Impulse Studios, Wallsend, 1982. Seven days of booked time, an engineer who cut most of the label's catalogue in the same room, and a bass player who had worked at that desk as a tape operator before he was in a band. Nobody in the building thought they were naming anything. They were making the second album by a group whose first one the British weekly press had treated as an accident.
The record that came out of those seven days is the most consequential badly made album in metal, and almost nothing about the way it sounds explains why. What explains it is two words in gothic capitals on the front, printed in Wallsend and cashed nine years later in Norway by people who were at primary school when it appeared.
Three school bands and a label above a bingo hall
The group assembled in Newcastle upon Tyne at the end of the seventies out of three school outfits called Guillotine, Oberon and Dwarfstar, and it took a while to arrive at the line-up that matters: Conrad Lant on bass and vocals, working as Cronos, Jeffrey Dunn on guitar as Mantas, Anthony Bray on drums as Abaddon. Lant moved to bass when the original bassist left, which is the smallest and most important personnel change in this history, because his voice on top of his own distorted bass is half of what the records sound like.
The label was as local as the band. Dave Wood ran Impulse Studios in Wallsend and started Neat Records out of an office above a bingo hall in 1979, and by 1981 Neat had the single "In League with Satan" backed with "Live Like an Angel" and then, that December, Welcome to Hell, cut in three days in August with Keith Nichol engineering. Geoff Barton in the British press gave it five stars while describing the sound in terms that were not praise anywhere else in the paper. The album is filthy, it is fast, and it is the sound of three men deciding that a record does not have to be competent to be terrifying.
Our practice room was a church. The vicar used to let us in and then leave. We ransacked the place, basically.
Cronos, interviewed by John Doran, Metal Hammer 225, November 2011
Seven days in Wallsend
Black Metal reached British shops on 1 November 1982, produced by Nichol and the band, eleven tracks running thirty eight minutes and fifty seconds, with the sides labelled Black and Metal rather than one and two. Lant drew the sleeve himself in correction fluid: a horned face with a pentacle on the forehead, an inverted cross on one horn and three sixes on the other. The back carried the line that home taping was killing music, and so were Venom, which tells you exactly how seriously the band took the apparatus around them.
Sounds gave it five stars. Sixteen years later Kerrang! put it fifty second in a list of a hundred albums to hear before dying and called it the seed everything else grew from. In between, almost nobody in the professional music press had a good word for the band, and the record sold on word of mouth, imports and a tape trading network that operated outside every institution that had dismissed it.
| Release | Date | Label | Cut where | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "In League with Satan" single | 1981 | Neat | Impulse, Wallsend | The first commercial release |
| Welcome to Hell | December 1981 | Neat | Impulse, Wallsend | Three days in August 1981 |
| Black Metal | 1 November 1982 | Neat | Impulse, Wallsend | Seven days, and the title that named a genre |
| At War with Satan | 16 April 1984 | Neat | Impulse, Wallsend | Number 64 in Britain, withdrawn by HMV |
| Possessed | 1985 | Neat | Impulse, Wallsend | The last album with the original three |
| Calm Before the Storm | 9 November 1987 | Filmtrax | The New Marquee, London | Made without Mantas, produced by Nick Tauber |
What the record actually is
Play it without the history attached and it is a very fast, very loud heavy metal album made by three men at the outer limit of what they could play. The guitar is open and heavily distorted rather than palm muted and downpicked, which is why it is not thrash technique. There is no tremolo picking, no blast beat and no rasped vocal, which is why it is not black metal technique either. The songs have verses and choruses. Its nearest relative is Motorhead played dirtier and with the devil in the lyric sheet.
The track list is the part that did the work. "Black Metal", "Countess Bathory", "Buried Alive", "Don't Burn the Witch" and a two minute preview of a song that would take up a whole album side two years later: read as a set of titles rather than as music, that is a programme, and teenagers in Stockholm and Bergen read it exactly that way. Whether the band count as thrash, as black metal or as neither has been argued for forty years, and the answer that survives contact with the recordings is neither. Venom stand at the branching point, and the branches are named after what they became rather than after where they started.
The reception history runs backwards, which is unusual and instructive. At the time the professional press treated three men who could barely play as a joke that had gone on too long. The people who reversed the verdict were not critics but musicians, and they said so early and repeatedly: Lars Ulrich of Metallica has called Welcome to Hell a classic and listed off the genres it fed, Fenriz and Euronymous both pointed at these records rather than at anything American, and by 2017 Rolling Stone had Welcome to Hell at number 74 in a list of the hundred greatest metal albums. Eduardo Rivadavia at AllMusic singles out "Witching Hour" as possibly the band's single most consequential recording for what extreme metal became.
The gap between those two verdicts is about thirty years, and it closed for a reason that has nothing to do with the playing. What the musicians heard, and what the reviewers of 1982 had no way of hearing, was permission. The record demonstrated that you could put something this crude on vinyl, sell it, and be taken seriously by the only audience that mattered.
Two words in gothic capitals, printed in Wallsend and cashed nine years later in Norway.
What happened next to the band
The two years after Black Metal were the band's largest. At War with Satan arrived on 16 April 1984 with a title track running just under twenty minutes across the whole of side one, reached number 64 in Britain and was withdrawn by HMV, which feared the obscenity laws. Venom played Hammersmith Odeon in London in June 1984 on a tour billed as the seventh date of hell, and the footage from that night was still being reissued four decades later. The following April they were in New York with Slayer and Exodus for the Combat Records package that came out as a live document of the American underground in 1985.
Then it came apart in the ordinary way. Mantas left in 1986 before an American tour, and Calm Before the Storm, released on 9 November 1987 with Jimi Clare and Mike Hickey on guitars and Nick Tauber producing, is defended by almost nobody. Lant left soon after it. The band continued in altered forms, effectively stopped in 1992, reassembled the original three in 1995 and has run in one configuration or another ever since. None of that later work carries any weight in this history, and the band would probably agree.
What happened next to the phrase
By the time the group had finished being a going concern, the two words on the sleeve had left home. Norwegian musicians who were children in 1982 took the phrase, the pseudonyms, the inverted crosses and the refusal to break character, discarded the rock and roll, the humour and the jokes about home taping, and built something the men from Newcastle would not have recognised. Not one royalty attached to any of it.
Lant's own position has been consistent and is worth taking seriously. The words described the lyrics on a record. They were not a manifesto, he was not founding anything, and the people who later meant it were not his responsibility. He is right on every count, and it makes no difference, because a name goes to whoever picks it up. That is the paradox chapter one is built around, the same paradox that runs through who Invented Black Metal, and the man who did the musical work while Newcastle held the title deed is bathory.
