Metal
Conrad Lant has died at the age of 63. Venom announced it on Thursday on social media and have given no cause.
“I want to thank all of the Legions for all of the support you have given my dad over the years,” his son Nathan Lant writes in the statement. “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.”
Lant went by Cronos and was Venom’s voice and bass from the first record. He was born in London in January 1963 and made his career in Newcastle: he worked at Impulse Studios and had a hand in setting up Neat Records, the label that ended up putting the band out. With Jeff “Mantas” Dunn on guitar and Tony “Abaddon” Bray on drums he formed the trio that released “Welcome To Hell” in 1981 and, the year after, “Black Metal”: a title that ended up naming a whole genre. He left in 1987, put together a band under his own war name and came back in 1995, and he was the last founder left in it.
“For more than four decades, Conrad’s voice, bass and vision were at the heart of Venom,” the band’s statement says. “From the first dark thunder of ‘Welcome To Hell’, through ‘Black Metal’, ‘At War With Satan’ and ‘Possessed’, he created something that changed heavy music forever. And Conrad was there at the centre of it all — uncompromising, fearless and unmistakable.”
On 1 May this year Venom had released “Into Oblivion” through Noise and BMG, the band’s sixteenth album and the first since “Storm The Gates” in 2018, with Stuart “Rage” Dixon on guitar and Danny “Dante” Needham on drums. The first single was called “Lay Down Your Soul”.
It is the phrase his son uses in today’s statement.
Text by Roger Estivill