The

The Way back in 2005, I was a 19-year-old lad living in Sheffield when I discovered a little band called Dimo Borgir.

Dimu Borgir are a band who play black metal, and their songs are called things like bloodhunger Doctrine,

progenies of the Great great apocalypse, or the charmingly

named the death of all saints in the kingdom of hell. They dressed like you might imagine

them too as well, as in nothing but leather, boots with spikes on, and lots and lots of what

they call corpse paint. Picture the band Kiss and the way they paint

their faces. Now imagine the most monstrously unsettling version of that possible, and that's

what corpse pain is. They're not trying to look cool as such. They're trying to look genuinely

unsettling, and from the moment I saw it, I was entranced.

But it wasn't just the music or the clothes that fascinated me. It was the culture, and that

culture can be best summed up with the story of a band called Mayhem. Or maybe it's more of a

chapter in the story of Mayhem, but it's a big one. So, long story short, one current

member of the band Euronymous and a former member of the band Var Vikernes got into a dispute

involving royalties. But then rather than see each other in court, they got all gangster rap

about it and started issuing death threats to one another.

Eventually, the former band member tracks down the current band member and pays him a visit at home.

Then after a violent struggle, the current band member is murdered.

The police then raid the murderer's house only to find a ton of ammunition and explosives,

and while he denied planning some sort of attack in court, the police put forward a pretty convincing argument that

he was planning one, and he was sent to prison. Now, I know how childish this is going to sound,

but I'm almost of the opinion that if you don't regret at least some of the stuff that you did and thought as a teen, you neither lived nor grown.

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