During a conversation with Kerrang Magazine, Venom frontman Chronos talked about the band’s influence on the thrash metal scene.
He said:
“We were the band that was influenced by Motorhead and the Sex Pistols, but we took their sound and made something completely new out of it. We were completely new; no one had heard anything like us.
“And of course, unbeknown to us, in America, there were these kids who were listening to our records and then shaping what we were doing into their own thing. Slayer would be an example of that.
“And I agree, without us, those bands either wouldn’t exist or would sound very different from the way they do.”
When asked about fans and press saying he couldn’t play live. He said:
“Oh, that’s such bullsh*t – of course we could play. I’ve been doing this for 40 years now; do you think I’d be able to do that if the band couldn’t play? Here’s what happened: in the early days, we used to make up stories to play games with the press.
“So we’d say that one of us was a concert pianist, for example, and that one of us couldn’t play our instrument. But the press just focused on that one thing, and that got repeated over and over again by journalists who don’t have any imagination.
“It kind of became a bit of a stick to beat us with. But in a way it was also a compliment – we were brand new, we had this ferocious sound, and we didn’t sound like anything that had come before us. So they dismissed what we were doing by saying that we couldn’t play.”
1 comment
It’s simple. Build a time machine. Go back to the 1970s with a picture of Metallica and Slayer. Destroy Venom. Slayer and Metallica should fade from the picture.