Conrad Lant, the British heavy metal musician who fronted Venom and ensured the Newcastle band became a huge influence on the genre, has died aged 63.
“For more than four decades, Conrad’s voice, bass and vision were at the heart of Venom,” reads a statement from the band. “He created something that changed heavy music for ever. Venom never followed the rules. They forged their own path. And Conrad was there at the centre of it all – uncompromising, fearless and unmistakable.” No cause of death was given.
Using the stage name Cronos, with an eerie pallor and dressed in showboating leather ensembles as he made theatrical declarations about witches, Satan and the underworld, Lant brought great showmanship to the group, for whom he also played bass.
While they never reached the commercial heights of forebears like Black Sabbath or the thrash bands that followed – they only reached the UK Top 75 once – Venom had a big impact, and their album Black Metal ended up giving a name to one of metal’s most important subgenres.
Lant was born in Chelsea, London but moved with his family to Newcastle aged seven. His brothers were also musicians, one a drummer who joined Prefab Sprout (“they were shite,” Lant would later opine), and another who drummed for Venom in the band’s 21st-century period.
Venom began as Guillotine, which Lant joined aged 16, initally on guitar, then bass and graduating to vocalist after a previous frontman left. The lineup solidified around Lant, guitarist Jeff Dunn (AKA Mantas) and drummer Tony Bray (AKA Abbadon), and they released their debut album Welcome to Hell in 1981. It featured the controversy-baiting single In League with Satan, which featured reversed speech about the devil and helped bring satanic imagery into metal.
Inspired by punk, they intensified the heaviness of early British heavy metal bands by playing at a furious pace. Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne “was singing about the devil,” Lant said. “I wanted to be the devil.”
He told the Guardian in 2019: “I had that snot and piss and shit element, which I wanted to put back into metal. I saw more and more bands shoving socks down their pants and putting lipstick on, and I just was disgusted by that, to tell you the truth. Fucking hell, if heavy metal was anything it had to be raw and dangerous and in your face.”
That impulse came to bear on five more albums during the 1980s, including Black Metal, whose demonic cover art and raw, hellish sound “carved in stone some of the essential features” of the black metal genre, according to scene historians Michael J. Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind in their book Lords of Chaos. Lant, who also co-produced the album, said the making of it was “pure mayhem from start to finish”: instrumentation included steel plates being cut into with a chainsaw, and a makeshift coffin having earth dumped on to it.
Venom went on hiatus in 1988 and Lant – after pondering a career change in forestry – went solo as Cronos, putting out two early 1990s albums, before Venom reformed for another seven LPs, the most recent being 2018’s Storm the Gates. There was another, shorter hiatus in the early 2000s while Lant recovered from a climbing injury.
He trained as a fitness instructor in the 1990s, (“I did loads of classes, I played rave”, he later said) and also began parallel careers in computer engineering and graphic design, though Venom continued to tour, including at festivals in summer 2026.
Venom’s pace, ferocity and darkness all proved seductive to a new generation of metalheads in the 1980s, particularly thrash bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. “It was so, so evil. This was a new kind of insanity,” Scott Ian of Anthrax said admiringly of Welcome to Hell.
Lant collaborated with another admirer, Dave Grohl, for Grohl’s metal supergroup Probot in 2004.
Lant’s son Nathan has thanked the group’s fans. “I know he really appreciated you all. He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
