A requiem for Slayer: the poignant, pulverising end of 'the band that terrorised the world' 

I once witnessed this power at close hand. After interviewing the band at their practice rooms in Anaheim, California – a man-cave of Marshall stacks, BC Rich guitars and Hustler centrefolds taped to the walls – I was invited to watch them rehearse. I stood in wonder as they tore open Dittohead, a right-wing flurry of a song that bemoans the leniency of the US justice system. A disagreeable racket in every sense, it remains one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever seen.

They weren’t always this good. Drenched in reverb and desperate to shock, Slayer’s earliest recordings were far from convincing. But even the cack-handed illiteracy of songs such as Necrophiliac and Evil Has No Boundaries couldn’t wholly obscure the notion that the band represented something fresh and new. Metal’s reactionary old guard gave a name to the nascent scene they represented – thrash metal – and viewed it with a suspicion that bordered on contempt.

It might have amounted to little were it not for the intervention of a hip hop loving one-time punk from Long Island. In 1986 Rick Rubin signed Slayer to Def Jam Records, the rap imprint he co-owned with Russell Simmons, and made them the unlikely label mates of Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J. If the band were thankful for their sudden association with the most credible and revolutionary musical form of the decade, they didn’t show it. “I hate rap,” said guitarist Kerry King. Despite this, he provided the guitar solos for the Beastie Boys’ early day anthems No Sleep Till Brooklyn and (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!). 

This was the year that Rick Rubin introduced Run DMC to Aerosmith, a collaboration that resulted in the first marriage of rap and rock worthy of the name. But if Rubin’s role as the producer of the ubiquitous Walk This Way established him as one of the leading studio technicians of the 1980s, it was with Slayer that he produced his first truly world class album.

Thirty-three years after its release, today Reign In Blood sounds as alarming and unpleasant as it ever did. With an average speed of 220 beats per minute and an evergreen dry-to-the-touch production, it is a outing of such swivel-eyed fury that it killed thrash metal stone dead for everyone but the band that recorded it. It is to my mind the greatest metal album ever made. Despite a subsequent body of work that features many moments of brilliance, everything Slayer have recorded since has been a variation on its themes.

“Some people have said that Slayer’s music doesn’t change and grow,” Kerry King once commented. “F___ that. We do it ‘cos we like it. I’m a true fan of what we do, which is why my music has stayed similar over the years. You know Slayer when you hear Slayer.”

Reign In Blood met with controversy even before it was released. Balking at the song Angel Of Death, a metal classic that chronicles the activities of Auschwitz ‘camp doctor’ Josef Mengele with a psychotic lack of restraint, Def Jam at first struggled to find the album a distributor after Columbia Records refused to handle it. In the end, Geffen stepped into the breach, albeit reluctantly; the LP emerged without the company’s logo on its sleeve.

That Slayer have the right to sing about one of the most awful events of the 20th Century is a given, but their wisdom in doing so is a different matter. For all its peerless velocity, Angel Of Death is clumsy and distasteful. That said, guitarist Jeff Hanneman, the song’s author, had a point when he said that “nothing I put in the lyrics says necessarily that he [Mengele] was a bad man, because to me – well isn’t that obvious? I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

As Slayer dragged metal to its feral extremes, their audience responded accordingly. Accused of harboring Nazi sympathies – the band are right-wing, but not that right-wing – a number of their concerts proved to be bothersome affairs. An oversold appearance at the Hollywood Palladium in 1988 that saw hundreds of excluded ticketholders smash the venue’s doors and run riot on Sunset Boulevard was not untypical of the time.

Neither was an appearance at the Felt Forum in New York that same year. Unhappy at being housed in a seated venue, fans responded by tearing up the cushions on which they refused to sit and hurling them toward the stage. Bootleg footage of ‘the seat cushion riot’ appears to show the band performing in the middle of a skeet shoot. 

“You guys came here to have a good time, and you’re blowing it big time!” announced front man Tom Araya from the stage. “Why don’t you give us a break? We can probably never play here again!” 

As incorruptible as an aluminium baseball bat, Slayer’s refusal to mellow with age has drawn the admiration of a wide range of artists The hipster’s metal band of choice, the quartet have been referenced in songs by Weezer and The Weakerthans, while an episode of South Park saw Eric Cartman blasting Angel Of Death in the direction of a group of hippies. Better still, Public Enemy sampled one of the song’s central riffs for use on the excoriating She Watch Channel Zero. 

The prize for the most innovative use of the band’s music goes to Tori Amos, whose mournful piano-based cover of Raining Blood is many miles removed from its savage original. Explaining her decision to interpret the song in this way, Amos said that “when I heard it I thought about this giant vagina raining all over the Taliban, and I thought that was pretty hardcore.” By way of thanks, Slayer sent her a t-shirt. 

The band might have even have had Amos’s words in mind when they played the song at the Civic Center in Augusta, Maine, beneath a sprinkler system that drenched them in fake blood. Captured on a subsequent live DVD, it is at once the most stupid and brilliant thing you will ever see. 

Even in physical form, Slayer are as metal as it gets. Kerry King stared down the encroachment of male pattern baldness by shaving his skull and having the face of a demon tattooed on the back of his head, as well as ‘go faster’ stripes above his ears. The words ‘God hates us all’ stain the inside of his left arm from bicep to wrist. 

Following years of headbanging, Tom Araya was forced to undergo surgery to insert steel plates at the top of his spine. I know this to be true because he once showed me a picture of the x-ray on his iPhone, a sight he seemed to regard with some pride. No longer able to thrash in the way he once did – or watch tennis either, presumably – these days he stands stock still on stage as if oblivious to the chaos of his band’s music. 

An even grislier fate awaited Jeff Hanneman. Following a bite from a poisonous spider with which he was sharing a hot tub, in 2011 the guitarist contracted necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating disease that not only threatened the guitarist’s career but also his life. In hospital he was met by a Slayer loving surgeon who told him that “first I’ll save your life, then your arm, then your career.” 

It wasn’t to be. Hanneman rejoined Slayer onstage for two songs at that year’s Coachella festival - in typically gruesome fashion, he removed the right sleeve of his t-shirt in order to show the audience his badly disfigured arm – in what would be his last public appearance with the band. By 2013 he’d drunk himself to death. Appalled that the guitarist’s friends intended to celebrate his life with Jagermeister and bourbon, Tom Araya declined to attend the funeral. 

The following year, I ran into Kerry King at an awards ceremony in London. I asked him if representing the band without Hanneman at his side marked a poignant occasion. Not really, was the answer. “What am I supposed to do,” he said, “mourn the guy forever?”

Slayer’s decision to call it a night is probably well timed. Despite remaining a ferocious onstage proposition – “I would hate for people to say that we’d lost a step,” Kerry King has said – as with most groups of a certain age, their audience has reached the point of indifference when it comes to new material. That this assessment is far from fair is neither here nor there. Them’s the breaks. 

At least the band’s 18 month transcontinental farewell tour has been a boon for their retirement fund. Now into its ‘Final Campaign,’ the revenue from ticket sales alone stands at more than half a million dollars per show. A further 10 million bucks has been harvested from the sale of t-shirts.

Earlier this month I was able to see Slayer one last time. A visit to New York coincided with the band’s appearance at Madison Square Garden, a sold-out happening that culminated in thousands of people chanting their name as they made their way down the escalators of Penn Station and into the subways of Seventh Avenue. In the corridors of the Garden a drunken fan barreled into me. “Enjoy the show,” I said. “F--- you,” he replied.

From the cheap seats of ‘The World’s Most Famous Arena,’ the numerous mosh pits on the floor below looked like satellite images of a dozen gathering hurricanes. As the musicians onstage smashed their way through one audio nasty after another, from hundreds of feet away I stood in silence and bid farewell to a union that have been a part of my life since I was a schoolboy.  

Considering the band were playing a song called Chemical Warfare, it was quite the poignant moment. I thought back to the first time I saw them, at the Rock City in Nottingham, a show from which I was nearly ejected after accidentally landing on the stage following a crowd-surfing mishap. I recalled watching in wonder from the front row of the Hammersmith Odeon as Tom Araya sang at a microphone that featured an unbroken trail of viscous phlegm all the way to the stage. What price such tender memories, I wondered, as Slayer said goodbye to New York, and to me. 

Inevitably, the band’s retirement from public life comes with a measure of equivocation. A management spokesperson described the event as a transition into “legacy mode,” and added that although the quartet will no longer record or tour “they still have their endorsers [and] there’s still merch and branding to do.” This most 21st Century of statements concluded with the words, “Slayer lives on, absolutely.”

All of which is good news for anyone that wants to buy a t-shirt or a signature guitar. But as of Sunday, Slayer’s reign (in blood) as the most exciting metal band the world has ever known is at an end. We will not see their kind again.