Satanic worship, church burnings and murder: The true story behind ‘Lords of Chaos’
To signify their break from mainstream Christian society — and in opposition to the glam-metal dudes in hairspray and spandex — the Mayhem founders took on ominous new identities: Aarseth would be known as "Euronymous," Stubberud as "Necrobutcher."
"That's why we started to wear our hair all black. We were singing about Satan and sadism, and everything that was wrong like torture and stuff like that — the opposite of hanging around at the beach," Necrobutcher, now 50, recalled of those days. "We were looking for perversity and craziness."
They found it in their creation of a frantic metal subgenre that was uniquely grim and threatening, just as Mayhem and others in the Norwegian black metal scene began to stumble from a frightening made-up image and into tragic reality. Within a decade, bandleader Euronymous was murdered by another band member, and a Mayhem singer was dead from suicide. Others...
