Venom Interview

Anyone with any sense knows that when you get right down to it there is only one band to thank for black metal, death metal, thrash metal, speed metal and all such glorious creations. That band is, of course, Venom. So when the godfathers of extreme metal release a new album it’s a momentous event and when that album is as downright awesome as Fallen Angels…well, you get your arse down to the Universal Records building in Hammersmith and talk to them about it. Ave Noctum were lucky enough to be given an audience with all three members of the band, so read on for words of wisdom from legendary front man Cronos, guitarist Rage and new drummer Dante (Interviewed by Chris Kee).

AN: First things first, I just wanted to say congratulations on the new album, it’s probably the finest Venom album in years.

C: Thank you, we feel that. We really feel that. It’s the whole way we approached this. We solidified this line-up in May 2009 and we said ‘let’s not think of albums, let’s not think of labels, deals, money, bullshit, publishing and all that crap. Let’s do it the way we did in the early days, as a band. Let’s get to know each other, let’s get out there and get the gigs done and we’ll take it from there’. And things have just gone from strength to strength you know? We get on great and the whole sort of writing process was just so natural – very much like it was in the early days. One of the things that I think has made the album so special is the way we approached the recording as well. From Resurrection onwards we did go down that Pro-tools, drum triggered thing…you know, just trying to make better productions for the band. I kind of scratched me head and thought ‘let’s go back. Let’s get the microphones on the drum kit, let’s get the Marshalls plugged in, let’s get the fuckers cranked up and let’s play as we do on stage. Let’s play like a fucking live band, like what Venom’s all about and we’ll see what we get out of it.’ And I was blown away by the way these tracks came out.

R: It lets the songs speak for themselves doesn’t it?

C: Absolutely.

AN: One of the most pleasing things about Fallen Angels is the way it has captured so much of the old atmosphere and magic compared to recent albums.

R: And it’s not like we sat there and said ‘let’s write another ‘In Nomine…’ or stuff like that. It helped us in 2009 when we did the South American stuff, the 30 Years of Venom you know? Because it wasn’t like ‘go and listen to the old albums’, the vibe was already there – it was ingrained. It was like ‘let us speak, let the songs speak, let’s just write a good fucking Venom album’.

C: I told these guys from day one that Venom is not a parody. Venom is a band that changes year after year after year. We’re not reliving 1984, Venom are a different band today than we were back then. I’m not looking for a new Mantas or a new Abaddon – I’m looking for a great Venom drummer. I’m looking for a great Venom guitarist who stands up on his own, who’s got his own ideas, his own look, his own identity. I’ve never believed in that parody thing, I think it doesn’t work.

R: The fans are that clever and savvy now that they just see through it.

C: That was what happened when, back in the day, we replaced Mantas when he got sick on that US tour and we got those guys in. The kids were throwing things at them and shouting ‘you’re not Mantas!’ Because that’s who they were trying to be and that’s where the first mistake was. But with these guys, from the 2009 South American tour, we said we’re going to make the live set a full thirty years of Venom, so a song off every Venom album – plus the singles – so even Calm Before The Storm is in there, stuff off Possessed and everything. Get them in there. We’ve come up with these medleys where we go from one song to the next song to the next song, so these guys have got this great understanding of how the band has progressed. But because it’s all on a live stage where we’ve got the same sound, songs from thirty years ago to now have all got the same sound and it comes together – which shows how good the songs are.

D: Yeah, nothing sticks out like a sore thumb, like it sounds like it was recorded fucking thirty years ago. It all comes together like one great sound.

C: As an example – and no disrespect to the band, because I think Saxon are a fantastic band – but when you hear their first stuff, ‘Wheels Of Steel’ and then you hear the stuff they do today, it would be very different for them to do a thirty year thing like that because their songs have radically changed – whereas Venom haven’t. We’ve stayed within the essence of Black Metal you know? In there is thrash metal, power metal, speed metal, death metal…it’s all part of that Black Metal stamp and I think we’ve kind of retained that, which I’m really proud of.

AN: Is it difficult for you to find a balance between progressing and moving on and staying true to your original sound? Especially when there’s so much pressure on you to keep sounding like the early days?

C: Yeah it is a challenge, but I believe the honesty of the songs will tell me if it’s right or wrong. Of course I write things where I think ‘that’s not fucking Venom’, and in a way that’s why I went off and did the Cronos thing back in the day. I had all this material but I knew it wasn’t Venom so I wasn’t going to call it Venom. It was quite heavy but it wasn’t Venom. I think a Venom song tells you it’s a Venom song. It’s got to have the ‘x, y and z’, you know? It’s got to jump out at you and punch you in the nose.

D: Or stab you in the bollocks!” (Dante making a quick reference to the lyrics of new track ‘Nemesis’)

R: It helps with me and Dante’s background. We like classic rock, Glenn Hughes (he points at my Hughes t-shirt), we like that sort of stuff. I’m not into new music. It wasn’t like I was into Lamb Of God and trying to bring that into Venom. I’m into the sort of stuff that Cronos is into.

C: I think that’s another learning thing that Venom have had to go through. We did get a nu-metal drummer in at one point and it didn’t really work…

AN: Antton?

C: Antton yeah. At first, on Resurrection, he was trying to stay within that black metal theme but you can hear by Hell that he was basically a nu-metal drummer and it wasn’t working. That’s why we parted company. Whereas Dante’s got a rock drumming background…

AN: With ex-Sabbath man Tony Martin’s band.

D: Yeah.

C: Yeah, so he’s coming from the same background as Abaddon, he’s a rock drummer who’s learnt metal.

D: Your Sabbath, your Purple, Cream…all that’s my bag.

AN: So how did you end up playing with Venom then?

D: I was playing in Germany with Tony at a festival, Bang Your Head, in 2006, ’07 maybe, and a guy I was chatting to backstage who was working at the venue was working three months later at a venue where Venom were playing. They (indicates Cronos and Rage) were chatting to this guy and asking him who he’d been working with and he reels off all these bands, including ‘Tony Martin from Black Sabbath’. So they were like ‘bloody hell, what’s he doing now?’ And the guy says ‘he’s got a drummer from Newcastle, where you’re from’. So ears pricked up…

C: A lot of people who were auditioning were like ex-Cradle and this, that and the other but I thought ‘that’s not Venom really. We need somebody who knows about Zeppelin and Purple, the bands that Abaddon loves’. Then we’ve got somebody who’s coming from the same place and can approach the drums with the same mentality.

R: You don’t have to explain when you’re going to do a new album. ‘Right mate, this is what you need to do…’

C: Dante was straight up from the get go. He turned round and said ‘I’m not a thrash drummer, I don’t get this blast beat thing…’ and I said ‘you don’t have to. Abaddon developed that from the old ‘boom whack boom whack’, big hitting drumming. We’ll take it from there and you just listen to what’s going on and take it from there’ and he got it like that – because it does make sense. These guys who are going ‘tippy-tappy-tippy-tappy’ that’s not us.

D: When you’re going a hundred miles an hour you can’t play with the intensity that the big rock drummers have got. Drumming that means something when you hit a cymbal or play a drum fill. When you’re going a zillion miles an hour it’s fast and it’s ‘fucking hell look how fast he goes’…but it doesn’t really mean anything. You think ‘this is great’ for five minutes but you get bored of it and end up thinking ‘I’m off to the bar’.

C: I think out of all of the main bands that came up after Venom, the only drummer that I personally like is Lombardo cos he’s a hitter. I’ve stood right beside him at gigs when he’s been playing and I’ve thought ‘you’re a fucking drummer, that’s how you hit the fucking drums’. That’s what I like to hear.

D: Basically you get your foundations down with your drums and then get your guitar on top and your vocals. If you can’t get that right then there’s something wrong.

R: He’s not just a great drummer though (indicating Dante), he’s an entertainer as well. Sometimes I turn round and see him and his arms are going and it gives you energy ‘cos you’re playing along.

C: You know people do think that that’s all show but with him it’s a lot to do with timekeeping as well. He’s counting his beats as he’s doing it. You can see the concentration in the playing and it just makes everything so tight. I’ve always said about this music – thrash, power, black, death – the tighter you can make it, the heavier it gets. I’ve heard the critics who will turn around and say ‘it’s just loud to hide the mistakes’ but no; you hear the mistakes more when it’s loud.

D: Especially when you’re a three piece; you can’t hide behind walls of guitars.

C: I think it’s one of the testaments to this band, because of the work we’ve put into it. One of the last shows we played last year was in the Ukraine. They were young kids who’d put the festival together, it was not the best run festival but love them, they’d tried their best and I love a tryer. They were very young and they didn’t have a clue. It was terrible and sounded atrocious but because we had so much work under our belts we just looked at each other and said ‘fuck it all, let them deal with their shit, we’ll, as a band, nail our shit. The reviews came back and nobody spotted a thing. It was all ‘Venom were amazing, it was fantastic’ and I just thought ‘job done, there you go’. We just sort of looked at each other and kind of like telepathically just fucking went for it. We could stand here and cry, we could stand here and go ‘oh we’re not happy with this’ but no – these people are doing their best, let’s just get on with it. I actually enjoyed it at the end of the day…it was funny as well.

D: You know I said how we’re a three piece? But there was always another bloke on stage, putting a mic stand back up or unplugging a monitor and signalling to the guys at the back of the tent.

C: When I went on the bass backline was all feeding back so I went over and turned it down and the guy came straight back on and turned it back up…’no, you must be loud!’ I think they’d watched a video. They must have watched some Iron Maiden video and seen a roadie run on and change a mic and thought ‘that’s what you must do!’ So these guys kept running on and changing mics and it was like ‘there’s nothing fucking wrong with the mic!’

R: I introduced him as the new member of the band at one point.

C: It was great though. There was this young guy and his girlfriend there who filmed the show and they gave us the tapes after the show – the little hard drives out of their cameras – and it doesn’t look that bad. We’re putting this live DVD together and we can use the footage. We’ll give them a little credit and big them up, you know? At the end of the day it was good to be able to turn that show round, ‘cos it could have been a disaster. The kids don’t want to know about the problems, they don’t understand. They’ve paid for their ticket and they just want to see a fucking great band – so let’s give ‘em what they came for.

AN: Have you got any touring plans in place to support the new album?

C: This year, now that we’ve got the album under our belts we can start looking at getting back out there. We’ve got Germany on 26th November, it’s the Christmas festival and we’re doing the first day which has also got Immortal on before us. We’re headlining. The next day has got Saxon and Hammerfall and that. That’s going to be great – it’s one of the biggest German in door festivals and we’re going to get the full pyro show and walkways and everything. They’re really going to pull out the stops for it. Then two weeks before that we’ve got a show in Bucharest, a Rock Legends festival. We’ve never been to Bucharest so that’s really good for us. Then next year we’ll hopefully get some of the bigger festivals.

AN: But will you be here?

C: Well this is one of things we’re talking about. There are a couple of venues we’re in discussions with, we’d really like to do it but we really want to put on the show. I mean we did that Mean Fiddler gig – great gig, don’t get us wrong – but for me, with England, I really want to do something a bit special. We’re going to try and get the Bloodstock gig and if we get the Bloodstock gig we should be able to put the pyro show on. Failing that would be a London show somewhere. We’re looking at somewhere like the Roundhouse because I think we could still put a show on there. But we’re still looking at all these new territories as well. We’re never been to Ireland, never been to Spain…there’s Australia, you know? We’re busy talking to all these people and then there’s the return to South America. The promoter is trying to get the timing right for us there but he wants us to go back every two or three years. There are other places now opening up there. We did Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil and he says now there’s Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru. There are places opening up all the time as governments are becoming more broad minded.

AN: So did you guys find South America to be as crazy as most bands report?

D: It was like Beatlemania! The first gig was in Mexico and I’ll never forget this…we were getting our suitcases off the belt and this guy, security guy, he says ‘just two minutes, I’m going to go and check out what it’s like’. He went through to Arrivals and when he came back his face…he was like ‘we’re not going through there til we’ve sorted it out. There’s about two hundred kids screaming VENOM! VENOM! VENOM!’ It was great! They were all outside banging on these glass windows with coppers trying to drag them away.

R: And me and Cronos were standing there going ‘right Dante, welcome to Venom’.

D: The people were just so enthusiastic.

R: We had to stop playing at one of the gigs because we couldn’t hear anything.

C: They were doing this football chant but for Venom. We had to stop the gig because they were that loud. We just stood there and let them do it, and then we applauded them and got back on with it. Afterwards we asked one of the security guys what that was and he translated it for us – ‘oh Venom you are our soul and we’re really glad you’re here’ blah blah blah. It was really emotional. ‘We are you and you are us’, all this sort of stuff. They knew all the stuff as well. People have been saying for years ‘Venom is Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon’…what a load of shit. Those guys are in the minority now. The kids that are coming to our shows now, it’s all about the new stuff – they’re singing along to ‘Antechrist’, ‘Burn In Hell’, ‘Metal Black’…and they know all the fucking words as well. I mean these albums are the ones that they’ve bought now, they’re important to them. Yeah they’re familiar with Welcome To Hell and Black Metal and they understand the history of the band but they weren’t there when they were released. Of course we get the older guys at the back waiting for the ‘Countess…’, ‘Witching Hour’, ‘Bloodlust’…great, we’ll always do those, not a problem, it’s all part of the set. But those kids are so enthusiastic for the new stuff…and they’re the majority.

AN: Is it hard fitting new material into the set when there’s so much from the past that you have to play?

C: Yeah, because we like to be controversial as well. We are also looking at songs that have never been played live before, songs that have only ever been played in the studio, never made it on to a stage before. We’ve been rehearsing things like ‘Manitou’…and I was quite surprised, it sounds alright, you know? I think that might creep in for a gig or two. When we did this thirty years thing we said ‘we want to do something off every album and some of the singles and that’ so now it’s like ‘At War With Satan’ going into ‘Too Loud (For The Crowd)’ going into ‘Nightmare’ going into ‘Live Like An Angel…’ blah, blah, blah. Cutting these songs together is fantastic because you see the look on the kids faces and they’re like ‘fucking hell!’ At first they’re like ‘which one’s this?’ and then they’re like ‘fucking hell!’ It’s great seeing the anticipation on their faces. And it also just shows you how good the song writing is as well that they can fit like that, that you can merge such radically different types of songs together really well. You wouldn’t think you can put something like Live Like An Angel…’ with ‘Calm Before The Storm’…but you can.

R: The new songs as well are just slotting in because they’ve got almost the same vibe, you know? You hear stuff like ‘Pedal To The Metal’ and it just fits right in…

…and that is where the lovely Nina from Universal stepped in and called time on our chat; a long queue of other journalists were waiting for their time with Venom. Hopefully I’ll be seeing them again soon – next time in a UK venue where I’ll get to hear some tracks from that fantastic new album, Fallen Angels, live.

For more on the band check out http://www.venomslegions.com