grandeur,” Lant says. “I wasn’t thinking, if we don’t
become as big as Kiss, I’m going to hang myself.
But I grabbed the bull by the horns. Live the
dream. Who wants a life of regrets? I ain’t gonna
regret shit.”
Lant was in the right place at the right time. He
persuaded David Wood, the owner of Impulse
Studios, to create independent label Neat Records
as a vehicle for local rock bands. Lant was
instrumental in signing acts to the roster, and
eventually, after the first Venom demo failed to get
them a deal, a second attempt succeeded.
The first three albums made Venom the world’s
biggest underground metal
band. Welcome To Hell was
hailed by Geoff Barton as
“possibly the heaviest
record ever allowed in the
shops for public
consumption”. The follow-
up, Black Metal, released in
1982, was no less of an
onslaught, with macabre
songs in Buried Alive and Countess Bathory.
And in 1984’s At War With Satan, the title
track was a 20-minute symphony of the
damned. 2112 it was not.
These albums had a huge influence
on the early thrash metal bands such as
Metallica, Slayer and Celtic Frost. As
Lant wryly notes: “Metallica had one song
that sounded exactly like Witching Hour but it
was called Whiplash. But I thought, these
guys are fucking great! And as that whole
scene started to erupt for me those bands
were like kin, not rivals.”
It was only after Venom had toured the
US and Europe, with Metallica among thesupport acts, that they finally played their
first show in the UK, at London’s
Hammersmith Odeon on June 1, 1984,
billed as ‘The Seventh Date Of Hell’.
What the band delivered that night was an all-out
assault on the senses: their Satanic thunder
matched by shock-and-awe theatrics, with Lant as
master of ceremonies, resplendent in thigh-high
Dr. Martens boots, with a bass guitar in the shape
of an inverted cross, dripping blood. “Even though
we sounded like shit,” Lant recalls, “it was so
spectacular that people were like, Wow!”
But in the wake of this triumph, they blew it.
In 1985, a sub-standard
Venom album, Possessed,
was rendered obsolete by
the ferocity and evil genius
in Slayer’s Hell Awaits. After
Jeff Dunn left the band, Lant
brought in two guitarists,
Mike Hickey and Jim Clare,
for 1987’s Calm Before The
Storm, in which the Satanic
shtick was toned down. And when that
album stiffed, Lant disbanded Venom to
form a new group, Cronos. “I wanted to
do something completely different,” he
explains. “The Cronos band was a
bit more rocky and laid-back. We
made three albums and had a blast.”
In Lant’s absence, Dunn and Bray
had re-launched Venom with Tony
Dolan, but after unremarkable four
albums, the band broke up again in- With distance and time, Lant
had gained a new perspective on
Venom. “I had to walk away from it to
understand what the band meant and
what it meant to people,” he says. For
Lant, Venom was pure escapism. “I was
a horror movie fan and we brought
that into the music.” But in the early
90s, when a number of young
Norwegian bands developed a new
form of black metal, heavily influenced
by Venom’s music and imagery, it led
to horrors real, not imagined. After
members of these bands burned down
several ancient churches, there was
a grim inevitability to what happened
in August 1993 – the murder of the
leading figure in this scene, Mayhem
guitarist Oystein Aarseth, by his rival
Varg Vikernes of Burzum.
“It’s sad,” Lant says. “When you
think of those Norwegian bands, you
think of the crimes, not the music. But
all that shit has nothing to do with
Venom. A lot of those bands said they
were influenced by Venom, and they
took the whole dark Satanic thing to
another level, but they’re not true black
metal. Only Venom is.”T
he reunion of Venom’s
classic line-up in the
late 90s was short-
lived: “We did one album, Cast
In Stone, but it wasn’t great.
And we only did three or four
gigs. I thought, we’re not
nailing it, the fans don’t buy it
anymore.” When Bray quit,
Lant and Dunn made the 2000
album Resurrection with Lant’s
brother Antony on drums.
Soon after, Dunn left again. In the 19 years since,
Lant has never spoken to Dunn or Bray, though
there has been some communication between
them, albeit minimal, and through third parties.
“I avoid them like the plague,” Lant says. “They did
get in touch and say they wanted to get back in
Venom, but I said no thank you. Not interested.”
As recently as last year, further contact was
required during the compilation of a forthcoming
Venom box set, named 40 Years In Sodom in
reference to a song from Welcome To Hell. But as
Lant says sharply: “I only communicate with them
through lawyers. I really don’t know these people
anymore. They’re simply names on a document.
I would never go out for a drink with them. And
I don’t miss them in any sort of weird way.”
For all that, Lant remains “insanely proud” of
what he, Dunn and Bray achieved – a legacy
celebrated in 40 Years In Sodom, which includes
previously unreleased archive material. “It’s even
got the church hall demos from ’79,” Lant says. “It’ll
be a massive thing for hardcore fans to hear... how
fucking bad we were! That stuff is embarrassing as
hell, but it’s the history of the band.”
As for the future, the self-proclaimed “crazy
bastard” who grew up wanting to be scarier than
Black Sabbath is still thinking big. “I’ve got so much
music in me,” he says. “And so many stage show
ideas. I still want to do At War With Satan with
a pentagram lighting rig.” A demonic cackle rings
out. “Vincent Price made scary movies. I make
scary music. It’s what I do best.”Storm The Gates is out now via Spinefarm.EST
ER
SEG
ARR
A/P
RES
S“Vincent Price made
scary movies. I make
scary music.”
Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant
Sex, drugs and...erm,
skulls: Venom circa 2019.74 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COMVENOM