Warhammer Records: Brian May, bungled tours, and 40,000 hard rock anthems

polygon.com:

Had you been at Slaughterhouse Studios when Brian May arrived one summer day in 1990, you may have thought you’d stumbled into an alternate timeline of British rock music. The Queen maestro had traveled to the outskirts of Hull in the U.K. to lay down some riffs on a couple of new tracks. Yet rather than shredding to Freddie Mercury’s wails demanding that Scaramouche do the fandango, May was putting the final fuzzy touches on grimdark tales of stranded Space Marines and gigantic robotic Titans, conjured straight from the sci-fi world of Warhammer 40,000.

He’d been invited by D-Rok, a newly formed heavy metal rock group that was in the process of recording its debut album. It was something of a concept piece, with each song peppered with lyrical references to Games Workshop’s tabletop wargame, and its cover art an illustration of a troop of Space Marines. But this was no fan project. D-Rok was both a bona fide rock outfit and thinly veiled promotional vehicle, the first group signed to Games Workshop’s then-fledgling and ultimately ill-fated in-house music division: Warhammer Records.

Games Workshop had first dipped a toe into musical waters a few years before, in 1987. John Blanche, the art editor of the company’s promotional magazine, White Dwarf, and a longtime Warhammer illustrator, had persuaded local Nottingham thrash metal band Sabbat to partner with the mag for a one-off single. He’d provide the page art, he suggested, and the band would handle the tune. The result was “Blood for the Blood God,” a satanic paean to Warhammer’s Khorne that was printed on vinyl flexi discs and tucked between the magazine’s pages. “The mag just gave Martin [Walkyier, Sabbat’s singer] a big pile of books and he wrote the song from