Venom singer/bassist Conrad Lant, better known as Cronos, has died at the age of 63.
His band confirmed his death in a statement today (Tuesday, October 1). No cause of death has been given. […]
Born in London in 1963, Lant moved to Newcastle aged eight, where he joined Venom in 1978, during the burgeoning New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Inspired by the rough, DIY nature of punk rock, the trio – completed by guitarist Jeffrey ‘Mantas’ Dunn and drummer Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray – brought a raw fury to the UK heavy metal scene, first heard on 1981’s controversial yet ultimately seminal debut album, Welcome To Hell, which UK music magazine Sounds hailed as “possibly the heaviest record ever allowed in the shops for public consumption.”
“I loved Motorhead,” Cronos said in 2019, “they were a huge inspiration, but I wanted to have the Black Sabbath satanic thing too, and Alice Cooper’s theatricality, and punk’s aggression. I wanted us to be evil.”
Recorded in six days, Venom’s second record, Black Metal, was released in November 1982, and received a five star review in Sounds from future Classic Rock editor Geoff Barton. The album’s title track became the band’s signature song, influencing the namesake extreme metal genre, featuring such bands as Mayhem, Emperor and Darkthrone.
A marvellously Neanderthal racket they did make, and still teenagers when they started making it. May he enjoy all the Newcastle Brown Ale in Hell that he can handle.
Oof. I don’t normally expect 1930s cinema to be, you know, big on racial sensitivity or anything, but Black Moon managed to lower the bar by setting its story on a Caribbean island inhabited by “two white people and a couple of thousand blacks” and then having one of those blacks be racist towards the island’s natives (presumably because he came from the mainland US). That… didn’t really endear me to the film, and nothing much else about it did. This is a horror film where the real horror is that of a nice white woman “going native”; born on the island in question, she’s raised by her plantation-owning uncle after her parents’ death, and becomes involved in the natives’ voodoo practices. Although uncle dispatches her to the mainland where she marries a nice white man and they have a nice white child, the old attraction to those old ways comes back for some reason never fully explained. Per IMDB, the film provoked a mini-riot in Jamaica when it showed there, and even in the US there were questions about whether or not it was wise to show it in some areas there, but one African-American newspaper gave it credit for employing a load (up to about 250 or so) of black extras, so I suppose that’s… something? I don’t know. This was Fay Wray’s last horror film, and apparently she later had no memory of being in it. It’s like that. I don’t really have much else to say about it.
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