A few years into his band’s career, Kreator’s Mille Petrozza learnt an important lesson. The German hellhounds were deep into a hot streak of albums that had helped turn their homeland into thrash metal’s second major stronghold, after the USA. Kreator already played fast, Mille reasoned. But what if they really took the handbrake off?
“I remember there was this one show when we were like, ‘You know what… What if we take speed? Maybe we can play even faster!’” he says now. “So I took speed before I went onstage, and yeah, I played faster, but also I played like shit. So I figured that out right away and I never did it again. We were definitely better without the drugs!”
It’s more than 40 years since Mille co-founded Kreator in Essen, a city in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. Back then, they were young, unskilled and mostly fuelled by adolescent aggression, but the noise they created at their rehearsal space kick-started a legacy that continues to this day.
“The first music I got into would have been the disco bands like the Village People, Baccara, the Bee Gees,” says the 58-year-old. “But when it came to playing music it was Kiss. My first concert ever was Kiss. I was 12 or 13 years old, and Iron Maiden opened for them on that tour, so I came as a Kiss fan and left as a Maiden fan, and from then on it was all metal.”
Prospects for young, working-class Germans in the early 80s were not exactly thrilling. Mille’s dad was a coal miner, but the notion of exhausting physical work wasn’t appealing. Instead, he devoted his energy to music. By 1982, he and a bunch of like-minded friends had put together a band, initially named Metal Militia, then Tyrant, then Tormentor. Their early line-ups were nothing if not unwieldy.
“We built a rehearsal room and started rehearsing as a seven-piece,” he says. “People who were in it at that time thought you just turned up and you were a metal god. But it’s hard work. You can’t just hang a guitar around your neck and expect things to happen.”
Steadily whittled down to a three-man core of Mille on guitar, his childhood friend Jürgen ‘Ventor’ Reil on drums and Rob Fioretti on bass, the nascent group learned their trade by playing along to Judas Priest’s British Steel and Point Of Entry albums, but soon began to write their own material. At first, their songs were simplistic and steeped in heavy metal cliché, but as the band matured, they began to establish their own infernal personality.
“We were playing riffs by Raven, Ostrogoth and all this obscure early metal stuff, but then this album came out: Welcome To Hell by Venom,” Mille remembers. “Before, we had typical, early heavy metal lyrics – one song was called Shoot Them In The Head. But then when we heard Venom, all of our songs became Satanic songs.”
Still unable to legally drink, Kreator were not the most obvious candidates for a deal, but the vitriolic fury of their first rehearsal-room demo grabbed the attention of Noise Records, who would soon become major players in the evolution of European thrash. As metal got heavier, faster and nastier, Kreator were perfectly poised to become their country’s next big underground sensation, with a little help from Mille’s mum.
“The guy at Noise saw that SPV had just signed Sodom, and that had exploded in the underground, and he wanted a band just like that!” Mille recalls. “I was only 17, so my mother had to sign the contract for me, and she did. She knew that I was happy and that it meant a lot to me, and she was just happy that I was not on the streets and doing the stupid things that teenagers do. I was spending my afternoons in a rehearsal room, almost every day, and she thought that was great!”
The first Kreator album, Endless Pain, was released in October 1985, and became an instant hit with fans of metal’s dark and dirty underbelly. For Mille, the mere fact that his band had been able to release an album was a dream come true. But something happened between Endless Pain and its follow-up, Pleasure To Kill. Kreator got serious.
“We were just more aware of what we were doing,” Mille notes. “From Endless Pain to Pleasure To Kill we only did four or five shows, if that. We were not expecting to record a second album, but we got a message from the record company saying, ‘Are you gonna go back into the studio?’
“This was our chance,” he continues. “So we thought, ‘Let’s really come up with something killer!’ We were in the rehearsal room every day, and we were really obsessed with the music and listening to albums like Seven Churches by Possessed and Slayer’s Hell Awaits, and we were trying to make our own version of those records. It just happened.”
Released a year after the debut, Pleasure To Kill was a thrash metal benchmark. The efforts of the Big 4 aside, few albums from that era can claim to be anywhere near as influential as the music Mille, Ventor and Rob made in Berlin’s Musiclab studios in 1986. A fundamental inspiration for all the thrash, death and black metal that followed, Pleasure To Kill confirmed that Kreator were a very serious proposition, much to their own collective surprise.
“It was all teenage energy and naivety,” says Mille. “No, we didn’t think we were doing something important. All of a sudden, we were being taken seriously in the underground world. People like Katon from Hirax wrote to me, and the Possessed guys sent us a letter, so we were like, ‘Oh, they’re taking us seriously!’ For us, it was a fanboy dream come true. Nobody knew we were writing something so essential for the future.”
Pleasure To Kill was a critical hit and a major success for Noise Records, and from that moment on, Mille realised that a real career was now a possibility. The next few years went by in a chaotic blur, as Kreator refined their sound and made more acclaimed albums, including 1987’s Terrible Certainty, 1989’s Extreme Aggression and 1990’s Coma Of Souls.
Mille admits that Kreator certainly took the opportunity to party and enjoy the trappings of life as 20-something musicians, but career-threatening recklessness was never a real threat.
“There were a lot of distractions along the way, I admit that!” he laughs. “Especially on the tours for Terrible Certainty, Extreme Aggression and Coma Of Souls. We were partying very hard, but we were 20 years old and that’s what you do when you’re 20. Do I regret anything? No.”
While the 1980s were a triumph, the 1990s, as Mille cheerfully admits, “were fucking weird”. Traditional metal was in a state of nervous flux, with the dual threats of grunge and, later, nu metal elbowing the rowdy old guard out of the way. Kreator never downed tools during that time to take a lengthy hiatus, but the four albums they released during that decade weren’t always warmly embraced.
“We’d done five albums in the same style and we wanted to try new things,” Mille shrugs. “We wanted to strip down the riffs a little bit. We wanted to make it more trippy, more unique and strange. We were smoking a lot of weed! Ha ha!”
The result was 1992’s Renewal, an album that today sounds both dated and a little half-baked. But it was 1997’s Outcast that really upset the old-school faithful. Avowedly gothic, slow-paced and largely bereft of guitar solos, it gave the impression that Kreator were creatively lost.
“Outcast has maybe three good songs,” says Mille. “But I was really into the goth stuff at the time, and I still am.”
Endorama, released two years later, fared little better. “Endorama is a very good album,” he says. “But it took us a while to realise that just because you’re listening to goth music, you don’t have to make a goth album! You can write a metal album with goth influences, and that’s what we do nowadays.”
If the 1990s proved to be a challenge for Kreator, the 21st century has been much kinder. It began with the forging of a new relationship between up-and-coming producer Andy Sneap, formerly of Kreator’s Noise Records labelmates and touring partners Sabbat, who manned the controls for 2001’s Violent Revolution. A wholesale return to full-on, face-flaying metal, that album coincided with the rise of US bands such as Lamb Of God and Killswitch Engage, and the emergence of a huge, new and open-minded audience.
“The metalcore bands who came in, in 2004 or 2005, were talking about how thrash metal influenced them, and they were doing their homework and rediscovering bands like us,” says Mille. “It was a big push for us. Once we started working with Andy, things started to fall into place. We started touring the US again, and our band was really strong. We had a good line-up, and there was really strong energy around us.”
Firmly back in the zone, Kreator have spent the last 25 years touring relentlessly. Combined with a series of well-received albums, their commitment to the cause has enabled them to rise to the top for a second time. They are currently one of mainland Europe’s biggest metal bands, with regular headlining slots at major festivals and sold-out arena tours across the continent and beyond.
All of this would have been unthinkable to the 17-year-old who had to ask his mum to sign a record deal on his behalf, and yet Mille’s determination and passion for his band’s music were never to be denied. Fittingly, Kreator’s new album, Krushers Of The World, purposefully taps into the idea that anything is possible if we stick together and really give a shit.
“We wanted to write an album that encourages people, like an empowerment record,” Mille explains. “That’s why it’s called Krushers Of The World. We wanted people to listen to the album and feel good afterwards – to feel the energy! We’re living in weird times at the moment. Everything is so tense, the whole political situation in the world. There’s wars and there’s fascism, all that stuff, you know? We want our community to grow, and we’re telling people that they’re not alone with all the shit that’s happening around them.”
From working-class roots to world-conquering greatness, Kreator have navigated four decades with relative ease. Mille jokes that his current biggest problem is working out which songs to drop from the band’s increasingly lengthy setlists, but his delight at the way this unlikely career has turned out is self-evident. Krushers Of The World is another anthem-heavy triumph, the sound of a band with plenty of gas in the tank, and a strong desire to inspire unity among metal’s global community. For a band whose most influential song is about cold-hearted bloody murder, it’s all rather heartwarming.
“I’m not trying to be esoteric or spiritual here, but it’s the power of the mind,” says Mille. “When you have a strong vision, hard work and a little bit of luck, maybe you can go places. Being able to do this now, it’s amazing, and I’m just very grateful for how it is. We had to build it from scratch and there were ups and downs, but not losing faith in what you do really helps.”
Krushers Of The World is out now via Nuclear Blast. Kreator tour the UK in March.
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