He is one of the true innovators of heavy music, and he defines his ethos with complete clarity. “If you call yourself an artist,” Tom G Warrior says, it means “you’re not playing it safe.”
In a career spanning 40 years, in which he has led three key bands – Hellhammer, Celtic Frost and latterly Triptykon – Tom has fought some hard battles and endured some lean times. But, as he says with a wry smile, “I think struggle and suffering are essential artistic tools.”
Born Thomas Gabriel Fischer on July 19, 1963 in a village in Switzerland, he was 12 when he heard Black Sabbath for the first time. “After that,” he recalls, “nothing was ever the same again.” He named himself Tom G Warrior when he formed Hellhammer, a band that, despite its brief existence, had a profound influence on the development of black metal. And Celtic Frost’s music was even more extraordinary, combining extreme metal with an art rock sensibility.
Frost’s debut release, the 1984 mini-album Morbid Tales, had crushing heaviness in Procreation (Of The Wicked) and Into The Crypts Of Rays, and an experiment in dark ambient music in Danse Macabre. But the 1987 album Into The Pandemonium was their groundbreaking masterpiece, its eclecticism illustrated in tracks such as Tristesses De La Lune, with a female voice reciting French poetry over a string quartet.
What followed was a disaster. The departure of bassist Martin Eric Ain and American drummer Reed St. Mark led Tom to form a new Frost line-up for the 1988 album on which they sounded, and looked, like a
