Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  Raise the dead: Abaddon, Cronos and Mantas, the unholy trinity of Venom, up to no good in the cemetery. Photo courtesy of Spinefarm.

  The transition from this incarnation to the one that would become famous was relatively swift. The group first stripped down to four members when Alan Winston departed, a move that forced second guitarist Conrad onto bass, a fateful change that would see the band stumbling upon a dirty, rumbling sound that became a staple of their style and influenced many who followed.

  “We had a concert in Wallsend, just outside Newcastle,” recalls Conrad, better known by his stage name Cronos, “and three or four days before the concert I heard from a friend that the bass player didn’t want to do it and was gonna leave the band. So I went to the studio and asked one of the guys if they could lend us the bass. We didn’t have time to get another guy in and learn the songs, so I said that I’d basically just play all the root notes, and after the concert we’d get a proper bass player. But all I had to play my bass through was my guitar stack—a Marshall 4x12 plus effects pedals—and when I played the bass into the guitar stack … fucking hell, it was like, woooooorghbwwwrooooaaaaw, and that’s how the bulldozer bass was born. After the show the other guys were like, ‘Keep that, that sounds great,’ so I was like, ‘Okay, I’m now the bass player.’”

  Two months later the band went into Impulse Studios, where Cronos had managed to sweet-talk his way into a free half-day session, and the band’s first recordings were made. Revealing a noticeable influence from earlier rock and heavy metal bands, as well as from the British punk scene (now rapidly evolving into the heavier “hardcore/crust punk,” a genre whose Motörhead-inspired sounds actually closely paralleled Venom’s), the result was an aggressive sound that combined recognizable metal traits with a less polished approach to musicianship.

  “We grew up with the rock bands of the seventies,” Cronos explains, “from T. Rex to Status Quo to Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple to Judas Priest to AC/DC. But I was also a big punk fan, I loved the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, Sham 69, all that. I loved the imagery, the youth of it all. It was very much where we were mentally at that time. Living up in the northeast of England, punk was the voice for our frustration, because we were all leaving school and there was no work. But punk was over so quickly—like boom, a total flash in the pan—and the bands that I heard coming out of the back end of the seventies, the Saxons and Samsons and Def Leppards … I mean to me rock music is the devil’s music, and it was like, ‘Wow, this is pop music, this is not rock ‘n’ roll.’ And I thought if we put the punk back into metal then we have a winning formula, ’cos it’s about the youth, how you felt, how angry you are, and that’s something we wanted to put into the music ’cos we weren’t hearing it anywhere else.”

  Cronos’ determination to make Venom stand apart from everything else happening at the time stemmed in no small part from his day job at the studio, where he was witness to an endless conveyer belt of metal musicians trying to ape other successful bands.

  “Bands would come in and say, ‘Can you make my guitar like Tony Iommi?’ or ‘Can you make my vocals like Rob Halford?’ and I thought ‘What the fuck…! These are all club bands, this is karaoke,’ so Venom’s goal was always to be different, to create something new, and that’s exactly what we did. We thought if we took all the best parts of all the greatest bands we could make the ultimate band. So we took the heaviness of Motörhead, the doomy, Satanic side of Black Sabbath, the leather and studs of Judas Priest, the pyrotechnic side of Kiss and combined it all.”

  While the “Satanic side” would come to the fore as time went on, it’s interesting to note that despite their 1980 demo tape being called Demon, of the three tracks included, only one—“Raise the Dead”—dealt with anything approaching the supernatural or diabolical. The remaining songs, “Angel Dust” and “Red Light Fever,” both draw inspiration from rock’s staples of drugs and sex. All the same, the four members shared a taste for macabre and demonic subject matter, and the demo sleeve revealed that the group had now adopted unearthly pseudonyms. Conrad became Cronos, Tony Bray became Abaddon, Jeff Dunn became Mantas, and vocalist Clive Archer—perhaps most outlandishly—adopted the stage name Jesus Christ.

  “I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we weren’t just called Conrad, Jeff, Clive, and Tony,” Cronos laughs, “‘wouldn’t it be cool if we put this band together with wild fucking stage names?’ and told them that David Bowie and Elton John’s names weren’t theirs. Mantas and Abaddon got theirs from The Satanic Bible [the most famous tome of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan] but I wanted something more personal. Me birthday’s in January, I’m a Capricorn, my star’s Saturn, and the god of Saturn is Cronos. So you see I wanted something that was mine, something relevant to me, my birthday, all that sort of crap. I thought the Father of Time would be… apt.”

  With this move the band inadvertently kick-started a tradition that would become almost mandatory within black metal, that of the Black Metal Persona—though Venom were perhaps more mindful to separate this from their offstage personalities than others have been.

  “They are more than stage names. They are states of mind. It’s sort of possession,” Cronos told Gary Bushell in UK magazine Sounds a couple of years later. “We actually feel possessed before a gig. We start getting really angry and mad. We have to have a fight before we go on stage… it’s the only way we can play.”

  Further adding to the increasingly theatrical nature of the band, vocalist Clive Archer began wearing face paint, something else that would become common within black metal years down the line. As it turned out, however, the Demon demo was not only the first recording featuring Clive, but also the last. Some months after Demon was issued the band returned to the studio to record six more tracks, and Jeff—or Mantas as he was now known—having heard Cronos “messing around” with vocals for a new song entitled “Live Like An Angel” during rehearsal, suggested he might also try recording them. Very quickly it was decided that Cronos’ vocals were the most suitable for the job, and Clive departed amicably, leaving the band as a trio.

  “The reason there was two guitars and a separate singer in the first place was that Mantas, being such a big Judas Priest fan, thought it was the best formula for the band,” Cronos considers. “But the three-piece worked, and we said ‘look at Motörhead, look at Rush—fuck it, we’re a three-piece.’ And the chemistry was there immediately. The first rehearsal, me and Mantas were jumping round like grasshoppers—there was so much room on stage not having the other two guys. We were running round striking a pose like nobody’s business. There was no way that lineup was gonna change, there was so much freedom and it sounded so fucking heavy with one guitar and one bass.”

  The Demon demo wasn’t exactly released in a blaze of publicity, but was fortunate enough to be picked up and championed by Geoff Barton of Sounds, who included the three tracks in his weekly playlist (highly unusual, as the normal form was to include songs by three different bands) for three consecutive weeks. Combined with Cronos agreeing to work extra hours at the studio, this persuaded the head of Impulse Studios, David Wood, to bring the band in to record more demos, and before long Wood had signed the band to his label Neat Records.

  In 1981 the band released their first single, a double A-side comprising the songs “In League With Satan” and “Live Like An Angel.” Sales proved to be surprisingly good, and Neat—seeing that they were on to a good thing—asked the band if they had any more songs to offer. Replying in the affirmative, Cronos agreed to record all the songs written so far and soon provided Neat with a collection of roughly recorded demo tracks.

  To the band’s surprise, those same demo recordings were released later that year as their debut album Welcome To Hell. By far and away the most blasphemous metal album released up to that point, it was an opus fixated on Satanic themes, its iconic cover emblazoned with Cronos’ adaptation of the Sigil of Baphomet, an occult symbol dating back to the eighteenth century but ma
de famous by LaVey’s Church of Satan. If any doubt were still in place as to the band’s intent, the album opened with “Sons of Satan,” while other notable numbers included “Witching Hour” and “In League With Satan,” whose lyrics clearly went some way further than anything that had come before in metal.

  “I’m a big Sabbath fan and I sing along to Ozzy’s lyrics, but it’s very obvious to me that he is the tortured soul,” the vocalist explains. “He’s singing, ‘Oh God help me!’ and ‘The witch is coming for me, the demons are gonna come and get me,’ and I thought, ‘Well, I want to be that witch, be that demon,’ you know, ‘I’m coming to get you!’ and that’s where we came from immediately, you know, ‘I’m in league with Satan / I was raised in hell / I walked the streets of Salem / Amongst the living dead.’ I’m not gonna sing about Satanism in the third party, I’m going to fucking speak about it as if I’m the demon, or I’m Satan.”

  Despite the sinister lyrics, the musicians involved were a far cry from the bloodthirsty devil worshippers they playfully portrayed in their songs. That’s not to say that they didn’t share an interest in Satanism and the occult—Cronos had been interested in the neo-pagan religion known as Wicca since going out with a girl who was interested in the subject, and the pseudonyms and cover art found within Venom’s work reveal at least a passing knowledge of and admiration for LaVey’s writings. All the same, Cronos chose not to draw on these subjects directly and instead wrote far more melodramatic, horror-style lyrics that drew on people’s fear of the dark side, rather than exploring the actual beliefs and activities of genuine practitioners.

  “People hear about witchcraft and Satanism and they automatically assume murders and child molesters, and it’s like, wow. It’s incredible really, since the church has such a black mark against it with priests interfering with children and so on, yet in the communities of Wiccans, druids, Satanists, there’s no sign of that at all. They teach love to those who deserve it, so it’s a real shame that people aren’t educated. But since people assume all sorts of bad things when you mention Satanism, we were hell-bent on using that against them, to create something that would shock people, the same as punk shocked people or Sabbath shocked people. What we do lyrically is anti-Christian, what we sing about is the opposite of what the church says. We’re not really preaching Satanism, we’re just writing fantastic rock ‘n’ roll lyrics about anti-Christianism, lyrics that would scare the ignorant deliberately.”

  The first black metal album? Welcome To Hell, 1981, with Cronos’ take on the Sigil of Baphomet.

  Even putting aside the Christian-baiting imagery, the album was an undoubtedly groundbreaking affair, the primitivism and the raw barbarity of the eleven songs making it instantly memorable. With unfussy, crashing percussion, chainsaw guitars, that bass sound, and vocals that were more growled than sung, the songs on Welcome To Hell were some of the heaviest yet encountered, a point highlighted at the time by Geoff Barton in his five-star review in Sounds, in which he described the album as “An epic of ugliness, a riotous noise, an appalling racket and… possibly the heaviest record ever allowed in the shops for public consumption.”

  Despite their trace elements of blues rock, what most obviously separated Venom from the majority of the bands that had inspired them—and in turn placed them closer to artists from the punk scene—was the chaotic nature of both the playing and the production. Geoff Barton mentioned the latter in his review when he described the album as “having the hi-fi dynamics of a fifty-year-old pizza” and “not so much laid down in a recording studio as slung together from pieces of scrap vinyl at the back of a disused gasometer.”

  “I was always a massive Sex Pistols fan,” says Cronos. “I loved Johnny Rotten’s arrogance and that the music was so ‘off the cuff,’ which is why when we did the recording we weren’t really paranoid about the guitars being perfectly in tune, or everything being perfectly in time, it was more about the feel. When I was working in the studio I saw so many band arguments over timing, the slight movement of a snare drum, the slight coming in late of a bass guitar, and that’s got nothing to do with Venom. Venom’s all about feel and compulsion—never mind if it works on a scale or a graph. I don’t want [Stephen] Hawkins [sic] or someone to analyze the music, I want some kid to drop to his knees with an air guitar and say, ‘Yeah, this is amazing.’ When we put the first album out and people were hearing glitches, errors, time fluctuations and even tuning issues, it was like, ‘Oh, these guys can’t play, blah blah…’ and we were like, ‘For fuck’s sake!’”

  Despite criticisms of the band’s unorthodox approach, Venom were also starting to make a significant name for themselves, earning rave reviews and solid sales, something that came as a surprise not only to the label but to the band themselves.

  “It was totally unexpected, as it was really an album for us. We weren’t really in the clique of bands in Newcastle—and I know we weren’t really accepted by those bands, ’cos of the mess we’d make on stage with our pyros in rehearsals. But we were having fun. We were in what we’d have probably thought of as a ‘pretend rock band,’ you know, writing some songs, setting off some pyros, working on stage gear, coming up with crazy names. But to find out that people were into what we were doing… I mean it changed the whole ball game.”

  Spurred on by the positive feedback they were receiving, the trio set about building upon the foundations they had laid with Welcome To Hell, and a year later issued their second album, Black Metal, a milestone that managed to give a name to an entire genre while also contributing immensely to its development. To say that the band had “matured” would probably be stretching a point, but while the gloriously anarchic feel of the debut album was relatively intact, the band had certainly refined things considerably. Kerrang!’s Malcolm Dome described the album as “altogether more structured than its predecessor” and Gary Bushell commented in Sounds that “compared to the DOA disaster area of their debut this is almost considered.”

  The difference in the two records stemmed largely from the fact that whereas Black Metal had been written and recorded as an album, Welcome to Hell was simply the demo tracks that the band had provided Neat following the release of their debut single. When Neat had suggested releasing the tracks as an album, the band were more than happy, but assumed they would be rerecording the numbers. Instead, the label issued them exactly as they were. In contrast, by the time Black Metal was recorded, the band had earned enough goodwill with the label to record in a way that suited them, and the increased budget produced a tighter, and far more powerful, recording.

  Promo photos from Black Metal, the timeless opus that gave its name to an entire movement.

  This additional clout with the record label resulted in the band being given a week in the studio as opposed to the three days they spent on Welcome To Hell. The extra time allowed them to build on the theatrical elements of their music, perhaps most notably with the memorable “Buried Alive.” An atmospheric, mid-paced, and surprisingly considered song, it was described by Malcolm Dome in his Kerrang! review as “undoubtedly the most frighteningly effective horror/rock song since the original ‘Black Sabbath’ number.”

  “Doing ‘Buried Alive,’ we were able to push the boat out even further and get the engineer to do mad things. When we wanted to do the burial scene I brought in a big bucket full of mud and some spades in cardboard boxes and said, ‘We want to recreate this burial scene, so if we put the microphones inside the cardboard box and shovel the mud into the box then as the mud gets deeper and deeper, you’ll hear the thud of the mud getting further away as the muck’s coming on top of the coffin.’ And this guy was like, ‘Hell, yeah, fucking great!’… The people in the studio were like, ‘What the fuck’s going on here, you’re turning the whole place upside down,’ but everybody was psyched, it was like, ‘This album’s going to be amazing.’”

  And indeed it was. Improved songwriting and musicianship along with a less noisy production resulted in a tighter sound that allowed
the songs to shine, while also exchanging some of the violence of the debut for a more foreboding atmosphere. Classic cuts such as the title track, “Leave Me In Hell,” “Don’t Burn The Witch,” and the irresistible and much-covered “Countess Bathory” provided killer riffs, memorable choruses, and spirited performances, even if the inspiration for the tunes turns out not to always have been quite as unholy as the fans might liked to have imagined.

  Studs, bullet belts, long hair, devil horns, inverted crosses and weaponry: Venom’s imagery has proved enduring—sneakers and spandex notwithstanding.

  Photo courtesy of Spinefarm.

  “Years later when I met Dave Grohl [of Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and later Probot, for whom Cronos provided guest vocals] I asked him, ‘Have you ever heard of The Magic Roundabout, the animated children’s program?’ ’Cos we wrote this song called ‘Countess Bathory,’ which is a deadly serious Venom song and the riff is the theme for The Magic Roundabout. You know, ‘da nana na na, da nana naa.’ And I asked, is this where you pinched the [riff for] Spirit of Fucking Whatever? ’Cos it’s exactly the same as the Countess Bathory riff, only backwards. He totally didn’t get what I was talking about—must be an English thing!”

  One distinctly English moment that sticks out like a sore thumb on the album even today is “Teacher’s Pet,” a bluesy number whose crass, tongue-in-cheek lyrics (which see the protagonist caught masturbating under the desk by his teacher) and chant of “get your tits out for the lads” showed how the group’s approach differed from many bands that would claim them as an inspiration.