Venom heard Motorhead and thought “That’s a bit tame”. The result is a darker and rougher sound, with vocalist Cronos (Conrad Lant) roaring and growling rather than singing as such. Cronos also plays the bass, and we have yet another power trio. The other two band members also go by pseudonyms – Mantas (Jeffrey Dunn) on guitar and Abbadon (Anthony Bray) on drums and these names, evoking a sense of Dante’s Inferno, play into the band’s satanic imagery.
This is played tongue-in-cheek, although I suspect many people, fans and opponents alike, probably missed this point. They’re kind of the bright red stage blood and gratuitous nudity of a Hammer Horror production in terms of deliberate but evidently fake scares. The track Countess Bathory is about a fabled Countess who bathes in the blood of virgins to stay young, but the opening riff is a heavy metal version of The Magic Roundabout theme.
Satanic imagery abounds on the album – To Hell And Back, Don’t Leave Me In Hell, Heaven’s On Fire, At War With Satan, as do other horror themes – Buried Alive, Raise The Dead, Sacrifice, Don’t Burn The Witch. The one exception is Teacher’s Pet (“Teacher’s pet, teacher’s wet”) which is a schoolboy sex fantasy that AC/DC didn’t dare to be as explicit about.
It’s pretty clear that all this is meant just for shock value rather than any kind of real worldview from the band, but that doesn’t stop people clutching their pearls. The album also spawned a genre of the same name, which I would guess would in turn mutate into death and thrash metal, and some of their successors took the whole satanism element to become an actual part of their identity. Here, though it’s all harmless fun. As with a lot of this style of music I found it a bit repetitive, not least because the songs are a standard 3-4 minutes rather than the ultra-short hardcore punk tracks, but some of them are good fun – Countess Bathory and Teacher’s Pet especially.
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