How Venom made their unholy masterpiece Black Metal and changed the course of metal

Venom ’s 1982 album Black Metal is one of the most influential records in history, detonating a chain reaction that would result in thrash , death metal and, of course, black metal itself – even if it was roundly mocked at the time. In 2011, Venom singer and bass-bludgeoner Cronos looked back on the making of a twisted masterpiece.

It may feel like the genesis of heavy metal should have been sparked when a lightning bolt hit a mountain, but in reality, the birth of the song Black Sabbath would not have made for a great fly-on-the-wall documentary. As momentous as this event was, something that happened over a period of several weeks punctuated by many arguments over who was making the next round of brews and interminable conversations over exactly which take of the line ‘Oh, no, no! Please God help me!’ was the most convincingly terrifying and how loud the bell should be in the final mix, would not have made for great cinema.

This is one of the reasons why full credit should be given to Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant , the mainstay of extreme metal pioneers Venom for refusing to mystify the making of their iconic second album, Black Metal , in 1982, no matter how influential and important it went on to become. He’s quite candid about what is arguably the most important album in the birth of extreme metal ever recorded.

“We had no idea what we were doing was going to become such a big thing. So many bands were in the studio at the same time as us. How the hell could I have presumed that it would be my band who would be the lasting name? We weren’t trying to be the next Iron Maiden or the next this or that. We just wanted to do what we enjoyed. You had a band like [fellow Geordie NWOBHM outfit] Tygers Of Pan Tang always dropping Purple references; you know, ‘We want to be the next Deep Purple.’ Well, Venom never did that. We never said that. We said, ‘We are now, we are new, we are Venom.’

Venom formed in Newcastle in 1979 and coalesced into their early classic lineup of Cronos on bass and vocals, Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray on drums and Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn on guitar the following year. There were several key environmental factors at work during this unholy conception.  Newcastle in the late 1970s was a hard bitten, industrial city, destabilised and depressed by high unemployment and a profound lack of meaningful choice available to the majority, working-class inhabitants who lived there. It was a city where you “put on your father’s clothes when you were old enough and then went and did his job”.

Except, according to Cronos, “That wasn’t an option in 1979 – there were no jobs left.” Everything from the dark Satanic Mills of the English industrial revolution  to the once-mighty ship yards had been forced to shut up shop, leaving most of the erstwhile sons of toil signing on and pissed off. The city was, in many respects, similar to Birmingham, the home of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and half of Led Zeppelin, all favourite groups of the bassist. Except a decade later, many young Geordies had fallen under another spell as well as metal:

“Growing up in the 70s in the north of England, punk meant everything to me. The whole industry was dying, the ship- yards, everything. There was no future. There was no hope. Punk music was a way for the real people in this country to get a voice. It was the great unwashed getting a say for once, shouting, ‘Fucking hell, we’re not happy about this.’”

Seeing his desire to be in a metal band as a mission, he was drawn to work with Abaddon and Mantas simply because they struck him as the only people he had met who were as driven as him. Their chops were the last thing on his mind. And in return, the other two were keen to work with Cronos because he had access to a studio. Ironically, the only place they had played with any great regularity before they recorded their debut album, Welcome To Hell , was a church.

“Our practise room was a church, our first ever gig was in a church and our first demo was recorded in a church – I’ve still got the tapes; we sounded fucking terrible,” he says with a laugh. “There was this Methodist vicar who liked the idea of putting a few bob in his pocket, so we would set up on the altar just in front of the pulpit and away we went. The Vicar used to let us in and then fuck off. So we ransacked the place basically... ha ha ha! I’ve still got some of the big old candles and crucifixes that we nicked off him.”

Another influence on Black Metal was a feeling that they’d been misled by their record label, Neat, during the recording of their debut; an experience they were keen not to repeat. The frontman had worked overtime at the studios where he worked for months until he could afford to pay for a heavily discounted three-day period when it wasn’t in use. After blagging help and tape they were ready to roll. There was just one problem.

“We recorded Welcome To Hell in three days and they were just demos,” says Cronos. “We thought that if the label liked them we’d be given a green light and we’d have the chance to record them properly as a great new album over a week or so. But then when the record company heard the tapes they said, ‘No, we like it the way it is, we’ll put it out like that.’ We must have looked horrified... there were timing issues, there were tuning issues but they just said, ‘No, it goes out like that or not at all.’ They had our arms forced up behind our backs because there was no way in hell we were going to turn down an album. No fucking way at all. There was that kind of feeling, ‘Fucking hell. We’re going to blow this before we’ve even started.’”

The following year Venom still had everything to prove and the little that they had achieved to lose. The fact that their biggest supporter in the press, the legendary Geoff Barton, described Welcome To Hell as having “the hi-fi dynamics of a 50-year-old pizza”, really showed that they had their work cut out for them... and this is where Cronos’s tenacity revealed itself fully for the first time.

“We knew we had to record this one properly,” he says. “We knew what kind of tricks might be played on us, so we made sure all those songs were nailed before we went into the studio. And for me, Black Metal is our first proper album, because Welcome To Hell is just demos.”

He laughs as he describes the sheer luxury that was offered them during the week-long extravaganza. “We got the chance to overdub some solos. We got the chance to redo some vocals. Welcome To Hell took three days to record and mix and Black Metal took seven days. But we had our shit down so tight we knew all we had to do was to get a sound on the kit and a sound on the back line and BANG!, just nail the fucker.”

Black Metal opens with a literal assault on the listener. There isn’t even a run-in groove on the original vinyl album – the first sound you hear is a horrible noise the second the needle hits the groove (if you’re listening to the original vinyl it does this anyhow). It seemed that punk nihilism, the heavy industry of the area, a real desire to shock the listener out of complacency and a vicious sense of mischief were coming together in a screeching sonic scree.

“That is literally a chainsaw cutting into metal,” says Cronos. “Abaddon used to work in a steel factory. I was saying to him, ‘We really need to find this annoying sound to go at the start of the album.’ And he said, ‘Fucking hell, if you’ve ever heard metal grinding on metal, it’s a sound that will go right through you.’ We took huge chunks of steel into the studio, put them into a vice and away we went. It was a fucking incredible sound, menacing.”

This was simply one of many strategies that he was using to make the record lively, unexpected and unique. Cronos took a more literal approach to spooking out the listener on the track Buried Alive .

“I came to the studio with all these buckets of mud, sand and flour and we put some microphones inside some cardboard boxes in a stairwell. Then we got all these spades and slowly started filling in the boxes with the mud and soil. There were a load of guys into the studio when we did the whole, ‘We came into this world with nothing and with nothing we shall depart’ bit. They were doing the crying and whimpering as if they were at a real funeral, and the funny thing was we had to do this a lot of times because no one was whimpering or crying, people were actually trying to hold back laughter. And when we came back to listen to the tape the weird thing was that the actual laughter actually sounded like crying, and that’s what you can hear.”

Black metal as a genre would go on to mean many different things to many different people over the next three decades, but to Cronos it means exactly the same thing today as it did then.

“It was our way of distinguishing our music from the run-of-the-mill heavy metal that was coming out back then. When people were telling me that rock was dead at the end of the 1970s, I couldn’t help but wish that most of it was because it was that fucking lame. ‘Black metal’ was coined because I wanted to describe how different we were to other bands of the time, even how different we were to most ‘heavy metal’ bands of the time.”

The influence of Black Metal is so vast it can barely be measured. As well as providing the name and many of the conventions for one of the healthiest sub- genres of metal still thriving today, it also set the foundations for much of what we now call extreme metal, in particular thrash, death, speed metal.

If many in the UK sneered at a perceived lack of technical prowess in Venom, this was easily offset by their growing legion of fans in the US. And it really didn’t hurt that some of them were in bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Exodus.

But of course, if we had to boil down the significance of this album to one time and place it would probably be to Oslo in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Everything about Venom was sacrosanct to the second wave of BM, or the practitioners of True Norwegian Black Metal, from the lo-fi aesthetic, the Satanic imagery, the desire to alienate the listener and even the style of dress.

“I was sent early demo tapes by acts like Burzum and Mayhem ,” says Cronos. “They reminded me of early Venom in that it was guys who cared more about the passion of the music than the accuracy of it. It reminded me of our first two albums and how I was 10 years earlier, that enthusiasm and hunger. Of all the bands who came up after Venom – not Metallica and not Exodus – they were the only ones who had that ‘looseness’, that punk rawness, the piss, the shit, the snot, the vomit that we had. I could hear it in those young Norwegian bands who were going Hell for leather. Those guys still cite Venom as a big influence but they need to take more credit for what they did. They evolved the sound. I just think it was a shame that it was overshadowed by that church-burning bullshit.”

He’s keen to point out that the influence can often be felt in unexpected places: “I think the lasting impact of Black Metal for me is that it has earned us respect in areas that you wouldn’t expect. When you hear someone like Dave Grohl say how important it was to him when he was in school then that’s a big deal. Also it’s further-reaching than you think. It’s like when you meet a lawyer in a suit and he’s asking you for a Black Metal shirt. The secret Venom fans. Those are the kinds of things that last because you realise how important it was for a lot of other people as well.”

But ultimately, the strength of Black Metal is its raw, ugly sound - the noise you make when you genuinely don’t give a fuck and have nothing to lose.

“Absolutely. I think it’s about the intensity and conviction that you put into the recording. If you play with fire and vengeance you can get away with dodgy production because people pick up on the actual vibe of the performance in the studio and that’s how I think the first Venom records did OK. Because people weren’t going, ‘Oh I think there’s something wrong with the production,’ they were saying, ‘Fuck me!’ They got where we were coming from. They got the fact that we were young and full of ‘ARRRGHHHH!’”

Originally published in Metal Hammer magazine issue 225, November 2011