The Colour Tetralogy

Bloody Mary were born in Milan in the spring of 2000. Guitarist Stranger and bass player LaRouge met and decided to start a band, and within a month the line-up had settled with a second guitarist, LaMountain, drummer Jürgen and singer Aldebran: on 14 April 2000 the five of them were Bloody Mary, and they would stay together for the next seven years.

The chemistry was immediate: by the summer the band had already written ten songs, and from the start the aim was to fuse the members' different backgrounds into something of their own, with Aldebran's warm, dark voice riding on riffs that mixed eighties wave, hard rock and the heavier edge of metal. The influences were plain — HIM, The Cult, Fields of the Nephilim — but the band meant to outgrow them.

The first concert took place on 10 October 2000, and it began with an adventure. The night, "A night like this", had been announced at the Jammin' in piazza XXIV Maggio, with Easy Cure, the official Italian Cure cover band, headlining and Bloody Mary as special support. A few hours before the start something happened at the club, and the concert had to move to the Binario Zero. Word went round by messages and phone calls, a relay that brought the audience across the city in time: the band's live story started with a change of venue and a crowd that followed it.

In November the band had its logo. The year closed with a handful of songs, a name that was beginning to circulate in Milan and a first night on stage — the ground on which everything that followed would be built.

The first recordings came out on the band's own Vor-Daran Productions. In February came a demo single, a remix of "Little Sister" — a song the radio would play two years later — with a photograph of their first concert at the Binario Zero on its cover.

In March came "Bloody Zero Live", recorded at the Binario Zero in Milan on 26 January, one of their very first concerts, and released as a live demo: eleven songs, some of them not even finished, some with lyrics that Aldebran improvised on the spot. Alongside early versions of songs that would travel with the band for years — "Little Sister", "The 2nd Chance", "Cease to Burn", "The Dreamer", "So Far Away" — it captured sketches that were never published in any other form. It soon became a rarity, a snapshot of a band discovering itself in front of an audience.

On 18 May Bloody Mary played the Rainbow Club in Milan, a stage they would return to in 2003. The video of "The 2nd Chance", released the following January, comes from that night.

On 6 July Bloody Mary played the Cross Roads in Bresso, just north of Milan — their first documented concert outside the city itself.

On 11 October the band played La Casa 139 in Milan, its fourth concert of the year and the last of 2001.

On 21 December the band registered bloody.it, the domain that would be its home on the web for the next two decades and more.

In January 2002 Bloody Mary released "Red", their first studio promo, an enhanced CD with four songs and a video: "The 2nd Chance", "Drops", "Dreamer" and a hard-edged cover of the Twins' eighties hit "Face to Face", which would remain the only cover in their repertoire for years. The same month brought the video of "The 2nd Chance", made from the Rainbow Club concert of the May before.

The four tracks made the name Bloody Mary circulate in Milan's underground scene and beyond, and the specialised press — Ritual, Psycho! and Zillo, and Italy's Babylon Magazine — responded well.

On 3 February the band posed for a studio photo session, in two sets whose pictures went with "Cinnabar", the promo of the following month.

On 31 March Bloody Mary played Dark Day IV at the Binario Zero, sharing the bill with Cinema Strange, and for the occasion released "Cinnabar", a promotional CD of five songs: the four of "Red" and "Cease to Burn". It would be their only concert of 2002.

On 28 May bloody.it went online in its first version, a few plain HTML pages. No other concert of the band is documented for the rest of 2002: the year's work went into the songs.

In September Bloody Mary appeared on ":Per:Version: Vol.5", a compilation of the Italian gothic label and magazine Ritual — the magazine that had already written about "Red".

In the last months of the year the band chose to slow down and take a period of reflection, working hard on the songs and their arrangements. The result was a remastered selection of the "Red" songs with "Cease to Burn" and "Little Sister" added, ready at the turn of the year: the promo that would open 2003.

On 14 February bloody.it reached its second version, which opened with a Flash intro.

On 28 March the band was back on stage at the Rainbow Club in Milan, almost a year after its last concert: the start of the most intense live season it had known.

On 20 April Bloody Mary played Dark Day V at the Transilvania Live in Milan, with Kirlian Camera, Vidi Aquam, Fields of Jena and Mortal Hope. The same day bloody.it reached its third version.

May was crowded. On 7 May Sony Music and Massive Arts released the compilation "Saturday Live Club", on which Bloody Mary appeared, and on the 30th the band played the night linked to it at the Rolling Stone. In between came Perpetual Moonshine III at the Rolling Stone with eight other bands (9 May) and the band's own Bloody Night at the Uragano with Ira, Soul Takers and Dark Eternity (24 May).

Meanwhile the songs reached the radio: "Little Sister" and "Face to Face" were played on the Darker than the Bat show of Belgium's Radio ZRO, on 12 and 26 May.

On 20 June "Little Sister" was played on Rock Never Die, on Italy's Tam Tam Radio, and on 29 June the band played Italian Metal Gods at the Black Hole in Milan, on a bill with thirteen other bands.

The season ran on into July: Dark Night at the Black Hole with Edera (9 July) and Il Venerdì del Rainbow at the Aquatica (18 July), while the site reached its fourth version (17 July). On 24 July the band closed it at the Wizard Pub, the pub where they used to drink and throw parties, with "The Bloody Goodbye Night" — an invitation to everyone who had followed them in "this bloody season", to friends, fans and every band that had played with them.

On 5 and 7 September the band shot its videoclip of "It's Too Late", directed by GianLuca Fabbrini; on the 8th Metallo Italiano gave the news that Bloody Mary had a videoclip in the works. On 27 September the site reached its fifth version.

October brought the Bloody Shadow Nights with Rome's My Sixth Shadow, at the Sitting Bull in Certosa di Pavia (10 October) and in Busto Arsizio the next day, the Gothic Festival at the Alpheus in Rome with Theatres des Vampires and Dark Shine (12 October), the Bloody Expiate Night with XP8 at the Black Hole (15 October) and the Hardsounds Metal Fest at La Sfinge in San Polo (24 October).

Above all it brought "Rosemadder", four songs recorded with Danilo "Stonehenge" Di Lorenzo at the Moon House Studio in Milan and presented on 23 October at the Midnight, where a hundred copies were given away. Around the band a small organisation took shape, with Christian Lezzi and Daniela Ardigò of Blasted Management as its first managers.

On 27 November News On Stage interviewed the band. Two nights later came the Bloody Absynth Night at the Wizard Pub (29 November), and on the 30th the third Bloody Shadow Night with My Sixth Shadow, at the Transilvania Live.

On 7 December the videoclip of "It's Too Late" was premiered at Dark Day VII at the Transilvania Live. The year ended with a sixth version of the site (12 December), a concert at Il Tempio with Il Fuoco di Glen (13 December) and, on 14 December, a studio session whose photographs would later serve "Blood'N'Roll".

The live reports followed the nights: on 4 February Ver Sacrum described at La Nuit de Sade "one of Italy's emerging gothic metal bands" with solid live experience, and on 14 February Holy Metal called Aldebran's entrance at Perpetual Moonshine IV "humanity's greatest nightmare". On stage the winter went on in Turin (7 February, the Bloody Quartz Night with Quarzo Nero, announced by the poster "Turin… it's your turn") and in Cremona (21 February, the Bloody Vampyre Party at the Transilvania Live).

On 27 March the band was back at the Sitting Bull in Certosa di Pavia for the fourth Bloody Shadow Night with My Sixth Shadow.

The site reached its seventh version on 4 April, and on the 8th "Rosemadder" collected two more reviews: Holy Metal gave it 7.5, News On Stage 8 out of 10. On 11 April Bloody Mary played Dark Day 2004 at the Transilvania Live in Reggio Emilia, with Rosa Crux, Kirlian Camera, Inertia, First Black Pope and Syrian, a night Ver Sacrum reported on; on 30 April came the fifth Bloody Absinthe Night at the Wizard Pub.

In May the band appeared on "Gothic Love", a compilation released by Sony Music and V2 Records. On 9 May it played the Bloody Portrait Night with Portrait of Tears at the Transilvania Live in Milan, of which two short clips survive. Not every date went ahead: the night at the Transilvania Live in Civitanova Marche (15 May), planned with a "Bloody on the beach party" trip from Milan, and the one in Bassano del Grappa (21 May) were cancelled. On 22 May the site reached its eighth version, and at the end of the month HardSounds wrote up the third Bloody Shadow Night.

On 4 June the band was at the Alpheus in Rome again, with Theatres des Vampires and Svenia.

The summer started in Genoa, at La Madeleine Café (3 July), for which the band printed a joke poster announcing "the first underwater concert in history" in the tanks of the city's aquarium. On 12 July HardSounds reviewed "Carminium" (69) and "Rosemadder" (75), and on the 13th Aldebran and LaRouge appeared on television, as actors in the programme "Love Bug", playing themselves as Bloody Mary. Then came the Aquatica in Milan (16 July), told in a fan's account.

In those weeks, before London and before any contract, Aldebran had the idea that would shape every album to come: the Didascalic Concept, a way of telling a story without ever telling it in words.

No lyric would narrate it. The story would live in everything around the songs: in the graphics and the cover artwork, in the sound atmospheres and the arrangements, in the instruments added to the band's own, in the clothes of the official photographs, in the descriptions Aldebran gave of each record — and in the band itself, on stage and in the clubs, telling it night after night.

The Colour Tetralogy had been four shades of red around no story. A second tetralogy would be one continuous story told in four albums, each chapter in its own age, across time.