ‘Best Of’s, but the urge remained to break new talent. With At The Gates’ Tomas Lindberg helming a kaleidoscopic fusion of hardcore, prog, industrial and metal, The Great Deceiver seemed a dead cert in 2002, but once again, an exciting new Peaceville act disappeared after two albums. Ditto Soundisciples (Bristolian genre-mashers with connections to Portishead and Massive Attack) and avant-garde Norwegians Beyond Dawn, while varied hopefuls like Asgaroth, Charger, The Provenance and Akercocke only managed one LP for Peaceville in the 00s.
An important bridge was rebuilt in 2004 when Hammy reached out to Darkthrone, 10 years after the controversy that ended their relationship. “They invited us on a cool trip to see castles in northern England and Scotland to bring us back together,” says Fenriz. “Worked like a charm and we could finally have our own little portable studio, and work the way we wanted to without interference.”
Another factor in Darkthrone’s return was a new imprint, run by the band: Tyrant Syndicate. This short-lived concern shook up the 00s schedule with prime black thrashing death by Aura Noir, Old and Obliteration, as well as Abscess’s last LP. Formed from the ruins of Autopsy, Abscess represented another old Peaceville friendship rekindled, the psychedelic death-punks belching up some twisted filth before a reformed Autopsy returned to the stable in 2009, where they proudly remain.
2006 was Peaceville’s busiest year since their early 90s heyday, with new releases by Darkthrone, My Dying Bride and Katatonia plus two exciting new signings offering atmospheric twists on dark progressive metal: Novembre and Madder Mortem. Yet that November, Hammy and Lisa tendered their resignations.
“It had been building for maybe a decade and there was no enjoyment left in us,” explains Hammy in his autobiography. “No creative spark to run on.”
His parting shot was a doozy: signing Japanese all-female blackened crust trio Gallhammer. Clearly, it was an important year for cementing the legacy. “I think we owed it to the bands who had stuck with us through thick and thin not to destroy it for no reason,” says Hammy. “It’s always been a bigger entity than just me.”
Since then, Peaceville continue balancing old and new, welcoming back bands from their past like Pentagram, Akercocke and Morta Skuld while headhunting suitably Peacevillian innovators and eccentrics like Mysticum, Fleurety, Dødheimsgard, Khold, Mork, Sikth and TOMB. UK metal titans Cradle Of Filth – who poached their share of musicians from Peaceville bands over the years – finally joined the Ville family for a clutch of releases from 2010-12, while in 2014 death metal supergroup Bloodbath represented the return to Peaceville of Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes, further strengthening bonds between past and present for this abidingly special, universally respected label.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 304, December 2017
Chris has been writing about heavy metal since 2000, specialising in true/cult/epic/power/trad/NWOBHM and doom metal at now-defunct extreme music magazine Terrorizer. Since joining the Metal Hammer famileh in 2010 he developed a parallel career in kids’ TV, winning a Writer’s Guild of Great Britain Award for BBC1 series Little Howard’s Big Question as well as writing episodes of Danger Mouse, Horrible Histories, Dennis & Gnasher Unleashed and The Furchester Hotel. His hobbies include drumming (slowly), exploring ancient woodland and watching ancient sitcoms.
