Thrash, speed, death, black, doom, neo-thrash, avant-garde black, symphonic black, post-modern black, melodic death, brutal death, epic doom and drone doom… all branches of the extreme metal tree. Wait! Come back! There’s no room on the pages of a family magazine such as this to explore these gory, garish and unsociably loud musical sub-genres, so let it be suffice to say that without Venom – the Newcastle trio consisting of singer/bassist Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, guitarist Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn and drummer Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray – none of it would have happened. They’ve got a lot to answer for, eh?
As any self-respecting headbanger knows, in 1979 the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (a buzz phrase coined by RC’s own Alan Lewis, then editing Sounds magazine) erupted onto the UK rock scene, featuring soon-to-be stadium legends such as Iron Maiden, Saxon and Def Leppard. A solid NWOBHM B-league including Angel Witch, Diamond Head and Blitzkrieg evolved, too – but standing to one side of all the metallic denim and leather malarkey were Venom, lumped into the main movement by the press, but specialising in a rather different blend of noisy misanthropy that was all their own.
So what was it like to be in a British metal band back in 1979? “Well, for starters I hated the category of NWOBHM,” grimaces Conrad Lant, 27 years after the movement took hold. “To me, it was all socks stuffed down spandex trousers – it made me cringe! We couldn’t go out and play live with Saxon and Samson and the Tygers Of Pan Tang and Raven, because all these bands were nothing like us. See, I came out of the punk scene as well as [liking] the usual rock stuff like the Stones and Deep Purple. The NWOBHM was more a case of young kids trying to make their way, rather than some great mastermind telling them what to do and where to go. There were thousands of bands coming out of Newcastle – Raven, Tygers Of Pan Tang, the whole thing.”
Ah yes, the whole ‘Metal is big oop North’ thing that developed around that time. How come Venom made it, when all the other headbanging Geordie bands didn’t?
“I still ask myself that,” wonders Lant. “We didn’t set out to succeed – we were just doing our own thing. Other bands used to take the piss out of us and say we couldn’t play. We just used to say, look, we’re here to have a good time. We headlined the Loreley Festival in Germany with Metallica under us in 1985 – and, while they made a few grand out of it, we lost a few grand! They said, are you guys not doing this for the money? And we said, ‘You’ve gotta be fuckin’ joking: we’re doing this because we want to do it.’ Venom have always had other jobs and other concerns – from me doing fitness, to Mantas having his own gym – and we’ve always tried to maintain our lives. We’re not going to hang ourselves over this if it all goes wrong. You just pick yourself up and start again. I don’t have to do this – that’s what keeps it fresh.”
So how were Venom different from the other metal rookies of ’81? For starters, their music was recorded under no-budget conditions – intolerably so for many listeners – thanks to the less-than-dazzling recording environment of Neat Studios in Newcastle, where Lant worked as a tape op and had managed to scrounge some recording time. This gave them cult appeal, like the other major proto-black metal contender of the day, Sweden’s Bathory. Secondly, if you went around screaming about Satan and dismemberment in 1981, you scared people a lot more easily than you would in today’s seen-it-all music scene. When Venom titled their first album Welcome To Hell, donned ridiculous loincloths for the cover and adopted those stage names, a sizeable proportion of the moral majority trembled in indignant fear. ‘This is the kind of stuff that gives metal a bad name,’ remarked a snooty Jon Bon Jovi a little further down the line – in the most extreme case of pot calling the kettle black in recorded history.
So where did all the Satanic nonsense come from? Black Sabbath had pioneered the idea of Old Nick and heavy metal as bedfellows, but had more or less given up on the idea once Venom were up and running. Lant: “I was a big fan of Sabbath – but always thought they fell a little bit short of going where they should have gone. In perspective, of course Black Sabbath went exactly where they should have gone, because Ozzy has that comical side to him. He couldn’t possibly have stood there and said, ‘I’m the fuckin’ Prince of Darkness,’ because people would have laughed and said, ‘Fuck off, you drunk.’ It was just that Sabbath were Hammer Horror, and I wanted to be The Evil Dead or Hellraiser. Sabbath sang lines like ‘Oh, the demon’s coming,’ whereas I said ‘Fuck that,’ and sang, ‘I’m the demon and I’m coming to get you, Ozzy.’
“Everyone wants to go and see Dracula, but no-one wants to be Dracula, so I said, ‘I’ll be Dracula’. So those early lyrics [laughs]… ‘Tear the infant’s flesh,’ and all that, people were so alarmed! I was like, nobody gives Christopher Lee or Vincent Price any shit, so why am I getting so much shit from people because of it?”
Venom also played mercilessly fast, with Bray’s slightly out-of-time 2/4 snare drum pattern (nicked from the American hardcore punk scene) leading to the term ‘thrash metal’, a genre tag that made a few journalists snigger. The jibes faded rapidly over the next couple of years, however, once Metallica, Slayer and the rest of the Bay Area thrash scene had found its feet and could be heard extolling Venom’s virtues in the press.
A second LP, 1982’s Black Metal, inadvertently spawned the Satanic metal scene of the same name, even though the band admitted that all the mock-devilry was basically an act designed to scare people. It’s a sign of Venom’s ongoing influence that today’s black metal scene – led by Norwegian bands Dimmu Borgir, Mayhem, Gorgoroth and Emperor, and Suffolk’s very own Cradle Of Filth – is a huge industry, generating titanic revenues and industry awards.
Of the band’s rapid-fire tempos, Lant remembers, “It just got faster! One of the earliest songs we got together was In League With Satan, which is quite a slow song. Mantas’ love of Kiss meant that we tried to come up with our own version of God Of Thunder, and that was our version. Then Angel Dust was our attempt at a Motörhead or UFO style. From there it just got faster and faster and faster, and we thought we’d take it to the next level. Once it was apparent that we could handle that speed without breaking our necks, we thought, why the fuck not? Let’s get this as fast as possible. People’s jaws would drop at the speed of it.”
One band who noticed Venom’s obsession with speed and got in on the act was Metallica, who put their collective feet on the gas after hearing Welcome To Hell. Lant feels they owe him some credit: “I was a bit alarmed about 10 years ago when I read an interview with [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich, where he said that Metallica started in America and then went on tour with Motörhead and the rest is history. I was like, excuse me? You guys were absolutely fuckin’ nothing until we said, let’s get them on the road. I got a bootleg video of them playing in San Francisco when Dave Mustaine [now of Megadeth] was still in the band. I’ve still got it somewhere, he’s got a fuckin’ Welcome To Hell T-shirt on… All we want is for people to put things in the perspective that they should be in.”
He adds: “But I also use the Slayer example. They’ve been going as long as Metallica, but they’re not as big as Metallica because they’re Satanic and evil and nasty, whereas Metallica are the boy band next door. They’re not going to hate me for saying that, because it’s true. ‘Hush little baby, don’t say a word…’ and all these crap lyrics. They’re safe. Even the name Metallica – woo, it’s a ‘heavy metal’ band. In small-town America, that’s safe and they’ll send their 14-year-old kid to that concert. I don’t want those kids at my gig. I want adults who are responsible for themselves. I don’t want Britney Spears fans – their heads will be done in. My lyrics are not for children!”
As the years passed, Venom watched as the metal scene nicked their ideas, ran away with them and made massive amounts of money, leaving the original trio more or less in the shadows. Subsequent albums, At War With Satan (1983), Possessed (1985), and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1986) didn’t attract much attention – and the plethora of cheap live and bootleg collections that have appeared since then has degraded the legacy still further. Only Sanctuary’s luxurious reissue series of 2002 has given Venom much modern credibility; rarely has any band been so influential and yet so universally ignored.
It hasn’t helped that Lant, Dunn and Bray have been at each other’s throats for the last two decades, of course, splitting up, re-forming and going off in a huff again every year or two. At the time of writing, Bray is languishing in obscurity, while Dunn leads his own band, Mantas.
The current Venom line-up is Lant, with his drummer brother Antton and guitarist Mike Hickey – and while most fans will be waiting for the original trio to reunite one last time, the new album (due from Sanctuary as you read this) marks an interesting crossroads. Modern black metal is a completely different beast to the old template Lant et al laid down in the 1980s – harder, nastier, much faster, much heavier and generally not for mass consumption. Should Venom try to emulate it, they’ll be dismissed in contempt; on the other hand, should they come back with a less powerful sound, they’ll be derided as old geezers.
The solution seems to be to land on a unique approach. Luckily, Lant seems to know this; “The new album is a cross between Black Metal and our comeback album of 1999, Resurrection. I’ve been writing very much the way I used to, but obviously it’s the 21st Century and studio equipment is brilliant now – so we’ve got a new production.”
Fortunately, the new record isn’t the only ace in Lant’s pack: Venom are renowned for their spectacular, ‘very metal’ live shows, which should pull in festival crowds. Lant: “When we tour I’ll stick my hand in my pocket: If they say, you can go on tour with some toilet band or go out with an amazing show for a few grand down, I’ll take the few grand down. I like the expression on people’s faces when they see the bombs go off. You might as well do it properly or not at all – we’re huge fans of what we do. I always say that this isn’t a job, it’s the best hobby in the world.”
It was nearly curtains for Venom last year, though – Lant almost ended up in a wheelchair after a rock-climbing accident. As he recalls, “At one point I didn’t know if I was ever gonna play again! I’ve got lots of mates in the marines – I was gonna do the same thing myself until sex, drugs and rock’n’roll came calling – and they’re absolute fuckin’ lunatics, as Marines are. I love ’em dearly, but they’re mad bastards, and every now and then the call comes to go away with them. I keep myself fit with the gym, so every now and then I’ll go off and do some serious work with them. These guys are professionals: they have special places they go that aren’t accessible to the public. So we went to this mountain in Wales that they told me was secure and protected, because there are ospreys there. I slid down a ledge and landed fine, thinking there was no problem because I was roped up. But then I looked up and saw that I’d dislodged a load of rock, which then landed on my head, neck and shoulders. I stood up from that thinking I was fine, but an hour later I was hunched up like Quasimodo, being rushed to the hospital. I’d chipped the bone off the back of my neck.”
Luckily for Lant, he’d spent the last couple of decades working out – he’s a fitness instructor by day – and has developed some suitably heavy metal muscles: “The doctor said that if I hadn’t been a weightlifter and had such big traps [trapezius muscles] it would have smashed my neck. A year later I had some microsurgery to remove three little broken bones: they advised me to have them taken out because they could have gone walkabout, lodged in an artery and killed me. I’m lucky I’m not in a fuckin’ wheelchair.“
New album notwithstanding, the subject of a reunion of the classic Cronos/Mantas/Abaddon line-up is never far from the table in today’s nostalgic climate. Lant observes: “I would never say never. We always have fights, but then so did The Who and Deep Purple. Sometimes volatile personalities make great bands.”
However, while relations remain cordial between Lant and guitarist Dunn, drummer Tony Bray is unlikely to be invited to the party. “When we reformed the band in 1995, we went into the rehearsal studios and rehearsed the shit out of the back catalogue. It got really tight. Then the drummer went off into his usual, ‘I don’t have to rehearse these, I’ve been playing these songs for 20 years,’ thing, and they got sloppy again. We tried to explain to him that any art needs to be practised and rehearsed. I said to him, we’re gonna go out there and Machine Head or whoever are gonna kill us, because they’re amazingly tight. The big horrible scary Venom are gonna sound like crap! We have some fuckin’ hard work to do. Wake up and smell the fuckin’ bacon! But when you’ve got a drummer who doesn’t want to be there… Well, what can you say?”
He then reconsiders: “But I don’t mind dysfunctional fucks myself. So long as they do the job I don’t care what problems they’ve got with drink and drugs and whatever.”
Lant’s plans for the future include some high- profile stuff, if he can pull the right strings. As he muses: “I met Slayer backstage at Download last year and was saying how it’s been 20 years since we took them on tour, and how great it would be to have a Slayer/Venom tour. Slipknot too – they took Slayer out on the Unholy Alliance tour recently – I told them they should have had us on and made it the Unholy Trinity tour. They were jumping up and down and saying, what a fuckin’ brilliant idea! We’re re-establishing ourselves, so I wouldn’t fight them for headline slots.”
In true metal style, Lant declaims, “We’ve never had anything to fear from other bands: we stand alone. We do what we do. You can’t compare Venom with, say, Judas Priest, although you can compare Priest with Iron Maiden: Venom have always stood alone.”
So after a quarter of a century, where does Lant think his band fits into the always gaudy, always silly pantheon of metal? He ponders: “I always thought of Venom as a catalyst. Not that extreme metal would never have happened if we hadn’t been around – it’s just that we kicked it up the arse quicker. We put the punk back into metal, which is something that Iron Maiden and so on didn’t do. We put the snot and the piss and the shit back into metal, because punk was fucked – it only lasted a year. I was a huge punk fan, I loved the Pistols and Sham 69 and The Exploited. But metal had lost that edge, and heavy metal is supposed to be dirty, horrible devil’s music. It’s not that I think Guns N’Roses and Bon Jovi shouldn’t exist, it’s just that I don’t think they’re heavy metal. They’re hard rock pop.”
He concludes: “Metal is Slayer and Metallica and Slipknot. Metal just keeps going, it’s like a runaway train. No c***’s gonna stop it…”
For more info visit: www.venomslegions.com, www.mantas666.co.uk
AXES OF DOOM…
…wielded by guitarist Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn,
currently heading up his own band.
Are you in touch with the other Venom guys?
No. What people don’t understand about Venom is that we’re not in touch when there’s no band activity going on. We’re not close at all. I’ve been running my gym, Fighting Fit, in Newcastle. Conrad and I have had a close relationship as songwriters, round each other’s houses writing lyrics, but we were collaborators rather than friends. That was probably what destroyed the band, actually – all the internal arguments and so on. In the band I’ve got now, Mantas, we’re all good mates and we go out and enjoy each other’s company.
Your new album, Zero Tolerance, is pretty aggressive stuff.
Yes, there’s a lot of aggro in those lyrics – everyone’s been asking me that. The track Kill It for example – I know what it means to me, but I’d rather people took their own meaning from it. You might put it on in the car after a bad day at work when the boss has been
a pain, for example. The actual meaning is for me to know and you to find out! The lyrics are a lot more real-life than they ever were in Venom, where there was a lot of sword and sorcery and fantasy – it was great storytelling. I would love this band to have that success, but I know it’s going to be a hard slog because the metal market is absolutely saturated.
Any thoughts on a reunion of the classic Venom line-up?
If there was ever a reunion of the first line-up, I can’t imagine recording with them. I think we’d go out and play songs off the first two albums and the first few singles. Paul Stanley once said that he’d never write a new Kiss song, because that’s not what the fans want to hear – they want to hear Love Gun and all that shit. I think it would be the same for Venom.
The other thing is that Venom were considered extreme 20 years ago, but not now. Even with the last album I played on – Resurrection in 1999 – there was nothing in common with current black metal trends. You can’t stand still, it’s evolution. If you don’t evolve, you’re gone. If we came back sounding like a current black metal band, people would say that we’d jumped on a bandwagon that we’d helped to create. I bet you that every single Cradle Of Filth fan wasn’t even born when Welcome To Hell came out!
