MAYHEM Bassist Explains Hotel Trashing

Bassist Jørn "Necrobutcher" Stubberud of Norwegian black metallers MAYHEM spoke to Norway's Dagbladet.no about the incident this past weekend in Tilburg, Holland when members of the group and their crew were arrested for allegedly causing several thousand dollars in damage to a hotel room.

On MAYHEM's record label, Season Of Mist, which wrote on its Facebook page following the Tilburg incident, "We're really proud when an established band of 40-year-olds behave like a bunch of inexperienced punks!":

Necrobutcher: "They are so square, they prefer not to have anything to do with guys like us."

On how what led to the hotel trashing:

Necrobutcher: "It was the last night of a three-four day tour, and we were gonna celebrate a little with the guys who had travelled with us. Unfortunately, the hotel room had to pay for this.

"Our rider says that we should get single rooms in three-star hotels. But the local promoter put us in double rooms in a hotel that hadn't been refurbished in sixty or seventy years. When one of us sat down on the bed, it broke. After that, a mirror went, somebody cut themselves a little, there was some blood, and some more stuff got broken.

"We weren't really sober, and we were nine guys: the band, the crew and two Dutch drivers. In the morning, when we finally fell asleep, the police arrived. They saw all the broken rooms, and water was flooding out of some of the pipes. They didn't bother to do any interrogations, they just arrested everybody. Because it was early in the morning, everybody wasn't sober and somebody became a little aggressive. The mood wasn't really great when we were arrested.

"I mentioned to the police that I at some point thought things had gone too far. I think it was when the TV went. For the prosecution, it became a point that I had tried to stop the whole thing. Everybody else was found guilty of complicity."