Stagefront are two silhouetted figures, heads at a strange angle. Like hanged men. Beside each is a robed demon sentinel with a burning torch. Overseeing all is a gigantic, trompe l’oeil devil, gnarly-fanged, eyes a glazed pink blaze. The demons touch their torches to the doomed mannikins who go up in flames. Kreator, amid the enkindled carnage, plough into the utter pummelling of “Endless Pain”, the title track of their 1985 debut album. The moshpit explodes again.
The German thrash perennials, over 40 years into their career, are bigger than you might think. They’re filling 3000-capacity venues across Britain. For two decades, the global sales greeting each new album have been impressive - Top 10, Top 20 (albeit not in the UK). Recent broadsheet articles reevaluate the “Teutonic thrash big four”, German bands equivalent to the more famous American Eighties innovators. Of the Teutonic quartet - Kreator, Sodom, Destruction and Tankard - the former have by far the biggest following.
They’re here tonight celebrating their current album, their 16th, Krushers of the World. It is, by their standards, almost poppy, with symphonic choruses on cuts such as “Satanic Anarchy” and the title track, both of which they play tonight. When they do, the album may only be two months old, but the crowd sing along, grizzled warriors in multi-patched denim battle jackets, but as many crowd members young enough to be the band’s grandchildren.
Tonight has a very tasty line-up. The doors open at 5.30 PM but, unfortunately, I miss much-vaunted hardcore punkers Nails. I’m there to catch fellow Californians Exodus, original second tier thrashers who remain ferocious. Against a backdrop of a Hellraiser-ish demon plopping a person into a Venus flytrap-style mouth within their palm, bearded, full-figured frontman Rob Dukes keeps energy levels high, notably on rap-spat punkin’ party song “The Toxic Waltz”.
They’re followed by groundbreaking Brit death metallers Carcass, who perform in front of a black’n’white, medical drawing-style backdrop of dissected heads, and four light boxes showing films of intestinal pulsing (appropriate for a band whose back catalogue includes songs such as “Fermenting Innards” and “Vomited Anal Tract”). Bassist-frontman Jeff Walker is an incongruous sight. Groomed of beard and hair, in white shirt and blue jeans, he looks like a suburban office manager who watches too much Clarkson-era Top Gear, yet he cuts theatrical Ted Nugent-esque rock star shapes. At his side, fellow Carcass lifer, guitarist Bill Steer, has the waist-length hair and slightly flared jeans of a Seventies rocker.
They make a fine racket, even playing “Genital Grinder” from their seminal 1988 debut Reek of Putrefaction to an enthused wave of crowd-surfing. For this observer, though, they’re at their best when they hit a solid rhythmic chug that’s meaty but not super-fast, ripe for swinging the body about to. Walker bids us farewell by saying we’re “not bad for a bunch of southern poofs”. Hmmm.
Kreator are preceded by a massed singalong to one of Iron Maiden’s finest, “Run to the Hills”, and a polemic, possibly AI-assisted film, wherein famous art works and photographs depicting war and violence are brought to animated life in chronology from ancient times to the present. They represent humankind as a doomed psychopathic race, all to the compelling soundtrack of Barry McGuire’s Sixties classic “Eve of Destruction”.
While creating sonic havoc from the start, Kreator really hit their stride with their third song, the title track from 2005’s Enemy of God album. Frontman Mille Petrozza, clad in knee-length shorts and a frayed greatcoat, stands at his mic-stand (decorated with two bloodied severed heads), and exhorts the moshing to begin. It does. Behind him, longterm band partner, drummer Jürgen "Ventor" Reil, lays down a battering rhythm, sat high within the conjunction of two gigantic devil horns. Petrozza’s guitar spars with that of Sami Yli-Sirniö (Finnish, 25-year tenure) and the rampaging basslines of French player Fred Leclercq (once of preposterous power metallers DragonForce, and the baby of the band at 47 years old).
They play for around an-hour-and-a-half. It flies by in a speeding haze, rarely going short on wild pyrotechnics, walls of flame along the stage-lip, their heat accentuating the sweaty writhing of the moshpit. Peak moments include “Hordes of Chaos” (“Everyone against everyone – chaos – ultra riot”!) and the cudgelling bellow-along “Violent Revolution”.
The latter is a good example of the ethos. These are songs of primal release, not lifestyle advisories. They are to be listened to, shouted along to, and leapt about to, as cleansing, euphoric expurgations at life’s daily frustrations. The crowd knows this. They’re an amiable bunch. Earlier, I saw a young man redoing another young man’s ponytail. The result didn’t pass the latter’s muster so he did it again. Their battle vests had patches reading The Black Dahlia Murder and Nailbomb. The moshpit, then, is a bruising but relatively safe space. Anyone who falls is picked straight back up, and there are lots of women in their twenties getting stuck in.
If I had a quibble, it would be the venue’s crash barriers. There are two lines of these cutting all the way across the front of the stalls. They’re an undoubtedly sensible response to the venue’s well-reported crowd safely issues, but do not allow for the massed ritualistic circles and walls “of death” that are an innate part of this kind of concert (“It’s like a fucking army assault course down here,” was the verdict of Carcass’s Jeff Walker earlier). It’s not a big deal and, of course, far better than catastrophe, but it’s still a fact. We make do with miniature mosh mash-ups.
As the concert goes along, Pretrozza dedicates a song to the recently deceased Ross “The Boss” Friedman, of oft-forgotten proto-punks The Dictators and OTT metallers Manowar, then later tells us about first coming to London with Swiss avant-metallers Celtic Frost. This is all well’n’chatty, but he knows what we want. The set climaxes with him telling us it’s “time to kill”, and the band hurling out an obliterating take on their 1986 anthem “Pleasure to Kill”.
Now wrung-out, mildly mauled, shirts as soaked as if we’d been showering, we “hordes” raise our horn fingers aloft. The band lines stagefront and salutes us. “Extreme aggression” may be their battlecry, but a Kreator gig is as communal an event as any rave.
Below: Watch Krushers on the Road (Episode 2: Madrid) a six-minute film in support of the current tour, featuring an interview with drummer Jürgen "Ventor" Reil
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