Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant might be the last stranger Kate Bush kissed on the lips in public. It was September 1980, and the queen of witchy art-pop was doing a signing session at Virgin Records in Newcastle during a stop-off in the city as part of her now-fabled Tour Of Life audio-visual extravaganza.
Cronos’s love of Bush and her music might seem at odds with the filth-hound racket he was making with his own band, demonic NWOBHM brat-princes Venom, but it’s just one of many unexpected and interesting things about him.
“What’s not to love about Kate Bush?” he says now, 46 years later, Geordie accent as wide as the Tyne estuary. “She’s got an incredible way of writing. I even dyed me hair red with henna because of her.”
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So when Cronos heard about that signing session, he told his bosses at the recording studio where he worked that he was bunking off for a couple of hours.
“I raced in and pushed me way to the front of the queue, got as near as I could,” he recalls. “She had these posters she was signing. I said: ‘Can you write “To Cronos…”? Then I said: ‘Can I have a kiss?’”
Some might have recoiled at the sight of a short, scrawny Geordie in a leather jacket asking for a smacker. But Kate Bush was made of sterner stuff.
“She leaned over and kissed me on me lips,” he says. “My knees went. As I was walking away in a daze, the guy behind us says: ‘Can I have a kiss?’ And I heard this voice: ‘No more kisses.’ I was the last one.”
He beams like a moonstruck teenager at the memory. “I’ve still got the poster: ‘To Cronos, lots of love, Kate Bush.’”
There are two versions of Cronos. One is the gargling, bass-wrecking Beelzebubian madman who has fronted Venom on and (occasionally) off since the end of the 70s. The other is the garrulous Geordie who used to teach aerobics, is into birdwatching and growing chillis, and loves Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and, yes, Kate Bush.
Both versions are here on this warm Saturday morning in May in London, nursing Coke-and-ice in a booth in a Wetherspoons on Camden Lock. Later today, he and current Venom guitarist Stuart ‘Rage’ Dixon and drummer Danny ‘Dante’ Needham will descend on nearby metal shop Raven Records for their own in-store ahead of the release of the band’s sixteenth album, Into Oblivion, a wild-eyed rush of noise and sacrilege. ‘Satan ejaculates!’ Cronos snarls on one song, Man And Beast. “I just like using profanity for the fuck of it,” he says with a grin.
But it’s not just provocation. Nevermore references Cronos’s beloved Edgar Allan Poe. “The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, I love that stuff,” he says. He was even thinking of recording his own audiobook version of Poe’s poetry, putting his own spin on it. He begins reciting phrases from The Raven: “‘Bleak December… saintly days of yore.’”
When talking, Cronos might make Jimmy Nail sound like a minor royal, but he was born in London. South Chelsea, specifically. “The Who used to park their van around the corner and me mam used to get her cigarettes from the shop where Mick Jagger and them lot bought theirs too,” he says. “I remember seeing him on the telly and saying: ‘That’s the guy from the corner shop.’”
Moving to Newcastle at seven or eight was tough. He got into a fight on his first day of school because of his accent. “‘Cockney wanker!’” he says, then mimes a punch: “Bam!” He doesn’t say who was on the receiving end of it.
He grins when he describes what he was like as a teenager. “A wanker. A proper twat. Me and me mate would terrorise the school.” One day, he broke into his mum’s stash of Mogadons and washed them down with a bottle of vodka. “I can’t even remember that day at school, but apparently I was wanting to fight all the teachers.”
He wanted to join the army as a kid, which he thinks might have straightened him out, but getting shot in the eye with a pellet when he and his friends were messing about with air rifles put the kibosh on that. “I’m blind in this eye,” he says, pointing to his right peeper. “The pellet’s still in there.”
He loved music as a kid: early Queen, Jethro Tull. His elder brother, Graham, was an in-demand drummer who ended up joining local heroes Prefab Sprout. “Oh, they were shite. I hated those fuckers,” he says of the latter. “They turned up in the studio one day and the engineer said: ‘This is Prefab Sprout.’ ‘Prefab what?’ We were rolling round the floor laughing our cocks off.”
Cronos got a job in a local recording studio, Impulse. In his telling, he persuaded the owners to set up Neat Records to release singles and albums by local bands such as Fist, Tygers Of Pan Tang and, eventually, Venom themselves. “I said: ‘All this heavy music is going on. Yous needed to get on it.”
He’d joined Venom when he was 16, fuelled by the mad rush of punk. He wasn’t their singer at first. That was Clive Archer, who wore protocorpse paint make-up and had the stage name Jesus Christ. “Jeff and Bray said: ‘We think you’re better than him.’ So we kicked him out and became a three-piece. I’ve never seen him since.”
Jeff is Jeff Dunn, aka original Venom guitarist Mantas, and Bray is drummer Tony Bray, aka Abaddon. This unholy trinity were on a mission to drag rock’n’roll to Hades, and they damn near succeeded. Venom’s first two albums, 1982’s Welcome To Hell and the following year’s Black Metal are the twin fonts from which all extreme metal springs. Rough-arsed hymns of blasphemy that made Motörhead sound like The Nolans. As Cronos puts it: “Ozzy was singing about the Devil. I wanted to be the Devil.”
To some, he came close. The title track of 1985’s heroically abrasive Possessed album landed them on the PMRC’s ‘Filthy Fifteen’ list of songs likely to corrupt America’s youth.
“I thought it was fucking great,” he says. “Fucking hell, you’ve got Frank Zappa and John Denver stepping up against these bored housewives. I’m a massive John Denver fan as well.” He starts singing: ‘You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest…’
The air of malevolence surrounding Venom electrified a generation of young American metal fans. Metallica and Slayer opened for Venom in the US. “Me and Cliff Burton used to hang out,” Cronos says of the late Metallica bassist. “He’d bring weed, I’d have hash. He was a proper stoner, Cliff. Good lad.”
Things were different back home in Britain. Gnarly metal fans loved Venom, but everyone else thought they were a joke, not least the press. “It seemed like England wanted fuck-all to do with Venom,” he says. “We must’ve stepped on the wrong toes.”
The only people who disliked Venom more than the press were Venom themselves.
“People have made up this myth about that line-up,” he says. “There was no camaraderie. We weren’t friends. When this band split, it was on bad terms.”
Technically, Venom didn’t split. Cronos quit in 1987, but the other two carried on without him. The original line-up reunited for one album in the mid-90s but the old problems resurfaced. One by one, Abaddon and Mantas fell away, leaving Cronos to lead the band ever since. The current three-piece line-up has been together for 17 years, almost three times as long as the original. Today there’s no love lost between Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon.
“Nah,” he says. “I don’t want anything to do with them two. Too much piss-fartin’ around.”
This is where the public perception of Cronos splits from the reality. Post-Venom, he considered quitting music. “I was gonna pack it all in. I was gonna be a slaughterman or work in the forestry commission. I love being outdoors.” Instead he formed a new band, Cronos, who leaned into more melodic heavy metal, verging on hard rock. They released two albums that are interesting rather than great.
But the early 90s saw him diversify in an unexpected fashion. He’d done his share of hard living in the 80s, but he was into weightlifting and fitness too. He’d seen how the aerobics craze had taken off on the back of Hollywood star Jane Fonda’s workout videos and he wanted in on the action. “I knew fuck-all about cardiovascular exercise, so I decided to go and learn how to do it properly,” he says. “I went to college, got top marks for everything in all me exams.”
By the early 90s he was working as a fitness instructor. “I did loads of classes. I played rave. We’d start off with mid-paced stuff, just to warm up, then it was bang! bang! bang!” He worked with guys from the military. “They used to come to the classes. We’d do it in sports halls or fields. They’d have their boots and backpacks on.”
Cronos was with his military buddies when he had the accident that nearly finished his music career for good. They’d take him climbing in Wales and Scotland. “Have you ever done it?” he asks. “The feeling you get being on top of a mountain is almost spiritual.”
He was on a climb in Wales in the early 2000s when he was hit by a falling rock. “The guy above us, the rock under his foot gave way,” he says. “I ducked out of the way, but it hit us square in the back of me neck – boom. I was braced up for a while.”
It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was serious. “I couldn’t play bass,” he says. “I certainly couldn’t stand up and play bass. I felt like I was done playing music. That’s when I took up the computer.”
This is yet another avenue that Cronos’s strange life has led him down
“A mate of mine had a computer company in Newcastle,” he says. “I was laughing at the graphics on the company logo, and he said: ‘Can you do better?’ I went: ‘Yeah.’”
He dived into Photoshop and began working as a multimedia engineer for his mate’s company. He saw it as an extension of what he’d done all his life. “Everything’s an art medium,” he says. “I could pick up some mud and create a picture on a canvas. This is the way I see creativity – nothing’s off the table. So AI comes along, and I’m like: ‘Yeah, I’ll try that.’”
He’s talking about the visual arts, not music.
“Nah,” he says. “I’ll always write me own music.”
Life today is only slightly less full-on than it has been. He grows chillis for a hobby, making sauces that he gives to friends. “If you’re talking Carolina Reapers and Nagas and all them boys, you’ve got to get your compost right,” is his tip. He was a member of the RSPB as a kid, and he still keeps an eye out for birds around his house in Northumberland. “Goldfinches, robins, wrens. We even had a heron in our back garden. I’ve always been into birds. Not just the flying ones,” he adds with a cackle.
It’s the kind of ripped-from-the-old-days gag you want from Cronos, a man who has spent almost 50 years giving less than zero fucks about what other people think of him – an approach that has brought him the good and the bad with it.
“It’s a journey and a story, and you’ve got to take everything in your stride,” he says, momentarily philosophical. “If you go back and change something, you change who you are today.”
It should sound surprising coming from a man who wrote a song called In League With Satan. But this is Cronos, and with him everything and nothing is a surprise.
Into Oblivion is out now via Noise/BMG.
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