Heavy Load: A Day in Germany's Heaviest Metal Factory

A ride upon the devoured wings of a tortured angel into the cradle of metal.

Heavy Metal, like Styrofoam and that godawful mess hugging the Florida Keys, will be with us forever. When the cities collapse into the sea and the sun burns all natural life to a crisp, there'll still be two guys, wearing black tees and ponytails, sat in the shade of a smouldering spacecraft, debating the technical merits of Cannibal Corpse and Autopsys' difficult middle albums. Heavy Metal fans are tough like roaches. They're not fazed by fashion or Tinnitus. We have to learn to live with them. So, on a wet Monday morning in Middle Europe, we pointed the Totally Dublin cruiser south and set off to visit their nest.

Donzdorf is in the heart of the Swabian Mountains in Southern Germany. It's a town with a population of about 10,000. They produce tractors in this part of the world and when they aren't producing them they like to watch them at play, pulling heavy loads across dirt fields. On a Sunday evening in Donzdorf you might take your gal out for a six-euro pizza or pass the twilight hours in the local chapel. Catholicism, like the potato furrows that demark the town limits, runs deep in this part of the world. But heavy metal runs deeper. It's the second biggest industry in Donzdorf. Nuclear Blast, the world's largest independent heavy metal label, is based here. It employs nearly one hundred people and every last one of them owns a pair of black combats. If they did casual Friday in this place, the staff would probably have to come to work in bathrobes and slippers for casual to make any sense.

Heavy Metal doesn't lie in. Monday morning, 8am sharp and the car park at Nuclear Blast is half full. The company was set up by a mysterious character called Marcus Staiger twenty-two years ago. I say mysterious because Marcus is never at the office. He's on tour. Working on a project. In the Lotus position on his bedroom floor. Marcus Staiger began Nuclear Blast after seeing the Scorpions play. He built it into a success then disappeared slightly leaving the good ship Nuclear Blast in the capable hands of Jochen. Every so often he'll send back reinforcements. A new programmer he met at a festival or an extra warehouse worker he met in a Rhapsody of Fire t-shirt at a pizzeria. He's the Kaiser Soze of Heavy Metal. Talked about but rarely seen. But without him, black metal bands would probably be forced to send their demos to hip hop labels and hope the A&R were on an anything-goes kinda day.

Heavy Metal is very clannish. Every one who works at the label has shared a mosh-pit at some stage or another. This is how it's survived for so long.

It had its time in the sun in the eighties. Maiden, Metallica and Megadeth dragged it through the nineties before its popularity petered out in Western Europe and the USA. And in Ireland today, the metal scene has about as much presence as the five punt note. There's Fredz in Cork and that's only around still because you can't tell Cork people what to do. In Germany a heavy metal record can sell a million units.

"Maybe there's something in our minds that suits the music," says Fritz, a trainee A&R at the label. "The German language suits heavy metal."

That's true. As true as the fact that honesty is the backbone of heavy metal. And loyalty and sincerity are its primary ribs. The fans don't download, they buy t-shirts like they were this season's football strips and they've seen their favourite bands play at least half a dozen times. Contrast with the pop and even indie scenes today where people go to gigs on the back of a Youtube clip or download a record on the strength of a catchy band name.
Diabulus in Musica, Legion of the Damned, Dimmu Borgin - there's nothing catchy about heavy metal.
"Heavy Metal fans want to hold the music, that's the difference I think," says Jochem. "Spending money on the artist is important."

But the whole game has changed and a label like Nuclear Blast don't just survive on music sales; they're selling a lifestyle. Horns, goblets and belts made out of bullet cartridges fill the warehouse. The belts are flying out as quick as they reorder them. It's festival season and I guess no one wants to be caught topless in the middle of a campsite with last year's skeletons keeping their combats out of the mud.

The warehouse floor is the most normal part of the factory. It's just like any other warehouse in Dublin. There's the grumpy older ones, the youngsters who've got more ambition than they know what to do with it, the mother-type figures who can pack six orders in the same time as anyone else and the hot young thing who's almost definitely got a boyfriend but won't stop tormenting the boys. It's just like any other warehouse in Dublin but instead of Joe on the radio, they're listening to heavy metal and instead of the full spectrum of polo shirts from Arnott's bargain basement, they're all in black band tees. It's a Monday morning, a lot of them have been at a festival at the weekend and are tired. It's May but the weather's shit. And it's mid-month, the furthest point from getting paid, but the mood on the floor is bubbly like a teenage birthday. Walti who mans the IT department describes it as a hobby job and maybe that's why.

"It's still a job, but I love what we produce," he says, "I could be doing the exact same thing but for a pharmaceutical company."

Sigrid works in accounts. They call her Siggy Pop. She says its an easy, laid back place to work and her favourite act are Nightwish. Walti and Siggy would be the stand out rockers in any other workplace. Here they fit in like fax machines.
If Nuclear Blast were the Irish Economy pre 2006, then Nightwish are the building sector - they've gone gold in every country that listens to metal, and even set a new record in Finland by going gold within two hours of release.
But there aren't only roses in the garden. Nuclear Blast have had issues in the past.
"We had to drop a band because their lead singer joined a satanic cult," says Jochem. "Then he was wanted for murder and ended up in prison."

And they've had a few bands who've fostered Neo-Nazi associations and had to be dropped too. They're careful when it comes to mail orders. They don't even want to sell heavy metal to Nazis, although the Nazis do tend to take a beating in heavy metal lyrics.

Sabaton, Nuclear Blasts great white hope for 2010, have lyrics like:

"Do you remember when the Nazis forced their rule on Poland" or "Ever since is started on Kristallnacht, when liberty died and truth was denied."

It's a little like Drunk History, but instead of alcohol being the barricade to understanding, this time it's the drum rolls and guitar solos.

Nuclear Blast don't help themselves. Stick nuclear in your name in a country where a lot of kids see tying themselves to rail lines to stop nuclear waste trains as a rite of passage, is not going to make you friends immediately. And branding everything from cars, to bags to ID cards with a nuclear logo makes you a prime target for a reach around at border security.

"Carrying Anthrax CDs doesn't help either," says Jochem.

They've also been a little cheeky in the past. Milking the Goat Machine were a band signed by Nuclear Blast. Fritz describes them as "totally sick in the head" - every song had a goat theme to it. For promotion they asked the band to collect a box of goat shit. They sent out their promo CDs with a little piece of turd attached to each one.

"No, they made no money," Fritz says, "It was just for fun. Normally we're serious."
Because heavy metal is a serious music. Forty year old men running into mosh pits wearing Viking helmets might not strike you as the greatest example of this, but those metal fans love their boys more than Pompey fans.

"We'll keep a band for two or three albums even if they don't sell well," says Jochem. What other music does that happen with?

Comrades, that's what metal fans are. In the rest of the world they stand out like dinosaurs with their girly hair and t-shirts that read ‘keep feeding me denial and hate, from that I will create'. For the love of god, they're just asking for every hoodlum and young punk to give them a hard time. Even the Darkness only managed to force a revival based on taking the mick. And that's why there's no sitting on the fence with heavy metal.
Towards the end of the day down in the warehouse, Buffallo Soldier comes on the stereo. The metalheads sing along, ‘dreadlock rasta doobee doobee doo', then it's straight back to Annotations of an Autopsy. You can only sing along to that if you're accompanied by a trained professional sawing your leg off at the knee.

There's nothing easy about Heavy Metal. Your hair is always in your face. The black is killer in the heat and those bullet belts will lacerate even the slightest gut. Still, when all around them are being carried away by the ferocious speed of fashion, for the metalheads the easiest thing to do is just stay the same.

Words: Conor Creighton