Three men from Newcastle went into a studio in 1981 to record a demo, ran out of money, and the label released the tapes as they were. The result was a record that almost nobody would defend on technical grounds and that is more responsible for the shape of extreme metal than anything made that year by musicians who could actually play.
Welcome to Hell is the permission slip. Understanding why requires setting aside the question of whether it is any good, which is the wrong question and always has been.
What is actually on the record
Forty minutes of fast, crude, extremely distorted heavy metal, played by a guitarist, a bassist who sings and a drummer who is frequently ahead of both. The production is a wash. The bass is enormous and largely uncontrolled. The vocal is a shout with the reverb turned up.
The songs themselves are structurally conventional, which is the thing most people misremember. There is no thrash technique here: the rhythm guitar is not systematically palm muted and downpicked, and the drumming is rock drumming played fast. Venom did not invent the genre's mechanics and never claimed to.
What they did have was an attitude of total commitment to being unacceptable, and the sound of three people playing at the absolute limit of their ability, which is a sound that cannot be faked by anybody competent.
The permission
In 1981 a teenager who wanted to make heavy music measured himself against Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. That meant professional musicians, real studios, ten years of practice, harmonised leads played in tune, and a singer with a range. The barrier to entry was not money, it was skill, and it looked insurmountable.
Venom demolished it in forty minutes. Here was a record that sounded like it had been made in a shed by people who had picked up their instruments the previous year, and it was frightening, and it was in the shops with a catalogue number.
Every band who formed in the following three years in the Ruhr, in Brazil, in Sweden and in the East Bay had that example in front of them. If this counted, anything counted. That is not a small contribution; it is arguably the largest single contribution any band made to the existence of extreme metal.
The word on the second sleeve
The following year they released an album called Black Metal. The music on it is not black metal in any sense that a listener in 1994 would recognise, but the phrase was now printed on a sleeve and available to be picked up.
Nine years later a scene in Norway took it, applied it to something considerably more serious and considerably more dangerous, and the word left Newcastle for good. Venom named a genre that did not exist, from a city with no connection to it, by accident, and it stuck to somebody else. There is no better summary of what this band was for.
| Contribution | Present on the record | Picked up by |
|---|---|---|
| Permission to record before you can play | Throughout | The Ruhr, Brazil, Scandinavia |
| Extremity as a posture rather than a technique | Lyrics and presentation | Slayer, Bathory, Sarcofago |
| The name black metal | The 1982 follow up | Norway, from 1991 |
| Speed as an end in itself | Several tracks | All of thrash |
| Thrash technique | Absent | Came from elsewhere |
The Satanism question
It was a costume and everybody involved has said so, repeatedly and with some embarrassment. The imagery came out of paperbacks and horror films, the band were three young men from Newcastle with jobs, and the theatrical excess was closer to a Hammer production than to any belief system.
That did not stop it functioning. In 1981 the imagery was genuinely transgressive in a way that is hard to reconstruct now, and it gave a generation of bands a visual language that was not denim and dragons. Slayer took it and made it frightening by refusing to wink. Bathory took it and made it cold. Sarcofago photographed it in Minas Gerais in corpse paint in 1987 and sent the image to Norway.
None of that would have happened without three men in Newcastle deciding that the pentagram was funnier and more useful than the dragon.
How to listen to it now
Not as a great album, because it is not one, and any attempt to defend it in those terms falls apart in the first four minutes. Listen to it as a document of what became possible on the day it was released.
Play Welcome to Hell, then play something recorded eighteen months later by a band who had heard it, and the transmission is audible. The speed, the crudity as a choice rather than a failure, the refusal to be pleasant. Venom supplied the licence and other people did the work, and both halves were necessary.
The wider period is covered in this part of the history, and the vexed question of what genre this band actually belongs to is dealt with separately in Is Venom Thrash Metal, Black Metal or Neither?.
How it actually got made
The circumstances explain the record better than any critical description could.
Three young men from Newcastle, one of whom worked at the local studio, booked time to record a demo. Neat Records, a small local label operating out of Wallsend, listened to the tapes, decided they were releasable as they stood, and put them out. There was no production budget to speak of and no second attempt at anything. What is on the album is substantially what happened in the room over a handful of days.
That is why it sounds the way it does, and it is also why it could not have been faked. A band with money and time would have fixed the timing, retracked the vocal and tidied the bass, and every one of those improvements would have removed the thing that made the record dangerous.
The lesson was not lost on anybody. When Kreator and Sodom made their debuts three and four years later, they were working at similar speed on similar budgets, and neither band showed any interest in sounding tidier.
The reviews at the time
Contemporary critical opinion was, to put it politely, unenthusiastic. The British music press of 1981 treated the record as a joke at best and as an embarrassment at worst, and the technical criticisms were entirely accurate: the playing is sloppy, the production is a mess, the lyrics are ridiculous.
What none of that criticism could account for is why teenagers in four countries responded to it the way they did. The reviewers were assessing a record. The audience was receiving a message, and the message was that the gate was open.
Forty years on, the same reviews look like a case study in what criticism is bad at. Judged as a piece of music, Welcome to Hell is exactly as flawed as everybody said. Judged by what happened next, it is one of the half dozen most important records heavy music has produced, and the two judgements are both true at once.
Sources and notes
Welcome to Hell was released by Neat Records in December 1981, from sessions originally recorded as a demo. Black Metal followed in 1982. Statements about the band's intentions follow their own published accounts.
