Mayhem shares a letter Dead wrote after the iconic gig in Leipzig

16/01/2021 Articles Share

Blast from the past! Recently, The Trve Mayhem shared a tour letter that Per Dead Ohlin sent to his friend back in the 1990s. The letter was sent on January 14^th 1991. The letter was photographed by Finn Håkon Rødland. Since it’s handwritten, we tried to decipher it. If you notice some errors, let us know.

Dead writing about touring experiences in 1990. Letter sent on January 14th 1991. Photo by Finn Håkon Rødland.
Posted by The True Mayhem on Sunday, January 10, 2021

"Darkest regards Nick!

Sweden. This is my old home where I lived before I joined the band. Never mind that, write to uscad address in Norway. I’m back from the tour now. It fucked me really much, man! First we played in East Germany, 3 gigs, and exept of that one band ripped us all of 1000 DEM (so it wasn’t much but to share between three bands at the first show it was really cool to see DDR and to play there! I like death metallers more in the East of Germany rather than the Western ones. They weren’t at all like the typical German thrashers with short hair, dressed like Scorpions but like the Poles more into death metal and they looked like that too. Much better than expected and we could have our stage show at 2 appearances of 3 which cheered me up really. Impaled pigheads which we had a great meat war with the crowd and the worst people seemed to enjoy that. I got a set of kitchen knives from a pal for the last show, which was in Leipzig and I cut a little. I meant it to save some skin and blood for the Dutch gigs. We had to go back to fucking Norway after that (getting cash from the social security…) When we came to Norway, I fetched the mail and the guy who showed set up 2 gigs in Athens had written. The dates were changed, only put forward some dates but we fucking misunderstood that and thought it was canceled! That pissed me off really!!! I didn’t realize that afterwards. I just can’t understand how shits we fucking D.U.M.B. we could be. However, we had a half (4 songs) gig in Izmir, they (the cops came) and Holland got cancelled of the reason that Asphyx, the band we should play with, suddenly got a German record deal so they had to leave for that. I gotta split. Write soon, with

Dead"

Per Yngve "Dead" Ohlin was born on January 16th 1969. He joined Mayhem in 1988. According to Hellhammer, Dead was the first black metal musician to use corpse paint. His screams can be heard at Live at Leipzig album. He took his life on August 8^th 1991. Rest in Peace! In our interview with Lars Goran Petrov of Entombed/Entombed AD, he talked about the first time he met his Morbid bandmante Per Dead Ohlin. „We had good fun. Maybe he got depressed throughout the years, but when I knew him we were happy, we would drink beer, do music, sit at my mother’s house…drink beer, play guitar and stuff like that…He was a happy soul. " In our interview with Morgan of Marduk, he also talked about Dead: "Mayhem became the band they are when Dead joined them" and called him „very serious about the things he was dealing with but still a very humoristic and fascinating personality".

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