Swiss extreme visionary Tom G. Warrior was a guest on BraveWords' Streaming For Vengeance recently and the Celtic Frost legend talked about the mega Danse Macabre box set which captures the radical ambition and evolution of the band from 1984 through to 1987. Here is an excerpt from our chat.
BraveWords: Arguably, people say that the artwork for To Mega Therion is one of the greatest in metal history. Explain how you got the rights and acquired it. Did you have to pay Giger money, or what was the deal?
Warrior: "Well, Martin (Ain) and I had pored over H.R. Giger's Necronomicon (originally published in 1977), his oversized, standard work constantly. It was basically our bible, we looked at it literally every day. And of course we loved the Satan 1 painting. When we wrote to him in late '83, when I wrote to him in my little letter, handwritten letter, we mentioned that painting and said if it's at all possible, would it be possible to do a collaboration with this painting? And to our astonishment he actually responded. He called us and his then wife also called us, who did his administration at the time, and we began to have regular phone calls, we began to have regular letter exchanges. It was of course before email and so on, and he told me on the phone one day that he had just finished what he called The Red Phase, a series of paintings in red paint, and he said his favourite painting of the series is the only one that hasn't been published yet, and he said, 'If you're agreed to also use that red painting (called Victory III) that I love so much, and put it also on the album, I'll give you the Satan 1 for free'."
BraveWords: Wow.
Warrior: “For us being total nobodies, and not even having been sure if he would even talk about Satan 1 for us, the offer of two Giger paintings was jaw dropping, really. Of course we said yes, and it was an honour for us to also publish the red painting, Victory. The big obstacle to this was to talk the record company into financing a gatefold album so we could have both artworks."
BraveWords: That must have been a huge battle.
Warrior: "It was. Because again, the record company didn't really realize that this was a sensation, that Giger was actually collaborating with this little Swiss band. But we managed to convince them and the rest is history, I guess."
BraveWords: How do you think the catalogue has aged over time? When you were creating it, and this is a very general question, did you feel like you were creating something special?
Warrior: "We didn't look at it so globally, we looked at it much more privately, much more intimately. We didn't create to make an impact, we created because we had something inside of us that screamed to be let out, probably based on the conditions of our upbringing, of our youth. Both Martin and I, and also Steve Warrior from Hellhammer, we all had quite a difficult youth, and I think the music we created was a reflection of that. So, we didn't want to leave an impression, we really, first and foremost, it was a very personal thing. What it achieved afterwards was of course out of our hands, and I'm hugely grateful for having found an audience, and the audience being true to me for such a long time. That's a gargantuan gift. As for your question about how the catalogue has aged, well Celtic Frost was a very ambitious, courageous, and daring band, and we did a lot of experiments. Some of those worked and have aged quite well, some of those failed miserably and have aged accordingly. But that comes with the territory. If you try to reinvent yourself on every album, you're bound to sometimes hit a wall. Not that that's an excuse, we should have been more diligent I guess, in some of the albums, especially me, but live and learn. I think the first three albums, Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion, Into The Pandemonium, have aged very well. The last one, Monotheist, so far has also aged very well. The others, there's an album that is unbearably bad and there's an album that's basically irrelevant. It's okay, but it's irrelevant in that catalogue. That's my personal view of it."
Watch the entire chat on BraveWords' Streaming For Vengeance below:
(Band photo credit: Sergio Archetti in Basserdorf, Switzerland, April 1985)
