Scum were the great forgotten underground supergroup of the 2000s. Fronted by Amen vocalist Casey Chaos and featuring current and former members of Emperor, Darkthrone, Turbonegro and Mindgrinder, the melded black metal with hardcore punk, managing just one album, 2005’s Gospels For The Sick, and a handful of gigs before flaming out. In 2005, Casey talked Metal Hammer through how this unlikely collective came about and just why black metal and punk rock are flipsides of the same coin.
For me it was a dream come true,” says Casey Chaos,”I did the impossible. I reformed Emperor. How cool is that? I got to sing with my favourite band.”
In case you’ve just come back from an extended vacation in Guantanamo Bay or something, let us fill you in briefly on Scum. Scum is a project involving the garrulous Amen frontman along with the cream of the Norwegian black metal – and just plain heavy metal – scenes.
Their debut album Gospels For The Sick sounds like a punk rock album (punk as in Conflict, Discharge, the Subhumans, The Exploited) though with contributions from everyone from Turbonegro’s Happy Tom and Euroboy, to Nocturno Culto from Darkthrone and the aforementioned original Emperor back-line of Samoth and Faust (with one time bassist Mortiis contributing lyrics and singing on a couple of tracks) it is, inevitably, a pretty dark and twisted one. Just the way punk rock ought to be in fact.
Is it a great album? Not really, but it is a great piece of history. The achievement isn’t the record itself as actually getting that line-up together in the first place. As Doctor Johnson once remarked of talking dogs, you don’t criticise what they say as much as express amazement that it’s happening at all.
Casey, never a man to mince his words, has typically high hopes for the record. “This is an album of action and freedom,” he says. “A unique alliance to address the state of affairs in music, and bring life to a dead and politically correct society. Scum has just begun to spread its filth and disease to your infected culture.”
As with all supergroups, the story of Scum is the story of clashing egos, meetings, compromises, prevarication, scepticism and eventually out and out enthusiasm from everyone involved.
“I think Casey and Mortiis were friends for a while and I think that’s where the idea began,” says former Emperor guitarist Samoth. “Anyway it was through Mortiis that I got involved… very loosely at first.”
Casey flew over to Oslo in 2003 for a confab that must have been something akin to a peace summit between rival warlords carving out stolen lands.
Casey: “Satyr was at the original meeting and there was even some talk that we would put this out through Moonfog but there was obviously so much politics with those guys – at one point it was just everyone shouting at each other in Norwegian and I was sitting there thinking, ‘What the fuck?’”
Samoth: “Then we tried a rehearsal, just jamming, trying out a few ideas, trying out a few drummers and Faust was one of them.”
It was almost 11 years since Samoth and Faust had played together in Emperor, though Faust wrote lyrics for Samoth’s new band Zyklon while still in prison. It was possibly Faust’s involvement that motivated Samoth to ensure the project actually happened, as he’d been keen to work with his former bandmate again once he was out of jail.
“I was very rusty, not having been able to rehearse for nine years,” says Faust. “But everyone really wanted me to do this.”
Fenriz from Darkthrone was the other drummer in the picture, but Casey eventually went with Faust.
“He has a lot of integrity, he’s strong and so… true, everything that I wasn’t really expecting to be honest,” says Casey. “And when him and Samoth got together, I was just floored.”
“We actually managed to keep the whole project out of the press until we went in to record the album,” says Samoth. “But it was very active, though Casey was caught up in the whole Amen thing. Basically we decided that if we were going to make it happen we were just going to have to book a studio and do it.”
With everyone finally gathered together, the band took off. The planned week long session grew to a six week stretch, with Turbonegro guitarist Knut ‘Euroboy’ Schreiner so enthused about the whole thing that he insisted on playing some guitar.
“Just to work with those guys and to see the chemistry they have,” says Casey. “Faust and Samoth are like the Neil Peart and Geddy Lee of black metal.”
With the line-up assembled – as well as Faust and Samoth the band proper includes Mindgrinder bassist Cosmocrator on guitar and Turbonegro bassist Happy-Tom on, well, bass – initial expectations were that Scum would be some sort of black metal band.
Samoth: “I’m really excited to hear what people make of it because I think a lot of people are expecting something different. Turbonegro fans will expect something different to Amen or Emperor fans. I was kind of sceptical in the beginning, but for me it was about doing something else, for me it was more interesting to work on something that had a more rock line. But I think there’s something quite similar between punk and black metal. It goes along the same path.”
Casey: “Black metal really moves me, when all that shit went down in the early 90s. Black metal is the only form of music since hardcore or punk rock that’s not money motivated. It’s an outcast’s music. It’s not something that was ever gonna be trendy. It was music that shocked the status quo and shook some shit up and I really identified with it.”
“Black metal done the right way has very much in common with punk,” says Nocturno Culto of Darkthrone, who says his next album will have a much more pronounced punk influence.
Where the faultline between punk and black metal is probably at its most pronounced is in the realm of politics. Punk bands have tended to be on the left while black metal is at best apolitical and at worst actively involved in promoting scummy fascism or ultra conservative nationalism. It isn’t that clear cut, but we don’t find many black metal songs espousing the joys of liberal democracy and pluralism.
Given Casey’s own politics which could loosely be described as being on the anarcho-left, were there any problems given that black metal – though certainly not the individuals involved in Scum – tends to throw its Molotov cocktails in the other direction.
“You mean that whole NSBM Polish thing?” says Casey. “Well firstly not all of the bands are into that. I’m not a musician, I’m a provocateur and I like to kinda see what happens. It’s not really about politics. I don’t think for one moment that Bathory or Celtic Frost really gave a shit about politics.”
Besides which this isn’t a black metal record. As Faust says: “You couldn’t find two people in Norway less interested in black metal than Samoth and me.”
“I didn’t want to make a black metal record anyway,” says Casey. “Cos how do you top the first fuckin’ Emperor record?”
With a festival appearance at Øya in Norway and a London launch for the album, there are indications that the story doesn’t end here, that there may be something – more gigs, another album – sometime in the future.
“I think everyone involved would love to do another one,” says Samoth. “I’d like to see it as something special like Stormtroopers Of Death, where there’s another one but not for 10 years.”
“I’d be honoured to do it again,” says Casey. “It’s probably one of the highlights of my life. We had so many songs tracked that we just left them behind. There’s something in the water in Norway. It’s just so the opposite of America. For those guys it’s like their life, their craft. I mean, can you imagine Linkin Park offering Samoth $10 million to join the band? He’d throw one fucking punch and knock ‘em all out.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer 144