Mercyful Fate's Don't Break the Oath

Henrik Marstal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501354397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Upon its release, Don't Break the Oath charted fifth on the official British heavy metal album list and was supported by a two month long sold-out American tour in early 1985. The band's controversial stage appearance with burning crosses, a microphone stand formed as a cross made of two human leg bones, as well as other blasphemous rituals attracted the attention of the then newly formed PRMC (Parental Resource Music Center) committee, ironically reassuring the band its position on the charts. But though the album was hugely popular in the anglophone metal scene, it was conceived in peripheral Denmark. This book discusses the relationship between center and periphery. It juxtaposes the Anglophone reticent of heavy metal with the rather marginalized location of Copenhagen, and examines Mercyful Fate's relation to the Nordic region more generally. It also takes a close look at the methods involved in the production of King Diamond's vocals, and emphasizes the role of the vocalist as just as an important part of the over-all soundscape as the instrumental contributions.

1 Introduction: A Broken Yet Completed Circle

I. A Brief Career Summary

Mercyful Fate appeared on the Heavy Metal scene in the first half of the 1980s and gained international recognition almost immediately. The band was noticed by audiences, colleagues and music executives for at least two reasons: They displayed an unusually well-crafted sound and revealed a fresh take on the genre conventions of Heavy Metal, and they differed from metal bands as such by being subject to one single, basic ideological concept – Satanism – rather than to the mixed varieties of themes common to the metal scene at the time. In their ‘classic era’ constellation from 1981 to 1985, which I will refer to as their Mk I era, Mercyful Fate consisted of five musicians, all of them young white males with a predominantly working-class background: King Diamond (né Kim Bendix Petersen) on vocals, Hank Shermann (né René Krølmark) and Michael Denner on guitars, Timi ‘Grabber’ Hansen (né Timi Holm Hansen) on bass and Kim Ruzz (né Kim Thyge Jensen) on drums.

In this constellation, the band released the eponymous debut EP (1982), the debut album Melissa (1983) and the follow-up album Don’t Break the Oath (1984). Here, the band orchestrated a combined sonorous, lyrical and iconographical embracement of the satanic concept, which was almost unheard of in Heavy Metal, and they did it with a discipline and a strong sense of perfection that supported their quest. These efforts made the band stand out as innovators in the manner of – though not at any rate comparable with – other strong conceptual entities such as electronic pioneers Kraftwerk or industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, both flourishing during the 1970s, that is the formative years of the members of Mercyful Fate.

In their home country of Denmark, which is my home country as well, Mercyful Fate is to this day regarded as the most influential Heavy Metal act ever to come out of the country, being deeply acknowledged by metal communities and fans. The band is widely considered an indispensable part of the national musical canon, and music enthusiasts are just as proud of Mercyful Fate and King Diamond as they are of fellow Dane Lars Ulrich of Metallica. Quite tellingly, the untimely passing of bass player Timi Holm Hansen in 2019 was mourned by many Danish metalheads and colleagues, Ulrich included (Ustaer 2019).

Don’t Break the Oath was released in the midst of a golden era of Heavy Metal, during which creativity and maturity converged and secured the genre mainstream access, as well as artistic recognition and media attention. This helped not only British but also quite a number of continental European bands to gain access to Heavy Metal markets in the Western world and other territories, too. Among these bands were Mercyful Fate, securing an international following in the Netherlands, Belgium and to a certain extent England, in the wake of the debut EP which was even voted EP of the year in the American metal magazine Metal Mania. After the release of Melissa, their following broadened to the rest of Europe and eventually to the United States with Don’t Break the Oath, securing the band a minor breakthrough in this territory.

Much to the surprise of the metal world, however, the band broke up only seven months after the release of the latter. It was a decision that seemed quite irrational, given the attention they enjoyed and the strong shared ambitions of the band members. But it proved to be inevitable since tensions between the co-founders of the band, Shermann and Diamond, prevailed as a result of insoluble disagreements about the band’s future. One can indeed wonder whether the band as a whole had become exhausted and drained after four intense years of ceaseless rehearsing, writing, recording and performing. And one can wonder whether the satanic image had become too frustrating for the band to deal with, not only because it resulted in many misunderstandings, but also because Diamond was the only one in the band who called himself a Satanist, leaving the other four members to be regarded as stanists without being it.

The story behind the break-up is quite telling: On 12 April, 1985, that is the day after Mercyful Fate’s only local concert on the Don’t Break the Oath tour, Diamond called each of his band members on the phone to inform them that he was leaving (Edward 1986). The decision, which immediately ended the band’s career for years to come, had been made a month in advance (ibid.). The concert took place at the renowned rock theatre Saga at 25 Vesterbrogade, Copenhagen, only half a mile from the very building which until 1982 had been the home for the no less renowned record store Bristol Music Center at 25 Frederiksbergsgade (at the main pedestrian street ‘Strøget’). In the basement, record store dealer and metal connoisseur Ken Anthony had earned a reputation for endorsing new exciting metal records to a growing crowd of young metalheads from all over the country, as well as Sweden and Norway (Rasmussen 2010, 121). In late 1978, he became a mentor for the teenager Lars Ulrich, a relationship that would continue when Ulrich moved to Los Angeles with his parents in the summer of 1980 (ibid.) and soon after co-founded Metallica. Anthony also became a mentor for his peers Shermann on the one hand, and Diamond on the other, the two not yet knowing each other at this time.

Anthony played a pivotal role in the creation of Mercyful Fate, by proposing to Shermann that Diamond should be the new singer in his metal punk band Brats (Rasmussen 2010, 129–130).¹ Shermann and Diamond soon found a strong kinship with each other, enabling them to leave Brats in order to start a Heavy Metal project that, at the suggestion of Anthony (ibid., 136–137), ended up being called Mercyful Fate. Anthony also volunteered as manager for the band in the beginning (ibid., 139) and helped them get started. For instance, he took Diamond and Shermann to MarktHalle in Hamburg, Germany, around 200 miles from Copenhagen, to watch Judas Priest on their British Steel tour (Diamond 2021a). This was the first time Diamond and Shermann saw the band, and it was a seminal event for them (Diamond 2021b). The date was 12 April, 1980, that is exactly five years before the date of the break-up of Mercyful Fate Mk I. And because Saga happened to be the venue for what would become the very last concert, Mercyful Fate ended their career in their Mk I formation only a few minutes’ walk from the record store which had played an invaluable role in the establishment of the band. Although the circle was now broken, it was also completed.

However, perhaps just as surprising, Mercyful Fate reformed in 1992, in a Mk II and later a Mk III formation, King Diamond now dividing his time between his own band, also called King Diamond, and Mercyful Fate. In an act of frenzied activity, the latter released a total of five albums during the 1990s with Diamond and Shermann as the only stable members. Since then, the band has not released any albums, but performed concerts in 2008 and 2011, before once again resuming its career in 2019. As of 2021, the band was in the process of writing new material (Diamond 2021a).

Figure 1 Mercyful Fate in Copenhagen, 1983.

A press photo of Mercyful Fate from 1983 with King Diamond (number two from the left) without paint mask although wearing earrings with inverted crosses – and a Judas Priest T-shirt bought at the band‘s 1980 concert at MarktHalle, Hamburg. Photo: Ole Bang.

II. Concepts and Reception

During their Mk I era, Mercyful Fate proved capable of expanding the genre markers of Heavy Metal in several ways. This had especially to do with the trademark double register voice of lead singer King Diamond in which he combined his chest voice and head voice (also known as the falsetto voice) in an innovative way. Due to the homosocial nature of the genre, the music in question seemed to be intended primarily for male audiences. With Diamond’s insistent use of the double register voice, however, Mercyful Fate adhered to the genre conventions related to hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987) but, rather unusually, also incorporated approaches that highlighted notions of femininity, spirituality and devotion, pointing towards new ways of negotiating hegemonic masculinity as a given premise of popular music discourse, Heavy Metal included. In this way, Don’t Break the Oath displayed contours of a queer positioning that attempted to subvert elements of hegemonic masculinity inherited in the genre. Don’t Break the Oath is particularly intere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Tracklisting
• A Note to the Reader
• 1 Introduction: A Broken Yet Completed Circle
• 2 Sounds, Atmospheres and 43 Minutes of not Breaking the Oath
• 3 The Satanic Endeavours: Intentional Transgressions and Antinomian Discourses
• 4 Diabolus in Musica and Other Musical Modes of Symbolic Satanism
• 5 Unmasking the Masks of Masculinities: (Dis)appearances of the Paint Mask
• 6 Queer-Satanism Galore: Otherings of the Oath
• 7 Conclusion: Rewriting the Heavy Metal Canon of Hegemonic Masculinity
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright