Classic tracks: Hell's Rock & Roll

'Hell's Rock & Roll' has been a popular song among Countess fans ever since it was written - especially live. In this post, Orlok takes a look at the creation of this anthemic track.

The original version released in 1997

"We were rehearsing some time in June 1996 and Zagan showed us a couple of riffs he had. We all liked them so we set about to make a song out of them. While playing the parts, we quickly came up with a song structure. The next step was, of course, writing lyrics. I thought about that for a while until the rather rocking nature of the song inspired me to name the track 'Hell's Rock & Roll'. The lyrics quickly followed: a rather cartoonish tale about the devil inspiring men to create metal. It was meant as a sarcastic response to those people who always claim that heavy metal is the devil's music: yes, of course it is! The devil made us do it!

When a few people outside of the band heard the song, they were quite surprised because it sounded somewhat different from most of our other songs (this was before 'black & roll' really was a thing, as far as I am aware). They did like it, though. So we decided to include it in our set for the recording of the live album in November 1996. The audience response to the song was great and we all realized that this could become a real live favourite. Since then, it has been played at almost every Countess show.

The live version recorded in 1996

Early in 1997 we decided to record an EP. Since 'Hell's Rock & Roll' hadn't been released yet, it was obvious it was going to be on this EP. In fact, we made it the title track. I don't really recall why we did that, probably because we thought it was a cool title.

When we returned to playing live in 2014, it was a given that 'Hell's Rock & Roll' would be included in the set. Unlike in the nineties, however, when we usually played the song somewhere in the middle of the set (except once in Hillegom, where we opened with it) we decided to make it the closing song, immediately following another classic, 'Bloed In De Sneeuw'. This proved to be a good idea: these two songs turned out to be perfect closers for a Countess show.
Of course, 'Hell's Rock & Roll' also had to be included on the compilation of new versions of our personal favourite songs we released in 2014. Since 'Hell's Rock & Roll' has proven to work best as a live song, we opted against recording a new studio version and instead included the version we played at 'Metal Magic' earlier in 2014."

The live version recorded in 2014