Bill Peel Interview
Bill Peel is the author of Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics, a book described as a “radical re-writing of the history and politics of black metal music.” He’s based in New South Wales, Australia, and has previously written for outlets such as Overland and Kill Your Stereo.**
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I wouldn’t really say I have anything like a “professional” writing career, I have a day job to pay the bills, but I can tell you how I got into writing I suppose. When I moved out of my hometown to go to university I needed something to do on the side, mostly to keep myself busy. One of my friends operated a website about metal music called Kill Your Stereo, and he knew I was into music and he valued my opinion, so he asked me if I’d be interested in writing album reviews for the website. It was pretty standard stuff, 700-word reviews done entirely for free. It was pretty stress-free, which is how I like it, so I just kind of kept writing reviews for the fun of it, and as a way to organise my ideas. Once I started getting more into politics, and the possibility of writing about music in a political way, I wanted to branch out into longer pieces of a more op-ed nature for my friend’s site. The first one I wrote was in 2017 I think, and was a kind of retrospective of the black metal band Panopticon and their excellent Kentucky album, and how the album combines the historically radical politics of a lot of country and bluegrass bands with the ecological interests of atmospheric black metal.
If I’m honest, the piece is pretty bad looking back at it, and it had absolutely zero impact, which didn’t surprise me.