there was a shit in the piano. A real, human shit. It had been there for days.
“There was this gang that called themselves the Shit Mafia,” says Erik Danielsson, by way of explanation. The Watain frontman sips coffee in the kitchen of his idyllic woodland house in the Swedish countryside, 40 minutes from his hometown of Uppsala. “They ate their own shit in public places. They were really into GG Allin; you’d see them at shows, five pretty big guys with dreadlocks, all spiked up, cuts on their arms. There was a piano in the hall, and one of them was taking a dump in it. Those guys are great – they’re still around, doing the same kind of thing. But that was the last show we could organise.
” This debauchery went down at the Grand in Uppsala: a youth centre that allowed Erik, alongside a fresh-faced Tobias Forge, to host some legendary gigs at the turn of the millennium. Acts included Necrophobic, Merciless, Dark Funeral, the ultra-violent Malign and Tobias’s death metal band, Repugnant. Watain even recorded their 1999 live tape, Black Metal there.
