Kerrang!

Kerrang! was the British metal magazine that gave Norwegian Black Metal its defining early burst of international publicity. Its March 1993 cover story turned the scene’s music, criminal notoriety, and self-fashioned menace into a vivid mass-media spectacle: the article expanded the audience for the movement while helping ensure that its alleged crimes would become inseparable from its public image.

The 1993 Cover Feature

Kerrang! issue 436 reached newsstands on March 27, 1993, as attention to the Norwegian scene was already escalating. A cover story in the Norwegian daily Bergens Tidende had appeared two months earlier, on January 20, placing Varg Vikernes on its front page and presenting an interview that helped establish the scene’s combative posture toward mainstream media. Kerrang! carried that story far beyond Norway.

The cover made its own argument before readers reached the article. Vikernes stared out through long, dark-dyed hair, holding two large knives crossed in his fists; a burning church appeared beside him, while an inset showed Emperor in corpsepaint, a hooded robe, and medieval-looking weapons. The headline promised a story of arson, death, and Satanic ritual. Inside, journalist Jason Arnopp devoted five pages to Norway’s Black Metal scene, writing in a sensational register and relying heavily on remarks attributed to Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth.

The feature also situated Norwegian bands within a wider metal landscape. It discussed Mayhem and Burzum alongside the American groups Deicide and VON. VON’s single raw demo, Satanic Blood, had become notorious within the Norwegian underground; the article repeated Vikernes’s claim that the band’s name stood for Victory-Orgasm-Nazis, a fanciful explanation rather than an established fact. That mixture of scene detail and provocative assertion was characteristic of the feature’s reach—and of its uncertain relationship to verification.

A Scene Framed as Conspiracy

The article presented the church-burning wave not merely as a series of crimes but as the work of an organized group. Vikernes and Aarseth were described as members of an entity called the Satanic Terrorists. Aarseth claimed that he and Vikernes held equal standing, and spoke of ten inner-circle members directing a much larger body of Black Metal followers. He also presented Helvete record shop as an economic base for the group, while saying that he stayed away from the crimes themselves because his arrest could bring the movement down.

Vikernes’s reported statements supplied the feature with its most incendiary material. He was presented as acknowledging accusations that included church burnings, illegal weapons, and other crimes, while declining to say whether he was guilty. He described Burzum’s Aske as music encouraging church burning and claimed that the group used music to influence young listeners. His explanation of the arson was paradoxical: he said the group supported Christianity because it oppressed people, and burned churches in order to strengthen it so that it could eventually be fought. The article also reported his claim that he supported dictatorships and aspired to rule Scandinavia. Such statements made the scene legible to an international readership as a coordinated ideological threat, even though the feature’s dramatic framing and dependence on the two men’s accounts left the substance of those claims open to question.

Publicity, Controversy, and Retrospect

Kerrang! was also notable as apparently the first media story to label the Black Metal scene neo-fascist. The article quoted musicians from Venom and Paradise Lost describing the supposed Satanic Terrorists as Hitlerian Nazis; it also reported an alleged attack on Paradise Lost while the band was touring Norway. These claims added political extremism to the feature’s existing frame of religious menace and criminal conspiracy.

The cover story arrived while the people it featured were still active in their musical projects, and the scale of the coverage electrified the Norwegian underground. For the scene’s leading personalities, the attention was publicity on an extraordinary scale. But the book’s retrospective account stresses the cost of that exposure: criminal allegations and theatrical declarations would likely overshadow the music itself. Kerrang! therefore functioned both as a conduit for the scene’s international recognition and as a powerful editor of its public meaning, selecting images and claims that made transgression the story’s dominant theme.

Years later, Vikernes insisted that many of his remarks had been fabricated, misunderstood, misquoted, or taken out of context; other participants looked back on the period as naive and deluded. Those later disputes do not undo the feature’s historical effect. Whatever the reliability of particular statements, Kerrang! brought Norwegian Black Metal to a global metal readership and gave its most sensational claims a prominence that the music alone might not have achieved.