H
e was just a spotty schoolboy, his
balls barely dropped, when he
decided he could do better than
Black Sabbath. In the early 70s, the
young Conrad Lant loved heavy
rock – Sabbath and Status Quo most of all. But as
much as he dug the sinister sound in the song Black
Sabbath, and the visions of Satan and hellfire in its
lyrics, he never liked the part where Ozzy
Osbourne wailed, ‘Please God help me!’ Even at this
tender age, Lant felt that Sabbath had missed
a trick. As he now recalls it: “Ozzy sounded
tormented. Like, the demon’s coming to get me!
But I wanted to be that demon.”
By the time he was 18, in 1981, Lant was playing
that role as Cronos, the bassist/vocalist in the
noisiest and scariest rock band in the world,
Venom. Based in Newcastle, Lant and his two
cohorts – guitarist Jeff Dunn, aka Mantas, and
drummer Tony Bray, named Abaddon – created
a sound heavier and darker than anything that had
come before it, equal parts heavy metal and punk,
and loaded with occult imagery in songs such as
Witching Hour and In League With Satan. When
Venom’s debut album Welcome To Hell was released
in December ’81, Sounds writer Geoff Barton
described it as “the musical equivalent to the Earth
splitting asunder and revealing a filthy, gaping
maw to the Kingdom Below”.
Of all the great bands that rose out of the New
Wave Of British Heavy Metal, the biggest were Iron
Maiden and Def Leppard, but arguably none was as
influential as Venom. The brute force and white-
knuckle speed in Welcome To Hell was an inspiration
to the progenitors of thrash metal, including
Metallica and Slayer. Later, Venom’s Satanic
imagery and raw, lo-fi sound would shape another
sub-genre known by the name that Lant gave to
their music – black metal.
Now, 40 years since Venom formed, Lant leads
the modern version of the band alongside guitarist
Stuart ‘Rage’ Dixon and drummer Danny ‘Dante’
Needham, while former members Dunn and Bray
have a rival act, Venom Inc., fronted by the man
who once replaced Lant in Venom in the late 80s,
Tony ‘The Demolition Man’ Dolan. There is no lovelost between the two camps. As Lant
says of Dunn and Bray: “I won’t talk
to them ever again. I’ve got no reason
to.” But there’s more to this than
a longstanding animosity between
them. “We reformed the original line-
up in the 90s,” Lant says, “and it was terrible.
Why the hell would I do it again when I’ve got
a great band now?”
The new Venom album, Storm The Gates, is the
third from the current line-up. If less overtly
Satanic than those seminal early 80s albums, it
remains true to the original ethos – “nasty, evil
shit”, as Lant describes it. And on stage, with Lant
a powerful presence, Venom still put on a hell of
a show, lit up with end-of-the-world pyrotechnics.
At the age of 56, Lant says he is still the same
“crazy bastard” he always was – and that Venom,
now as before, is an extension of this. “It’s never big
enough for me,” he says. “It’s never loud enough
for me. It’s never over the top enough for me.
I always want more, more, more...”H
yperactive energy is Conrad Lant’s default
setting. Speaking to Classic Rock from his
home in a quiet village near Newcastle,
he is voluble, funny and blunt, talking fast in thick
Geordie tones. His fervent belief in his band is
matched by self-deprecating humour, his best one-
liners – notably, “For me, it was always sex, drugs,
rock’n’roll, Satanism and aliens” – delivered with
a booming laugh. What is surprising, in this
context, is the seriousness with which he says
that it was fate that made him what he is.
First, he refers to astrology. Born on
January 15, 1963, his star sign is
Capricorn. “My planet is Saturn,” he
says, “and the Greek god of Saturn is
Cronus. So when we formed
Venom, the name for me
was obvious.” It was
different, he says, for
Jeff Dunn and Tony
Bray, who took the
names Mantas and
Abaddon from an
occult bestseller, The
Satanic Bible by Anton
Szandor LaVey.
Lant also attaches great
significance to an experience
from his early childhood.“When my nanna died I was only four,” he recalls.
“She was in her coffin and I gave her a kiss
goodbye. I felt like death was around me when
I was growing up, and that was my psychology
behind the whole Satanic thing. I’ve always been
drawn to the dark side of life. I enjoy writing about
it, and it fits the music I love – heavy metal.”
As a teenager, Lant attended various rock
concerts at Newcastle City Hall. “I’d
watch these bands with my mouth
wide open,” he says. “I just wanted
to get on that fucking stage.” He
had a number of bands with
school friends, playing songs
by T.Rex and David Bowie,
but it was after leaving
school, when he hooked up
with Dunn and Bray, that
his life was forever changed.
At that time, Lant was working
at Impulse Studios, a recording
facility in Wallsend, three miles from
Newcastle. Dunn was employed as
a petrol pump attendant, Bray in a steel
factory. The trio used an unlikely setting,
a local church hall, to develop a repertoire of
devil-worshipping numbers, mostly played
fast in the style of Motörhead, and to try out,
unsupervised, a few ideas for a Kiss-inspired
stage show, including DIY smoke bombs.
MA “I wouldn’t say it was delusions of
IN:^
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‘You shall not pass!’ (top-
bottom) Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant,
Jeffrey ‘Mantas’ Dunn and
Anthony ‘Abaddon’ Brayin London, (^1984).
Happy chaps: Cronos
onstage with (original
guitarist) Mantas, 1985.
Kids eh? Cronos^ and^
Mantas^ with^ Metallica’s^
Lars^ Ulrich^ backstage^
at the Breaking^ Sound^
Festival^ in^ France,^1984.
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 73