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The noise might have been building since the early 80s, but 1986 was the year thrash metal broke – bursting like a zit on a teenage metalhead’s bumfluffed chin. Slayer, Megadeth and Metallica all released landmark albums, with the latter swapping fleapit rock clubs for a string of arena dates supporting Ozzy Osbourne. But while these California acts would alter the course of rock music for ever, a clutch of like-minded teenagers were carving their own path 5,500 miles away from the genre’s epicentre.
What Kreator, Sodom, Destruction and Tankard – the “big four” of German thrash metal – might have lacked in finesse and professional outlook, they made up for in sheer unbridled aggression. Faster and meaner than most of their American peers, these bands helped to set a new benchmark for brutality while unwittingly influencing the next generation of death- and black-metal musicians.
“It was always more rough and violent,” says Destruction vocalist and bassist Marcel “Schmier” Schirmer of Germany’s initial approach to thrash. “We never tried to be the best musicians – we tried to write songs that punched hard. On English heavy metal albums, it was always the first song on the album and the first song on the second side of the vinyl that were the fastest tracks. We’d listen to those and say, ‘why isn’t there an album with just those songs?’”
By way of response, 1986 saw the release of sophomore albums by Kreator (Pleasure to Kill) and Destruction (Eternal Devastation), while Sodom unleashed their debut LP, Obsessed By Cruelty.
Formed in 1982, Sodom were conceived as an antidote to a seemingly preordained career in Gelsenkirchen’s mines. “My father didn’t want me to be a musician,” says vocalist and bassist Tom “Angelripper” Such. “When I stopped working in the coalmine, he was disappointed, saying ‘you can’t make money with this music’. It wasn’t until Agent Orange came out in 1989 that I got a cheque every month.”
Kreator, founded in Essen and also set against coalmines and shuttered steel factories, found themselves with a record deal off the back of a rough demo. “We were spending most of our time rehearsing in a school basement,” says vocalist and guitarist Miland “Mille” Petrozza. “When we did Endless Pain in 1985 we’d only played a couple of shows in youth centres and that was it. It was only after Pleasure to Kill came out that we started touring.” If their friends in Sodom viewed Gelsenkirchen’s coalmines as a trap, Mille suggests that Essen’s industrial heritage presented certain opportunities. “All the coalmines were used for cultural events,” he says. “We rehearsed there, I saw bands like Bad Brains there. It was a place of creativity, with a lot of theatre, art and music.”
While Kreator and Sodom’s relative proximity allowed for a degree of competition, camaraderie and cross-pollination, Destruction were out on their own in the small town of Weil am Rhein. “Everything was so conservative and so religious that we were trying to break out,” says Schmier. “Music was a gate through which we could escape and forget about everything. There were six of us who were the first heavy metal fans in our town and we formed a little metal scene. It meant we could create something unique.” Schmier and his friends made connections with Kreator in Essen, Tankard in Frankfurt and Iron Angel in Hamburg in order to gig. And while life as a Weil am Rhein metalhead might have been lonely, Destruction walked the walk from the very beginning. “A guy from our label said it’s not the music, it’s the image that sells the records,” says Schmier. “He was right, of course, but we didn’t know it – we really looked like that. I went with my bullet belt and everything to my grandfather’s funeral and my father freaked out. He was like: take this shit off, you’re embarrassing me in front of the whole village!”
With no local precedent for what they were doing and widespread derision from the German music press, the bands were forced to learn on the fly. Exposure to more experienced overseas bands helped the young thrashers survive: “Slayer taught us how to drink,” laughs Schmier of Destruction’s time supporting the band on their Hell Awaits tour. “We learned a lot of bad things from them.” The music was also fuelled by the likes of Venom (“their Welcome to Hell album was the spark to the powder keg,” says Angelripper), Judas Priest and early hardcore bands like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys and DRI.
The decade’s thrash metal scene was rife with references to nuclear Armageddon and the possibility of life’s destruction. If US thrashers gnashed their teeth about potential annihilation, their German counterparts had a looming reminder of cold war politics on their own doorstep. “Of course it impacted us,” says Mille of living in a Germany divided by the Berlin Wall. “I couldn’t pinpoint how because it was very unconscious, but it was always present.” The GDR’s strict, censorious regime meant there was little crossover between rock scenes on either side of the wall, though all three bands received enough intermittent fan mail to know their music was being smuggled into the east.
“We knew what was going on in the west but we had hardly any contact with musicians there,” says Peter “Paule” Fincke, drummer of prominent GDR metal band Formel 1, whose sole album, Live Im Stahlwerk, was also released in 1986. Older and more experienced than the West German thrashers, they’d been turned on to heavy metal via illicitly begotten albums by bands from the new wave of British heavy metal scene. “It was immediately clear that this was our thing,” says Paule. Recorded, rather fittingly, at a former steelworks and featuring German-language renditions of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden numbers, the live LP is air-punchingly alive.
Having met Iron Maiden when the east Londoners toured Poland, Paule recalls being taken by the thrill of the band’s visual spectacle as well as the music itself – something he and his bandmates were keen to bring to the Formel 1 live experience. “My graphic designer and I designed a castle courtyard, which we then had built, complete with battlements and staircases,” he says. “In East Germany, bands had to own everything themselves; there were no rental services, so we hauled tons of equipment across the country. I still feel sorry for our four technicians.” The band went on indefinite hiatus in the late 80s when several members applied to leave the GDR, with Paule now playing gigs with Silent Running.
While Formel 1 might not have lasted to witness the wall come down, in 1990 Kreator became one of the first western metal acts to play in East Berlin. Despite this, the 90s would be a challenging decade thanks to the rise of grunge and, later, nu metal. Like thrash bands the world over, Kreator, Sodom and Destruction variously dabbled with new genres and new members while witnessing record sales slide. They would all, however, find a new lease of life in the 00s thanks to a classic thrash revival and the likes of Mayhem, Immortal, Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse acknowledging the power of teutonic thrash.
Today, Sodom is in a state of temporary hibernation as Angelripper takes time out to hunt, enjoy life and work on multiple reissue projects. Kreator, meanwhile, have recently been the subject of a documentary and a book (co-authored by Mille), and their 16th album, Krushers of the World, heralds an enormous tour. Destruction have already toured Japan, Thailand and China this year, and are about to head stateside to tour with fellow thrashers Overkill and Testament. As for the future? The state of the world suggests they’ll be fuel for the genre’s furnace for many years to come. “I wish I could write ‘my god, there’s so much peace on this planet, I can’t write lyrics any more,’ but that will never happen,” says Schmier. “I guess we’re doomed to carry on writing about how fucked up the world is.”
