Black Metal / Black Rubber

(part 1 – Black Metal)

Last month we had the Fortress weekend festival in Scarborough. It wasn’t something heavily advertised and I only found out about it the week before in the general Spa Theatre brochure, nestling alongside things like Showaddywaddy, a Northern Soul musical and Scarborough’s very own Tony Skingle Elvis impersonator. Fortress is very much a niche black metal festival, and (I understand) is held in very high regard by fans of the genre. The weekend was blisteringly hot, which made one of those ironic counterpoints to the goth/gloom and cold-weather preset of the scene. I took a sequence of photographs which were somewhat contrived, and subsequently deleted most of them.

Even so, the sprawling of participants on the Spa Theatre forecourts was particularly eye-catching. It is a lovely spot. When we moved to Scarborough last summer we went to see PiL a few days after unpacking, and to sit on the sun court and sip a G&T felt like arriving in some odd, magical place.

The author about to enjoy PiL in August 2025

Black metal as a popular genre/subculture with an advanced set of mythologies and ‘codings’ is a subculture that has passed me by - an indication of my retired status. I am aware of it, partly through its inclusion in Knausgaard’s recent Morning Star novels and partly because it toys with a bad reputation of extreme and specific lyrics and narratives that venture from amplified misanthropy, to Apocalypto-beckonings, to extreme-cold-fetishism, to (archaic) far right viewpoints. This is evident on the plethora of tee-shirts on display, as a black tee promoting an obscure band with a cryptic image or phrase is de-rigueur. Even though I had not bought a ticket, the public were free to pass through the open areas of the Spa Theatre and me wearing a black/white vintage Vivienne Westwood tee depicting ‘the British beehive’ (with what looked like ancient torture scenes) seemed to blend in and attract glances as people tried to decipher it… “what band could that be…?”.

Westwood’s British Beehive tee (suitably tattered)

As well as using Nordic runes (a stylised version being currently employed on the Norway World Cup shirts) the main typography for the bands is fairly streamlined. These have progressed from the Blackletter/Fraktur fonts to be dominated by designs by Christophe Szpajdel (see Lord of the Logos). It is distinctive, powerful and intriguing, resembling a splayed-out vivisected animal (or indeed the vivisected humans in the 1997 space-horror Event Horizon). It also gives me memories of the frightening character Raggety who made sporadic appearances in the Rupert annuals.

A typical logo in the scene

Graphic scene from Event Horizon (1997)

Raggety confronts Rupert

There is an obligatory chapter on black metal in the Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023), which has the honour of being the only book in the Cambridge Companions series that has a multiple indexing to “blast beat”. That’s a good thing on many levels.

Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023) with index sample

The Companions book won’t get you too far for a black metal excursus. It does, however, include other chapters on punk-emergent scenes like grindcore, thrash and sludgecore that crossed my paths in the 1980s. Growing up as a punk in Derby and the East Midlands meant you were exposed to Potteries band Discharge most months on a multi-band bill playing at a decrepit theatre or discontinued bingo hall. I’m not claiming to be a metal fan, but these punk-adjacent scenes did garner my attention – as well as New York noise bands like Swans who toured the UK in 1985 with a punishing blast of noise. Swans were arty and experimental, but subsequent bands – like Prong – were more metal. I still dipped a toe in.

Black metal was apparently birthed by outlier metal band Venom and their 1982 album Black Metal. This album went under the radar – too punk for metal, too metal for punk – but was resurrected by Norwegian metal bands who crafted it into a distinctive genre. There followed an extreme sequence of murders, rituals and church-burnings that fired the scene into the public consciousness (and eventually the narrative arc of a Knausgaard series).

Bill Peel’s 2023 book Tonight It’s a World we Bury

I picked up on black metal through Bill Peel’s 2023 book Tonight It’s a World we Bury on the Repeater imprint (a publisher seemingly dedicated to enact an unending Mark Fisher mourn-a-thon). I read Peel’s book in 2024 when things in my life were not going well, needing something to entertain me. My normal policy when reading a book offering ideas is to make notes and transcribe these into a set of indexed notebooks. After the Scarborough festival weekend I checked my author index and realised I’d not made any notes on Peel’s book. This sometimes happens when I read something that doesn’t move me. I normally flog/donate the book, but the title was still on my shelf – so it must have had some impact?

I read it again, and this time absorbed the ideas and arguments and made excessive notes. Peel acknowledges the far right links and doesn’t try to explain or justify them. He also doesn’t turn away for the scene, but looks at the mechanisms employed to give the far right aspects a free pass (what he calls “reflexive anti-reflexivity”).

Peel is very smart and has a flickering methodology that grabs at some big thinkers in short, sharp blasts. I can only assume he keeps better notes than me or has one of these ‘mind palace’ ways of existing. I had a PhD supervisor like that, who could apply ideas (backed up by references) as if plucking them from thin air.

He doesn’t try to bring politics into black metal but instead brings black metal into his radical socialist ideas. Crazy eh? This is done through the motifs (or dispositifs) of DISTORTION, DECAY, SECRECY, COLDNESS and HERESY. Each chapter uses theories of capitalist explanation or sociological normalness and applies a critical tool from black metal. For example, the chapter on secrecy dismantles the commercial confessional art of (say) Tracey Emin’s Bed (1998) and argues that secrecy and darkness (via the radical activists Tiqqun) can offer better mechanisms for undoing capitalism. Other chapters are less convoluted, such as contrasting capitalism’s obsession with heat (and resource extraction) against black metal’s favouring of coldness.

It has not converted me to explore black metal, but maybe I’m just past it. I did buttonhole an unfortunate punter enjoying a break on the balcony who looked like he could be a version of me having taken a different life path. He was the same age and had visible arm tattoos extolling various band logos that had informed my mid-to-late-80s: Einstürzende Neubauten, Husker Du, etc. He urged me to get involved, and assured me that the dodgy politics was a thing of the past.

Next – black rubber