Celtic Frost - Biography
Zürich, Switzerland’s Celtic Frost were the supreme stylists of the nascent thrash and death metal genres when the band emerged in the mid-1980s. Celtic Frost’s ultra-heavy, extreme version of metal, as well as the band’s image — one of the first to include corpsepaint — anticipated the direction the genre would take over the next twenty-five years. The cult surrounding the band, particularly its first two albums, has continued to grow exponentially since its formation, and includes a number of musicians. Kurt Cobain, for instance, told reporters he had listened obsessively to a tape of Celtic Frost before recording Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach.
Singer and guitarist Tom Gabriel Fischer had founded the primitive, proto-death metal band Hellhammer in 1982. Bassist Martin Eric Ain joined Hellhammer the following year. On Celtic Frost’s website, Fischer says of his association with the genre’s guttural vocal style: "There were a number of death grunts in rock and funk music in the 1970s (and I believe even earlier), but [original Iron Maiden singer] Paul Di’Anno circa 1980/81 is indeed the reason why we in Hellhammer began to do the death grunt. Why it became so famous with us, out of all the bands who used/use it, I don't know. The press just loved Celtic Frost doing it and publicized it accordingly."
Fischer and Ain formed Celtic Frost in June 1984, following Hellhammer’s breakup the month before, with a session drummer, happily named Stephen Priestly. Celtic Frost’s debut album, Morbid Tales (1984 Noise/Metal Blade), is a quantum leap in heaviness for the metal genre. The band, whose worldview seems closest to author H.P. Lovecraft’s “cosmic terror,” disavows Satanism as well as Christianity: “There’s no human scheme in the beyond,” Fischer sings on “Into the Crypts of Rays.” The track “Danse Macabre” seems to be a kind of audio play, dramatizing some unspeakable encounter with supernatural forces. New drummer Reed St. Mark, from New York City, joined the band on the hastily recorded Emperor’s Return EP (1985 Noise).
Ain briefly left the band during the recording of Celtic Frost’s second album, which he had already named. The title of To Mega Therion (1985 Noise) is Greek for “The Great Beast” and presumably refers to the seven-headed, ten-horned monster that rises out of the sea in Revelation 13, though John does not use the adjective “mega” in the Greek original. Occultist Aleister Crowley sometimes identified himself as “TO MEGA THERION.” The album’s cover art features two paintings by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, creator of the Alien (1979) alien. Dominic Steiner plays bass on the original To Mega Therion, though Ain appears on several tracks on the 1999 reissue of the album, which replaces the original recordings of “The Usurper” and “Jewel Throne” with the re-recorded versions of those songs, featuring Ain, that appeared on the Tragic Serenades EP (1986 Noise). Orchestral brass contributes to the Wagnerian pomp of songs such as “Innocence and Wrath” and “Dawn of Meggido.”
The few lines devoted to Celtic Frost in Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book about Norwegian Black Metal, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (1998 Feral House), are not altogether complimentary. “Hellhammer/Celtic Frost flirted with darker occult subjects for lyrical fodder,” write Moynihan and Søderlind, “but eventually turned into something resembling a metalized Art Rock band.” The authors must be referring to the band’s transformation on Into the Pandemonium (1987 Noise), which opens with a bizarre cover of Los Angeles new wavers Wall of Voodoo’s novelty hit “Mexican Radio.”
In 1987, Celtic Frost entered a legal battle with Noise Records that would last over a year. According to the band’s official bio, Noise “had repeatedly tampered both with Into the Pandemonium and the group's artistic freedom,” and fighting the label left the band exhausted and broke. Celtic Frost began recording their another album for Noise (now distributed through Sony) in 1988. During the difficult sessions that followed, Fischer fired Ain and St. Mark, replacing them with Stephen Priestly, the session drummer who had played on Morbid Tales, and new guitarists Curt Victor Bryant and Oliver Amberg. The result was the hard rock album Cold Lake (1988 Noise/Sony), featuring such uncharacteristically generic songs as “Dance Sleazy” and “Downtown Hanoi.” Fischer has since disowned Cold Lake.
Ain returned for Vanity/Nemesis (1990 RCA), recorded in Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where David Bowie had recorded his late-70s work with Brian Eno. Vanity/Nemesis includes Celtic Frost’s version of one of Bowie’s songs from that period, “‘Heroes’.” The band began work on a proposed double album titled Under Apollyon’s Sun, but the album was never completed. Celtic Frost broke up in 1993, not long after the release of the compilation Parched with Thirst Am I And Dying (1992 Noise).
A long-rumored Celtic Frost album, Necronomicon, named after a book that appears in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, has never materialized. Fischer told the metal zine Voices from the Darkside, “Necronomicon was supposed to be the final album for Celtic Frost. But after each new album, there's been so many new open doors for us, creativity and business-wise, that the end just never was in sight at all. But Necronomicon was originally supposed to be our final release.”
Fischer oversaw the remastering and re-issues of Celtic Frost’s catalog in 1999 and published a memoir, Are You Morbid? Into the Pandemonium of Celtic Frost (2000 Sanctuary), which has since gone out of print and sells for over $100 on internet auction sites. Celtic Frost re-formed in 2001. Between 2002 and 2005, Fischer, Ain and drummer Franco Sesa recorded a new Celtic Frost album, Monotheist (2006 Prowling Death/Century Media), the band’s first new release since Vanity / Nemesis. The band, now legendary among metalheads, toured Europe, North America and Japan to acclaim.
Fischer quit Celtic Frost in April 2008, “due to the irresolvable, severe erosion of the personal basis so urgently required to collaborate within a band so unique, volatile, and ambitious.” Ain posted the following announcement at Celtic Frost’s website in June 2008: “Tom Gabriel Fischer has left the band, but Celtic Frost is still alive, albeit in a coma of sorts. Franco and I are not going to continue recording or touring as Celtic Frost. This would be preposterous without one of its founding members, the original voice and its defining guitarist. But we are not going to officially disband CF.” Ain goes on to explain that he hopes Fischer can be persuaded to return to Celtic Frost at some point in the future. Later in 2008 the band officially announced it's break up. They do not plan on reforming. Yet.