It was in 1980 that the teenage Conrad Lant took the name for which he’d become famous. As the bassist and vocalist in Venom, a band on a mission to create the heaviest and scariest music ever heard, he knew that he and his co-conspirators, guitarist Jeff Dunn and drummer Tony Bray, required demonic aliases to match the darkness of their devil-worshipping songs.
The solution lay in astrology and ancient mythology. Born on January 15, 1963, Conrad’s star sign is Capricorn, and as he explains now: “My planet is Saturn, and the Greek god of Saturn is Cronus. So for me it was obvious.”
With Conrad as Cronos, Jeff as Mantas and Tony as Abaddon – the latter two names drawn from Anton Szandor LaVey’s occult bestseller, The Satanic Bible – Venom rose out of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal to define a new form of extreme music immortalised in the title of their second album from 1982: Black Metal.
Forty years on from that landmark, Conrad is the sole remaining member of the classic Venom line-up, while Jeff leads a rival act, Venom Inc., which until recently also featured Tony.
Speaking to from his home in Northumberland, close to Newcastle, the city where Venom formed, Conrad talks at high speed and in thick Geordie tones as he relates the story of his life. “It’s nice and quiet here,”award on the mantelpiece – pride of place!”
