DEATH SS
The Devil Rides out
Black magic, human skulls and Aleister Crowley – the twisted story of Death SS, Tobias Forge’s favourite cult horror-metal band
WORDS: CHRIS CHANTLER
Steve Sylvester is a reluctant trailblazer. As frontman with cult Italian horror-metal band Death SS, he was plundering graveyards for stage props and embracing the occult well before the likes of Venom, Mercyful Fate and Bathory. But he insists he never deliberately set out to drag metal to the dark side.
“Many people said that Death SS was the precursor of black metal, because we started in 1977, doing Satanic things in music before all those other bands,” he says. “But it was completely unconscious. We were simply very young guys dressed in black, with a street attitude, obsessed with dark things, who came into the cemetery at night and wanted to do what we liked.”
Nearly 50 years after they formed, a huge gulf exists between Death SS’s influence and the recognition they receive outside of their homeland. In overwhelmingly Catholic Italy in the late 1970s, these brave souls were stress-testing the most obsessively morbid, avowedly occult aesthetic that metal had ever seen. They became a household name at home, and they’re worshipped by clued-up fans of occult metal from further afield – not least Ghost’s Tobias Forge, who has acknowledged them as a big influence on his own band’s image, music and message.
Yet this enigmatic five-piece have maintained a shadowy mystique and a cultish detachment from any scene, despite boasting a ton of killer tunes, a luridly colourful story and one of heavy metal’s greatest theatrical gimmicks, with each bandmate identifying as a classic monster - Vampire, Death, Zombie, Mummy, Werewolf and so on.
The Steve Sylvester speaking to Hammer via Zoom doesn’t look especially monstrous, though witchcraft seems to have been involved at some point. The disarmingly affable singer, born Stefano Silvestri, is now 64 but looks at least 20 years younger, a jet black mop of curls tumbling down onto the shoulders of his black leather jacket.