THE music was loud, the drinking hard. A Viking feast in Valhalla with a horde of long haired Nordic Hell's Angels preening their wings and silver chariots. Hangers on and guests rocking to the raw early morning rhythms of heavy metal.

An annual public relations exercise by the Hell's Angels of Copenhagen to prove that living next door to a biker gang may not seem desirable but despite their leathers, knives and shooters bikers are another band of happy teddy bears.

But the sham became a nightmare. Within seconds, the annual Hell's Angels Viking Party at Hell's Angel Fort I in central Copenhagen was transformed into a whirlwind of shrapnel and searing heat, as a deadly armour piercing, rocket propelled grenade erupted in the enclosed clubhouse.

One man died instantly. Another lay with only minutes to live, bleeding to death. Nineteen others lay bleeding and burnt in the inferno. Panic and shock took even the Yakuza like tattooed angels and their cohorts as they stumbled into the street, into a waiting cordon of heavily armed swat squads posted there 24 hours earlier to prevent such an attack.

In two years, the city of little mermaids, Lego, beer and bicycles, has been transformed into a battleground of warring bikers whose bombs and bazookas have terrorised a population unused to more than firecrackers in postboxes.

The attack on the party last October came as retribution for the most violent shootout in the country since Denmark's second World War Nazi occupation. On a Sunday in March 1996, all hell broke loose at Copenhagen airport in a scene reminiscent of Chicago in the 1920s. A group of Hell's Angels was there to "meet" a group of their rival Bandidos arriving from a party in the Finnish capital Helsinki. The rain of automatic fire left dead a Bandidos president, Uffe Larsen, two other gang members seriously injured and several others screaming for help.

By the time the police had arrived, the attackers had gone and panic stricken travellers picked themselves off the floor. And within the hour, reports reached Copenhagen of an identical attack at Oslo airport in Norway.

The Scandinavian war for supremacy between the biker gangs had reached new, and now public heights, and gave rise to a court case, the likes of which the country has not previously seen.

THE case concluded before Christmas with the conviction of four Angels on manslaughter charges.

Three got jail terms ranging from 16 to eight years the judge ordered a retrial for the fourth, despite the jury finding him also guilty. Two others were acquitted.

In the eight months it took to bring the six Hell's Angels before the courts for the airport attack, the Scandinavian biker war has put Denmark's police authorities into all but a state of emergency, with its courts located in Palermo type safety zones.

For each day of the proceedings, police cordons closed off roads in the centre of the capital as the smiling but silent Angels appeared before three senior judges and a jury of 12.

The failure of the prosecution to secure guilty verdicts for all its charged suspects highlights the major problem for democratic authorities in handling groups whose aim is the elimination of their rivals. This is particularly so for biker gangs, whose strict codes of conduct preclude co operation with the authorities even when they are targets of murder or attack. And with each attack, methods have become more violent.

In the case of the fort attack, for example, one used and one unused Swedish made Carl Gustaf grenade launcher were found on the rooftop of a building 80 metres from the clubhouse, in an area cordoned off for the evening by security forces.

"These weapons are meant to fry tank crews and spread shrapnel in the close confines of a tank turret. The temperature of the heatflame reaches about 3,000. Only for a short period but that's enough. We don't yet know for sure exactly who fired this weapon, but given the events of the past few months it seems certain it was a Bandidos," said police chief Kurt Nielsen.

Despite their ferocity, the two main attacks have not even been a culmination in the war between the Hell's Angels and Bandidos biker groups. A string of car bombs, packet bombs, mafia style speeding car shootings and knife attacks continue to bring the attitudes of "biker honour" into the public searchlight.

"This is the realm of equality in numbers killed. They have their own codes which are followed slavishly," said Capt Nielsen whose police force appears powerless to stop the attacks, despite heavy surveillance. Following the December court verdict, for example, Hell's Angels members showed their disregard for officers by going on a pub crawl with groups of armed policemen in tow.

LITTLE is known of the reasons behind the war but police are adamant: the string of attacks in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway over the past two years is a battle between the bikers for supremacy in the region and rights as the senior bikers to control a lucrative narcotics trade.

"Our problem is that we have nothing to prove that the organisations themselves are criminal. Their public aims are not criminal. None the less an indication is that just about every member of both gangs has sentences for serious and violent crime under his belt. But we are unable to ban the organisations themselves, simply because we can't label them criminal organisations."

It was with Jonke Nielsen, the Hell's Angels official spokesman serving a life sentence in a Danish jail for murder, that the war began in the late 1980s. The senior biker gang in the region, the Angels, were confronted with the emerging strength of a rival gang by the name of Bullshit. To make Hell's Angel distaste clear, Jonke Nielsen walked up to the Bullshit president in his car and shot him at close range in front of his wife. The murder spelt the end of the rival gang.

Apparently robbed of their purpose, disbanded Bullshit members applied, first to Bandidos US headquarters for permission to pen a chapter in Denmark, and then - following biker code and custom - to Hell's Angels Denmark. Permission given on both counts, the newly formed Bandidos, however, refused to keep to the terms of their licence from the Hell's Angels that they would only open one chapter in Denmark.

As an initial war of words and warnings intensified, `The Code' seemed to call for punitive action, to bring the Bandidos back to heel. War was declared in February 1994 when a member of a Swedish Hell's Angels support group was killed in a gunfight at a night club in the southern Swedish port of Helsingborg.

A year and several minor skirmishes later, a reciprocal shooting in southern Sweden of a Bandidos president seemed to even up the score. But this year attacks throughout the Nordic region have taken on proportions that police concede are out of hand.

From March 1st last year, 17 increasingly audacious attacks have taken place with little or no attention to the safety of the general public.

Ironically, or perhaps as part of an elaborate Bandidos plan to evict the Angels from its main headquarters, the October attack came six days after Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen announced that his government planned a "Lex Biker" designed to safeguard the public from becoming casualties in attacks on and around biker premises. Carried in record time by parliament the bill has given the police the power to ban bikers from any buildings in which their congregation is deemed to pose a risk.

"It hasn't solved the problem of the biker war, but at least it makes the general public somewhat more secure," said Justice Minister Bjorn Westh.

The Danish authorities are now studying the German situation. Hamburg banned the Hell's Angels from the city in 1983 in a decision accepted by the Constitutional Court in 1988 on the basis of allegations that the Hell's Angels had been involved in extortion from bars and pubs in the city.

But with continued reciprocal attacks this year, even a ban on the organisations seems unlikely to have an effect and the warped sense of honour within the groups will require a fight to the disbandment of one of the groups.

"They're not now fighting about narcotics or territory. They're fighting about reputation. Their own reputation within their own environment. The trouble with reputation in these types of subculture is that it is united and constant. The only way you can increase your own reputation is by stealing it from someone else," said criminologist and biker researcher Joi Bay.

A measure of the anarchism and anti-authoritarianism of the groups came from Jonke Nielsen after the October attack.

"It's the fault of the authorities," he said, on the mobile phone he uses to discuss events with fellow cherubim outside the prison into which men lobbed grenades into his cell to try and kill him.

"I think it's mainly their [police and politicians] fault. Parliament and the politicians have all been too busy messing around in something they know nothing about. Laws are not the way to deal with what's happening at the moment."

He offered no recipe as to what should be done.