During a conversation with Metal Underground, Venom frontman Conrad “Cronos” Lant talked about metal music, the style’s essence, pop music, and more.
Looking back at the time he entered the music scene, the musician said:
“To me, metal was getting limp. When I first left school, everybody told me that this was all finished; The Rolling Stones were dead, Deep Purple was dead, everybody’s gone, ‘Why are you in this music?’…
“I even tried to convince the people at the studio I worked for that rock ‘n’ roll’s not dead, that metal’s, like, a thing. It took the likes of Iron Maiden getting in the charts with that first single for people to start realizing that there were still legs in this music.
“People would not have been happy if it had have stayed on the road it was on because there was nothing new coming out. I don’t want to put any band names forward, but a lot of the bands that were coming out at the end of the ’70s, early ’80s, were very much like the bands that had come out before.
“It needed an injection, it needed something new, and I think bringing the punk element into the metal, I think, was the catalyst, which sort of sparked other people to create other ideas that progressed to the point it’s up to now. It’s massive now, there’s so much metal in the world.
“To me, the Americans weren’t saving it because what they were doing with the glam rock; that, to me, wasn’t metal. Metal’s always been something that would tear your face off – I wanted to bring that back.
“And for me, punk was so short-lived. I was still at school when the Pistols came out, The Damned… I loved all that sh*t, but in an instant, it was gone. And being able to put that into the rock, into metal, was just good fun – nothing else, just f*cking good fun.
“And we didn’t have any ideas of how long it was gonna go. A lot of other bands didn’t see what we were doing, and the bands that were around at the time had already established themselves, the rock bands. I think they were just scared.”
1 comment
As usual, Cronos spews out crap posing as acumen. He obviously forgets thrash and death were bascially U.S.-bred genres.