King Diamond & Mercyful Fate: The Corpse-Paint Originators the World Forgot Were Danish

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Play a certain kind of metal fan a burst of high, keening falsetto over galloping twin guitars, show them a face painted white with black around the eyes and a microphone stand built from what looks like a human femur and an inverted cross, and they’ll nod along to a story about Norwegian forests, church fires and the early 1990s. They’ll be wrong by roughly a decade and about 900 kilometres. The man who assembled most of that vocabulary was a Copenhagen singer named Kim Bendix Petersen, and he’d finished doing it before anyone in Bergen or Oslo had recorded a note. That the wider public still can’t place him — or his country — is one of the stranger accounting errors in heavy music.

Corpse Paint: A Short History of the Painted Face

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

White greasepaint over the whole face, black sunk into the eye sockets and streaked down from the mouth, the living man rearranged into a skull. You have seen it a thousand times on a T-shirt and it has stopped meaning anything, which is exactly the problem worth unpicking. The painted face is one of the oldest tricks in loud music and one of the few that still land a punch when the lights drop.

Corpse Paint on vo.rs

King Diamond & Mercyful Fate: The Corpse-Paint Originators the World Forgot Were Danish

Corpse Paint: A Short History of the Painted Face