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 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 simply were very young guys all dressed in black, with a street attitude, really obsessed with dark things, who came into the cemetery at night and wanted to do what we liked.”
