Book Review: From Hades to Valhalla... BATHORY - The Epic Story
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Of the many aspects shared between Punk and Black Metal, one of the most divisive is where the obvious prime movers fit into the genre. Just as The Damned, The Stranglers, The Clash and the Sex Pistols share little in common, so it takes some joining of the dots to link the Speed Metal of Venom, the occult musings of Merciful Fate and the raw eccentricities of Tom G’s Hellhammer and Celtic Frost projects.
No citing of those early Black Metal movers can be complete without mention of Sweden’s Bathory, and the main-man Ace Thomas Börje Forsberg, otherwise known as Quorthon. Truth is, to call Bathory a Black Metal band is only a part of the story; Dayal Patterson’s Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult (Feral House, Port Townsend, 2013) ended the band’s coverage at the release of their fifth album, claiming, post-Hammerheart, Bathory had become a fully-fledged Viking Metal band.
To a certain extent that’s true(ish), but the reality is far more complex and nuanced than such a statement would suggest, and this is where José Luis Cano Barrón’s looks to give a fuller story of one of Extreme Metal’s most innovative creators.
Originally published in the author’s native Spanish by Mexico’s Under Fire Ediciones in 2016 and again in 2022, From Hades to Valhalla… sees it’s first English language translation courtesy of Pagan Records & Monomaniax Prod. hitting bookshelves at the end of this month.
This is clearly a passion project from its author and in the Prologue, José writes nostalgically of visiting record stalls in Mexico City back in the heady days of 1984; of slaking his thirst for Extremity by reading about new band like Slayer, Hellhammer and Voivod in the specialist press; and of saving up enough to buy a copy of Bathory’s self-titled debut on import.
Rather than just cover the early years, José considers the entirety of Bathory’s recordings, dedicating whole chapters to some and combining others together. The band’s output could broadly be fit into four distinct periods, and the book makes an attempt to consider the reasons and affects of the fluctuations from raw Black Metal to Epic Norse Metal to a dalliance with Thrash.
José embarks on this journey with some words of clarification: The history of Bathory is uncertain, as even Quorthon would – deliberately or otherwise – obfuscate matters in interviews, exaggerating or even out-right inventing answers when questioned.
As Quorthon passed away in 2004, José has compiled From Hades to Valhalla… by exhaustively searching interviews and articles in magazines, fanzines, websites and numerous radio and video interviews, all the while balancing up the knowledge that the interviewee is not the most reliable of narrators.
Though the book stretches only 160 pages it is chock full of photographs and contains one of the most extensive discographies of any band I’ve seen. Each album is given a microscopic examination, including every record label, every catalogue number, and every detail of the variations. I’m imagining that there’s little else anyone would need to know, and José is confident the information given is 99.99% correct (page 110).
My only criticism come in the shape of the translation to English. Some of the wording seems a little off, and the sentence structure is clunky at times; that said, it’s a million times better than my Spanish would be. I was reading a PDF of the promotional version of the book, so I imagine further editing will take place.
All in all, From Hades to Valhalla… Bathory – The Epic Story, is an entertaining read; it’s missing some of those stories from the road that titillate most musical biographies, but José can only work with what he has and, with Bathory – deliberately - rarely ever played live, it’s a gap that is understandable.
One of the most positive effects of reading this book is that it reminded me of how much I liked the band and sent me back to going through their complete catalogue once again. The creativity of one man to conceive and produce such a body of work is astounding and so thank you, José, for reminding us of Quarthon’s genius.
