Blistering.com: With the Celtic Frost book, there’s this glimmer of hope that the band will get back together, even after the Under the Apollyon Sun sessions. The book is now 10 years old, so what do you recollect from penning those words?
Warrior: At the time, there was a glimmer of hope. You always had that feeling. We felt that Celtic Frost ended on an artistically bad note. I don’t know how the others felt about this, but I always felt that one day, we’d come back together. Artistically, we rectified that. Personally, we screwed it up. Although we always rated Celtic Frost as a very special band, different from any other, we proved that we’re as pathetic as the next human being. We weren’t professional. The first time we screwed it up musically, the second time we screwed it up personally. That goes to show we are failing human beings like all people. That’s just the reality.
Blistering.com: And you’re right – the band environment, from what I read, sounded really good around Vanity/Nemesis.
Warrior: To me, the band left its magic in the events of 1987/1988 when we had to take a leave of absence to regain our artistic freedom. We lost our path and that just damaged Celtic Frost too much to regain our footing. Even though the environment was good for Vanity/Nemesis, we could have gone much further. At the time, the band was damaged beyond repair and we should have quit much earlier.
Blistering.com: So say the band had lasted through the 90s, how would have it sounded?
Warrior: I have a very clear idea because we were working on a lot of things. I’m not so sure it would have been a good path. We were really possessed by being experimental and Into the Pandemonium had given us the courage to go as far as we wanted to go and in hindsight, I don’t think it was a good thing. I look at that now with the benefit of age and a little bit more life experience, I think the strength of Celtic Frost was the darkness and heaviness. At times we went so far with our experiments and radicalism that we lost of darkness and heaviness.
I think it would have been difficult to consume an overly experimental Celtic Frost now. I don’t know how these albums would have aged. If you look at an album like Vanity/Nemesis, which at the time got fantastic reviews, it’s basically an ordinary metal album. It’s a straightforward metal album. For a dark Celtic Frost album, it has aged really badly. If you listen to Morbid Tales or To Mega Therion, they have aged much better. If we recorded further albums after Vanity/Nemesis, they would have aged badly too. We simply weren’t in the proper frame of mind for Celtic Frost. If I wouldn’t have been so extremely consumed with Celtic Frost at that stage in my life, I should have dissolved the band much sooner. I waited too long because I could not imagine my life without Celtic Frost. I’m saying all of that with the benefit with years of analysis and discussions with Martin.
Blistering.com: Perhaps just ending it after Into the Pandemonium would have been the way to go?
Warrior: Maybe. I think the whole path of Celtic Frost would have been much different if we hadn’t of spent 14 months fighting against our own label [Noise Records]. It was the beginning of the destruction. That 14 months where videos, tours were cancelled because we had to take legal action. At that time, our breakthrough album, Into the Pandemonium had been released, but we were at the very top and the very bottom at the same time. We were way too young to handle it. We didn’t have strong management, didn’t have the money to handle it, so it was an extremely desperate situation for us. We were way too immature to persist and better it. Anything after that, the people around us were intent on re-capturing the glory and it was never the same. We only found that again when we reformed the band several years later.
Blistering.com: Knowing what you know now and having the people you currently have, how would Into the Pandemonium translate today?
Warrior: It would be a boring, everyday album like a million Gothic and black metal bands. When we wrote and recorded that album, it was extremely unusual to use female vocals in extreme metal. And a French horn and a violin and cellos and all of these things…operatic vocals. At that time, an album likeInto the Pandemonium was extremely unusual. A month after its release, it did nothing, then it started picking up crazy. Nowadays, I think the album would be just a run-of-the-mill album. A lot of this is luck and we were extremely lucky to do that at that time.
Blistering.com: Back to the book topic: any plans to do a book about the time when Celtic Frost broke up to when it reformed?
Warrior: I’m working on that book, yeah. I hope to publish it in maybe two or three years. It’s very, very candid; not politically-correct at all. I’m not going to lie to you: I was concerned of the opinions and thoughts of some people for the first book, so I didn’t describe things the way they were or I left names out. I’m no longer interested in doing that. If I’m writing a book, I want to be very frank, like I was for the Hellhammer book. The book details the Apollyon Sun period, very briefly, but it mainly focuses on the reformation of Celtic Frost, the creation of Monotheist, the touring behind, and the destruction of the band, as well as the forming of Triptykon. During this period, I went through radical changes in my personal life that changed who I am on many levels. I’m going to be very frank on this, and it will probably offend and maybe shock a lot of people. I don’t care. I want to be honest, I don’t want to paint a picture of lies.