Psychedelic Lunch

Welcome to our “Psychedelic Lunch” series, “Spooktober Edition” where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore music from the 60’s to today. Weekdays At Noon EST. Enjoy the trip!

Celtic Frost, “Into The Crypts Of Rays”

“Into The Crypts of Rays” is the first track on Swiss metal band Celtic Frost’s landmark first album Morbid Tales 1984. The songs based in a true story. As such, it introduced the world to Celtic Frost.

This song is about Gilles de Rais, who was the Marshall of France during the Hundred Years War, and companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc. Yes, that Joan of Arc. Gilles de Rais was also a famous serial murderer of children! He was tried and found guilty, and sentenced to burn at the stake. So Martin Ain read about him and made him the subject for a song.

Also in Precious Metal, Tom Warrior mentions that the story of Gilles de Rais appealed to him when Ain showed it to him because of its “irony and sarcasm.” And in the same paragraph, here’s a peek into research work back in 1984: “Researching things like that back then was a huge undertaking, because it was pre-Internet. You really had to be a fanatic to get into all that stuff; you had to raid libraries and go to secondhand bookstores to find it. You couldn’t go to Wikipedia or something like that.” Now, did you young whippersnappers get all that?

Celtic Frost was originally born out of the ashes of the group Hellhammer. Tom Warrior and Martin Ain, both doing vocals and guitars, were in Hellhammer when it disbanded, and began Celtic Frost along with session drummer Stephen Priestly. To this day, Priestly is a little chapped about being credited on the album as “session drummer,” when by the time they got to recording he was playing a larger role.