Frank Harthoorn:
"Vergeet ik toch bijna de 25e verjaardag van deze wonderlijke episode uit de Gorefest-annalen. Om het hele verhaal niet weer opnieuw te doen, hier een stuk uit een interview dat ik vorig jaar deed:
- To support that release you went on European Tour together with Deicide and Atrocity. How did it go? Do you still remember any particular show? What can you say about Glen?
"That tour was something else. Deicide were making waves with their second album Legion. Benton had made some controversial statements in various magazines, and I don't think that band since has attracted more people than around that time. Some serious nutjobs came to see them, and every day it really felt like the circus was coming to town. Not so strange in retrospect, since I thought Benton was part clown and part businessman. I think he mostly enjoyed that, just by being the obnoxious musician abroad, he was providing for his family back home. When you got him talking he came across as fairly intelligent, as did Steve, their drummer. Those two guitarist-brothers didn't appear all too bright, but that might have been the steroids they were consuming by the bucket.
I remember most of those shows for one reason or another, but the big one has to be The One Where We Got Bombed. The tour has hit Stockholm, and we're playing this large sportshall somewhere on the 3rd floor of this huge building called the Fryshuset. Therion's been added to the bill and half the audience is made up of Swedish death metal bands. The other half are all beautiful blonde Swedish girls. We're on second after Therion, and we're about 5 songs into our set when this huge BANG!! just hits us from seemingly everywhere. We all think it's fireworks, JC mouths 'Keep playing!' and we finish our set, having no idea what's going on behind the stage. We get off stage, Quorthon's there giving us the thumbs up - he was working security for the show - and right behind him this massive emergency exitdoor has been blown from the wall. There's firemen and police arriving and pushing people away from backstage, tour manager Adam is running around shouting stuff about towels at no one in particular - truely one of the most surreal moments of my life. Atrocity's show gets cancelled, and the very drunken crowd is getting really worked up and angry they have paid 20 quid or so just to see Therion and Gorefest, so they let Deicide play a short set - with full house lights - so as not to start a full scale riot. It took us a while that night to get out of there, but we did get an extended police escort - two cars in front, three following us - for at least four hours just so we could make it to Copenhagen in time for the next show.
We never did find out who was behind it. Norwegian black metal dudes hating on Therion but getting the running order wrong, or animal rights activist people hating on Benton for some stupid shit he said (and getting the running order wrong). Maybe it was Swedish housewives hating on Atrocity for bringing the most vile repulsive German scat porno movies - or 'Home videos' as they called 'em - into the country (and getting the running order wrong). Maybe it was Norwegian black metal dudes hating on US and getting the running order completely right! JC and B had met Euronymous the night before in Oslo, and had a chat with the little caped avenger about threats he'd made to Gorefest in some publication. Didn't have much to say for himself, but some of his small pack of followers had just about reached the right age to get a drivers license and travel to Stockholm overnight.
I myself to this day think it was tour manager Adam, in cohoots with the insane bus driver (that guy deserves a chapter all to himself), stirring up shit for even more publicity and higher ticketsales. And it worked, because if the places weren't fully packed at the start of that tour 5 days before, they sure were after that night!"
1st pic is from the frontpage of our local paper PZC on the day after, with some very early and misquoted comments from Ed's then girlfriend Hannah.
2nd pic is a larger piece in the same paper two days after, with JC telling it like it was, more or less blaming militant christians (!) and pulling some promo from all of it as he was known to do in those days.
3rd pic is an article on the day of the show (25-11-1992) in Swedish national evening paper Aftonbladet - this was almost at the height of the Scandinavian satanic panic in the media, and Benton arriving in Sweden was frontpage-referred news!
There's actually some footage of Deicide's short set on youtube. As you can see, all houselights are up. I think that's JC mulling about in the back - no one was allowed back there at that point but I remember he snuck through across the stage. It's either him or Quorthon:
https://youtu.be/3U1yi7BiFM0
edit: you might not tell from that footage, but Deicide were on fire that night, like I've never seen them before or since. Might have been one of THE death metal performances of all time - all 15 minutes of it!"
[Dit bericht is gewijzigd door Mutilator op 26-11-2017 23:29]
