No one could terrify like Cronos, the black metal innovator who reignited rock’s hellraising attitude
As frontman of Venom, Conrad Lant made an impact on metal to rival Black Sabbath, inspiring a whole new subgenre with his diabolical grandstanding, unruly spirit and heretic noise
When Venom’s first blasts of ungodly racket emanated from Newcastle upon Tyne in the late 1970s, metal was enduring its awkward adolescence. Black Sabbath and Deep Purple had respectively slipped down the charts and broken up, and young guns Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were years away from reaching their commercial heights. Frontman Conrad “Cronos” Lant decided that the genre had become “lame”.
“There could only be one new way to do this,” he recalled to Guitar World in 2008. “For metal bands to get some fucking balls again.”
It wouldn’t take long for Lant and his bandmates to reintroduce the kind of danger that their singer/bassist thought was missing. They dragged the unruly, DIY spirit of punk to heavier turf, smashing hoarse vocals against basic yet hammering riffs, unconcerned with the notion of harmonies. The lyrics took the occult fascinations of Black Sabbath and made them confrontational, rather than ominous. “I’m in league with Satan! I was raised in hell!” Lant declared on 1981 single In League With Satan, with the hellhound bark and ground-rumbling low end to back it up.
Critical feedback was harsh: Kerrang! dismissed In League With Satan as “a pompous piece of horrifying power plod”. But the disdain only made Venom’s ferocity scream further, inspiring its own subgenre, black metal, plus a host of future giants – and a school of musicians who wanted to look, sound and terrify just like he did.
Born in Chelsea in London in 1963, Lant moved up north with his family when he was eight years old. Although his London accent made him an instant target at school, he gave as good as he got. “We used to beat the shit out of each other as part of the curriculum!” he told Metal Hammer. “You learn to stand up for yourself, and I think that’s something I carried into Venom with the attitude: if you don’t like it, fuck you!”
After he joined Venom aged 16, it took only a few seconds of watching Lant on stage to see that attitude in action. Tongue out like Gene Simmons, bass in hand as he snarled into an overhead mic like Lemmy, he was a conglomeration of rock’s most intimidating figures to date. At the same time, his gravel-throated insistence on how diabolical he was, plus his gauntlets and lashings of leather, made him more than the sum of those parts. His grandstanding was soon mimicked by Slayer’s Tom Araya, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost’s Tom G Warrior, Kreator’s Mille Petrozza and countless underground metal singers.
These baying frontmen were just one subsect of the legions who owed themselves to Venom. The notorious Norwegian “black metal” scene took its name from the band’s 1982 second album and attempted to exceed their idols’ monstrousness, with certain members burning down local churches and even committing murder. Lant never endorsed the violence, telling the Quietus: “What a fucking shame that those guys are known for that and not for their music.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, Megadeth guitarist Dave Mustaine (also ex-Metallica) wore a T-shirt on stage that depicted the artwork to Venom’s 1981 debut album Welcome to Hell. Anthrax leader Scott Ian hailed the same album as “a new kind of insanity”, referencing how raw and savage the recording was (the band intended the recordings to be demos for the label, who decided to release them as they were). With the same self-assuredness that he brought to his live shows and old schoolyard scraps, Lant expressed pride in many, many interviews over his music being so different from the glossiness of other early-80s UK metal acts.
“I would never, ever have wanted to be in a band like Iron Maiden or Saxon, and I didn’t want to be commercial or sound like anyone else,” he told Classic Rock. “We wanted to create music that scared people. And we succeeded.”
But the public persona was only one side of him. As Classic Rock observed in a profile earlier this year, “there are two versions of Cronos”. At home, he listened to the usual suspects such as Led Zeppelin and Status Quo, but also Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. He liked birdwatching in his spare time. He left Venom from 1987 to 1995, after record sales started to dwindle. During that self-imposed exile, he became a fitness instructor.
Following his return to Venom, Lant steered the ship through a number of personnel changes and stayed committed to the heretic noise that had made his band so striking early on. Even though repetition naturally dulled the scariness, he became regarded as a beloved elder statesman, enjoying guest spots including on Dave Grohl’s metal tribute Probot. Mark Tremonti, guitarist of radio-rock institution Creed and unsung extreme metal connoisseur, told me in 2022 that Venom rivalled Black Sabbath in terms of their impact on metal. Lant’s vehement drive to stop the genre from going soft almost 50 years ago had ensured its survival.