Talie Helene

“This was my reality, this was my life.”
–  Thomas Gabriel Fischer on Hellhammer.

Celtic Frost frontman Thomas Gabriel Fischer recently discussed the difficulties he and Martin Ain have had in coming to terms with the legacy of their former band Hellhammer. Speaking to the UK’s Zero Tolerance Magazine about the forthcoming Century Media release Demon Entrails, which brings together Hellhammer’s legendary demos, the Swiss guitarist/ vocalist said: “It took many years, and for us to grow into older men, for us to actually be able to analyse Hellhammer properly and look at this band in the context that it deserves… The fact of the matter is that it took me years to feel at ease with some of the things that we wrote back then. The situation at the time was horrible. [My] youth defies description – there are things that happened then that I haven’t told anybody, not even my ex-wife of 16 years. But I’m now 43 years old and it’s taken that long for me to feel comfortable publicly talking about that. It was horrible at the time and my situation, and Martin’s rather similar situation, led us to do some radical music and radical lyrics. And later when we became adults it was rather difficult for us to live with that legacy because we had yelled that desperation out of our bodies and become professional musicians. Then the press started to cover our work and then we were faced with the fact that everybody talked about this image and these lyrics. That wasn’t very easy for us to accept and it took a long time for me to look at it, as I do now, as a period in my life that was very important to me and to be at ease with that. Now I have put all these lyrics in the reissue and commented on them and even though some of them are nothing to be proud about, I’m proud of Hellhammer as a whole. This was my reality, this was my life.”