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Sixteen-odd years ago Celtic Frost left a sizeable hole in extreme metal when they disbanded. In all that time no one has quite stepped up to fill the void. So Celtic Frost have come back to replace themselves at the top of the pile. Genius.

It’s a bit of an odd scenario, and there was certainly no lack of offers to return in the mean time. Three months after the release of their long-awaited comeback album Monotheist they finally hit UK soil, and as they did so we grabbed the Swiss trio to discuss the draining four-year process of making the album and mounting what had turned out to be one of the biggest comebacks of 2006.

“It was a very difficult album to make. The most difficult album I’ve ever made. And that means a lot, because none of the albums we’ve made have been easy, but this has by far been the most complex.”

Thomas Gabriel Fischer has suffered for his art. Personally, mentally and financially. All the members of the current Celtic Frost have worked day jobs just to fund the new album. They’ve put four plus years of hard work, money, time and effort into it, rejecting invitations to play greatest hits sets at major European festivals and maintaining complete control over their work, ultimately licensing the album exclusive to Century Media worldwide purely for distribution purposes. A clever move, and not one any old band could have made.

“Even with our reputation as Celtic Frost it’s been incredibly difficult to obtain the financing to record an album of that magnitude. And if it’s difficult for us, who practically everybody knows in the metal industry, how can a newcomer band manage to put together such financing, do an album, do the artwork, do all the concepts, all the advertising? It’s impossible to get that finished product and license it to a record company, even though for me it’s the only way to proceed in this industry, it’s financially impossible. Also there might be a lack of experience. We can draw on 20 years of working in the music industry one way or another, and a lot of newcomer bands can’t. They actually do need the experience and the expertise of a record company, and of course the record companies will capitalise on that and take their souls.”

Jaded at all, Tom? He’s dead right, though. The deal Celtic Frost have is perfect, but the way this industry works would prevent most people from doing it. But then, most people don’t put the effort, time and money into a project the way Thomas and bassist Martin Eric Ain have done with Monotheist.

“This wasn’t an easy album in the making. This wasn’t an easy band in the making. We had difficult times. I mean there were times when this was close to becoming a catastrophe personally speaking, as well as musically speaking. We created material for, I think, two more albums that we just threw away because it just didn’t sound like Celtic Frost. We experimented and it didn’t turn out right. There were times when Tom and me, we didn’t speak, because we just weren’t on friendly terms.”

Thomas added, “A fan wrote me an email saying they doubted that that was true, that we threw away material for two albums, which made me furious, because it is true. People probably think that we say that to make the album sound bigger, but it is true. We made one mistake, and we’re not keen on repeating that. Everything on this album simply reflects the place we have been at personally at the time of its creation. It reflects our mood and our personality while we were making the album. It’s a big album and that’s why a lot of people think it’s calculated or contrived, but it’s not. It’s very real and the heaviness and the complexity of the album reflects that.”

The path to creating Monotheist has been a remarkable one, both in terms of time and internal pressures. The band have overcome a lot to get this far, from a time when Thomas was convinced there would never be a Celtic Frost ever again. When he wrote his book, Are You Morbid?, he thought it was over.

“ We didn’t want to ruin what was there ”
Thomas Gabriel Fischer

“I was really convinced until we did the reissue albums, and for the first time in many, many years I actually sat down and worked with that music again, I did not think at all that there would ever be Celtic Frost. We turned down a million offers, some of them insanely lucrative, because we just didn’t feel like Celtic Frost. And even when I first sat down with Martin, we were both telling each other about our scepticism. Can we do this? Can we pull this off? Will it be Celtic Frost? We didn’t want to ruin what was there. We needed to do it right, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. And it may sound like a grandiose thing to say, but even after three years of working on this album, if it hadn’t sounded right I don’t think we would have released it as a Celtic Frost album. Even after all the investment.”

“I wasn’t in the mental shape or form to do a Celtic Frost album for a long time. And I think that’s good. The band had burnt out musically and personally. There needed to be a freshness in our approach, there needed to be new inspiration. We needed to retire from the concept of Celtic Frost, all of us, in various ways. I think that was essential.”

In fact to start with, they weren’t even a completed band when they reconvened for a new album. Thomas and Eric began working with guitarist and producer Erol Unala, who worked with Thomas in Apollyon Sun, and had no drummer. Erol drifted apart from the others in terms of musical vision and left the band towards the end of the writing process, but the man that eventually made them a completed unit was renowned underground drummer Franco Sesa.

“First of all I had to grow into this band. This is not a band you just a band you start with some friends, it’s not just some band that’s playing around. For me it was quite surprising that this became so big. And for sure it didn’t reduce the pressure! Ever since I joined we’ve been working so hard, and focusing on the work on Monotheist. We were also having an eye on what’s going on in the scene, and of course when we work as Celtic Frost and do this comeback, you should have an eye on the scene. We have this reputation of being avant garde, and to be avant garde in 2005 is different to in 1986. To me it was quite challenging.”

The normally subdued Fischer became very passionate when the subject of musical influence came up. Celtic Frost are cited as an influence on many different bands in the current metal scene. Most notably, Opeth, who guitarist/singer Mikael Akerfeldt often lists Celtic Frost first as a major influence on his music.

“If I tell you some of my influences you will never see the music of Celtic Frost in them. If I tell you I used to listen to David Bowie and Roxy Music as a kid, and maybe a little bit of Black Sabbath, that doesn’t make the sound of Celtic Frost. But it’s the aura, the approach and the chemistry, the magic that has inspired me, and I think it’s probably the same with these bands. Opeth is a good example. I’ve talked to Mikael of Opeth at length at the Wacken festival, and he told me a million times “you’re an influence”, and I just said “that cannot be, you’re like a genius musician, I’m not. I’m exactly the opposite”. And he told me it was the vibe and the ideas that inspired him, and the approach of Celtic Frost. As a matter of fact, if a band sounds exactly like Celtic Frost and they say we’re an influence, that’s not true, because they’ve just copied us. Inspiration and influence is something that on top of that gives you the energy to create your own thing. It gives you the fire and the adrenaline, that’s an inspiration. A lot of people mistake copying for an influence. It’s not the same thing.”

“ Elvis writes from the dead for Celtic Frost ”
Martin Eric Ain

As Franco and Martin respectively reaffirm, “Celtic Frost is a mood. They take the mood. What they do technically with it doesn’t matter,” “I always said that Elvis writes from the dead for Celtic Frost. So I guess he’s alive and well somewhere!” Celtic Frost always were unique, and it’s evidently that uniqueness and range of ideas that drives equally creative people like Akerfeldt to make their own music. Being such a unique band, and having spent such a huge amount of time and effort on a new album, some kind of visual document of the immense process would make for amazing viewing. But, alas, Celtic Frost aren’t quite pretentious enough to believe from the get-go that they were writing history.

“I think most of the time our minds were elsewhere. There’s a lot of footage of our sessions with Peter Tägtgren (producer), but that’s like one and a half months out of four years. There’s some documentation of that, but in all honesty we didn’t approach it thinking “we’re writing history”. We’re gonna do an album and documenting it was way, way back in the list of priorities. The thing is even if it were all documented, you wouldn’t see a therapist writing our music.”

Whatever does he mean? Therapists involved with bands? Nonsense, surely? But as Martin said, it would have been almost impossible for a group of people such as the band to accurately document something they were so deeply, personally involved in.

“It would have been necessary for an outside force to come in and document it, because we wouldn’t have been able. We had to bring up the energy, the time, the money. We were all working to earn the money to be able to fund this. We weren’t the made rock stars sitting back on our asses going “hmmm, OK, we would like to create some music again, so let somebody build up a studio for us”. That’s the way a lot of people think this works, you know?” The interest is now there, though, and it may mean some intriguing and unique projects in the future.

“Justified or not the attitude we experienced from the outside was rather an ardent one,” related Thomas, finally, “People were just saying “can they do it or not?” I don’t think there would have been any interest from any film production company to document this. The attention and the media exposure of Celtic Frost has happened now that we’ve played shows and people are like “oh shit, they actually are heavy and they actually can do it”. But as it is right now, there is actually a documentary filmmaker doing a documentary about Celtic Frost as we speak, and it will eventually incorporate some of the footage we have taken of the album, but this is now. We are talking about a variety of projects as far as a DVD is concerned. We’re working on a very ambitious project, and by no means is it certain that it’s going to go through, but if we actually manage to pull it off it’s going to be a very unusual DVD like you’ve never seen from any other band. There are a number of projects in the pipeline, but just like everything else we talked about in the beginning, it’s still hard to find financing and so on, we don’t want to give away too much control.”

“ As usual it’s something unusual ”
Franco Sesa

Franco chipped in at one point with the perfect summarisation of Celtic Frost, “As usual it’s something unusual”. And it’s only unusual because no one else has the same creative originality as Celtic Frost. Some have the same amounts of it, in a different direction, but no one else does what Celtic Frost can do. We can only hope that the proposed visual treats the band are working on come to fruition. Contrary to their original beliefs, Celtic Frost are currently writing history, on top of the substantial chapters the band have already added to the chronicles of extreme metal, and any glimpse we can get into that will be eye-opening in the extreme.

Photos: Chiaki Nozu | www.chiakinozu.com

Written by Andy Lye
More: Features, Celtic Frost