I heard that you actually converted part of your house into a recording studio?

Not really. I've acquired a new house, and it's and old thing, like from the Sixteenth Century. There's a ballroom, and it's ideal for a recording studio. The wine cellar's kind of like a "chill out" area. So it works out pretty good. But I only live here part of the time, so it's kind of between one and the other, you know?

Obviously, you guys are going to go out on tour once the new album's out. Are you thinking about who you're going to tour with, or will it just be VENOM, by yourselves?

It's going to be VENOM gigs, VENOM headline shows. The only people we've been in contact with from the UK are a band called CRADLE OF FILTH. They want to work with a band where they can put on their own stage show, and not be squeezed for space. That's the way VENOM's always operated. If you think of all the bands that have worked with us in the past, like METALLICA, SLAYER, and EXODUS, we've always wanted to give one hundred percent of the show to the kids, and that doesn't just mean VENOM's portion of the show. That means the whole piece. I guess it's kind of like what Ozzy's [Osbourne] doing at the moment, all the bands that are working with him. They're not support bands, they're doing just as much of "their" show as physically possible, really.

That's awesome that you might be touring with CRADLE OF FILTH, then. When you're out on the road, will you be doing songs from some of your "lesser known" albums, like Prime Evil?

Because of the nature of the band, the arguments in the past, and the way that the band members are, I would say that it's one hundred percent certain that we're only doing songs that are Lant/Dunn/Bray songs. There'll only be songs from when Cronos was in the band, so we won't be doing things from Prime Evil, we won't be doing stuff from Calm Before the Storm. It'll only be stuff from the first four albums, obviously, and this new one.

So you will be playing some of the new stuff then.

Oh yeah, sure! It's difficult to say the new stuff's going to be featured heavily, but it's going to be featured pretty good. There's going to be maybe four or five new songs in there. We're all going to be fighting to find out which of those songs it's gonna be, 'cause the songs are still fairly new. And a VENOM song doesn't really find its own speed and its own weight until its been played live a few times. So we'll argue it out, and we'll come up with four or five in there.

Dare I ask if you'll be playing some of those at the Milwaukee MetalFest?

We will, yes.

[taken aback] That's gonna be killer!! Some of those other albums, that aren't really well known, like Prime Evil again, you know that they're not available here in the States. Do you want to see them re-released here, or would you like to just forget about them?

The last four years of my work has been to pull the band back together again, and to make the live thing happen, and then to make the recording thing happen. Because of the way things have been in the past, things have been difficult, but we've managed to make that happen. Now the focus is getting all the old stuff back, and getting it back in the stable where it belongs. That includes Welcome to Hell, Black Metal, right up to Prime Evil, and Temples of Ice and The Wastelands. We're actively looking for a label who can look after the whole stable, take all of the albums together properly, and maybe re-package, maybe re-mix, whatever, but somebody who will sit down with the band and say, "This is what I think's good for VENOM for the back-catalog, and this is how we intend to market it." And we've never really been able to do that before. Music For Nations, who released Prime Evil, did an extremely good job in England, and a tremendous job in Europe, but didn't really do anything for the States. With VENOM, being on smaller labels, we've always had that throughout our whole career. Different albums come out different places, people ask, "What's this? What's that?" Sometimes that's the mistake of the band. Sometimes it makes people kind of wonder if the band's a shambles. But from the band's point of view, it makes us want to have some kind of curtain drawn across the stuff and say, "OK, there's a label looking after it, who are doing the best for it," instead of it being fragmented and everywhere. That's kind of where all of our heads going now. We're happy with how the live band works, we're happy with how the recorded band works, and we're happy with how the personalities accept each other now. I think it's attacking this area of the band's past that's really quite important, and it's gonna be maybe next year's work for us.

You'd think that with your current popularity, that labels would be fighting over signing you.

Well, a lot of labels want to sign us. A lot of the people who run these labels tend to be of a similar age to us, and they tend to have grown up on a lot of thrash metal, and grown up through the METALLICA growth and the SLAYER growth. These people are very aware of that. It's not like we're going to labels who don't know what VENOM's about anymore. People are very aware of the back catalog, they're very aware of the influence, and that's good. It makes it easier to talk to people. We don't have to educate them. People know it, and a lot of these labels are very good labels. Hopefully we can make the right decision. And it won't neccessarily be about getting money instantly. It's not about fighting over who's going to pay the most. It's over who's going to do the best for this material in the long run.

Shifting gears now, what was it like playing in front of so many fans at the Dynamo Fest last year?

Ohhhhhh... absolutely, completely a knockout. I've always been involved with the Dynamo, and I've had the promoter asking me to get VENOM back together. Again, the promoter and the people involved with the promoter were people brought up on VENOM, were brought up on SLAYER, and I'd always said I could possibly get VENOM to do it, as the original members, if the show was gonna be right. If everything was gonna be right, I could convince people to do it. I thought I could convince the band to do it, and when they were convinced, it was great. But always in my mind was, "Now we've got to convince this crowd, because they're not all gonna be VENOM fans." There's 89,000 people here who are into extreme music. I've seen how they reacted to BIOHAZARD, I've seen how they are with FEAR FACTORY, MACHINE HEAD, and GRIP, INC. I figured, this is the right form of music, but these people are so young, maybe it was their brothers who were originally into VENOM. I was just proved completely wrong when we stepped out and like 89,000 people just went absolutely fucking nuts for the whole period. I couldn't believe it. It still hasn't sunk in, because I don't believe all those people were VENOM fans, and that they all had pictures and albums, but they were all completely one hundred percent there for the band. I personally have never seen anything like it. VENOM got that kind of reaction back in the early '80s, but never with that amount of people. But to step up and have that many people ready to get into the gig as much as the band were, was absolutely a complete eye-opener.

So what do you think of the fact that you've got so many more fans now? That your music has kept growing and growing?

Again, I think that has very little to do with VENOM. I think that's got an awful lot to do with other bands who were constantly in the limelight, who saved VENOM. This week in Kerrang, there are five pictures of Phil Anselmo [PANTERA], live at the OzzFest, and he's wearing a VENOM t-shirt. And a good part of the magazine is his talking about VENOM and its influence, and VENOM had fuck all to do with that, really, apart that in the early '80s, Phil was into the band. It's got that kind of longevity about it, but I think you have to earn it, but I don't think you're aware that you're acheiving it. I think it's something that just happens. If it happens, then you're lucky.

Yeah. Now, when you guys first started, you didn't really sound like anybody else, except maybe MOTORHEAD. I mean, Cronos doesn't really have a "golden throat."

I think MOTORHEAD was a very obvious influence on us, but I think you can say that so were JUDAS PRIEST, because MOTORHEAD have kind of a very bluesy R&B kind of background to their sound. Whereas, PRIEST had a very '80s, spiky heavy metal sound to the guitar, and that's very relevant in a lot of VENOM riffs. Again, with the stage show, MOTORHEAD wouldn't have been seen dead going on stage the way we did, and that very much came from KISS. So you know they're an influence. One of the biggest influences that people don't often see is DEEP PURPLE, because PURPLE could pick up a gig, and if something was going wrong, they could wing it. And VENOM had to learn to do that, because we weren't particularly good musicians. It was kind of like a wing and a prayer. You had to pick the gig up from where you were, pick the song up from where you were, and sometimes that makes for interesting bootlegs. I'm a very big collector of DEEP PURPLE bootlegs, or have been, and you kind of pick up tapes and albums of the same songs time and time again, and they're all played differently because of different situations, and they'll never be played that way again. I think VENOM's very much like that. You can pick up "Witching Hour" from anywhere over the last ten years, and you pick the song up four or five times, and it sounds different every time. And I think that's an influence that we've not deliberately drawn from.

So, given the fact that your music was so rough, and rude, and loud, did people pick up on what you were doing, or were you slagged for a long time?

Well, we were slagged for a very long time. We still kind of will be by the mainstream press. I think again, that's one of the things about being an originator. If you're just accepted and ignored, that's got to be the worst thing in the world for being in the band. To make a piece of music, whether it be a live piece or a recorded piece, and have people simply ignore it, has to be the worst thing in the world. To have people ridicule stuff, means that they're aware of it, and it means that it has an influence on them, even if they don't understand it yet. VENOM were ridiculed by absolutely everybody throughout the early '80s, because we didn't have poodle-hair, and we didn't play "ooh yeah, yeah, I love you baby" songs, which heavy metal bands were playing. Because we weren't doing that, and we were being more dirty and more raw, people didn't understand it. And then all of a sudden through the late '80s and early '90s, when everyone's hearing bands like METALLICA, people then think it's cool to say, "Yeah, I was at that VENOM gig at Hammersmith. Man, it was awesome!" And they weren't there, and it's all bullshit, but that's part of the same picture.

How about the fact that a lot of fans have gone on to form their own bands, and have been on tribute albums to you guys?

I think one of the first things we said in an interview when people were talking about VENOM and saying "this new band from England, and the Godfathers of Heavy Metal and Thrash Metal and stuff," was, "Yeah, but the whole idea of being in a band was to get up and just play an instrument and make some form of sound, some form of music, if you call it that." And an awful lot of bands, especially in Europe, and Eastern Europe, and up into Scandinavia came out and thought, "Yeah, we can do that." Music in the '60s and '70s was based around what you were taught in school, and what you were taught from your peers. It was very rarely something about just picking up a guitar and trying something yourself. I think a lot of bands now, especially a lot of European bands that came out in the '80s, were bands that just got together and had an intensity and had an intent to play. You become a better musician the more you practice and stick together, and meet other people and get other influences. I think that's the most important thing. And then those bands that turn around and decide to do VENOM tributes, we think it's a tremendous thing because it's bands that say, "We didn't just get musically influenced by you, we were influenced by your whole attitude, by your whole intent." That's very important to us. It means that we were doing something right. Whether people liked the sound of it or not, meant that we were doing something people were aware of, even when they were growing up.

Something that's become kind of a trend is for musicians not to use their real names. But you guys were one of the first bands not to use your real names when you put out your first albums. Why did you decide to be known as: Cronos, Mantas, and Abaddon?

Originally, I think the thing was that we didn't want to be seen as just being who we were to some people who were working for some factory and had regular names and regular day-jobs. We wanted to be this untouchable, hidden thing. If you look at some of the early albums, the photographs were very deliberately hiding our faces. If you look at the logo, the early logo, it was a very twisted, very unintelligible looking logo. All this stuff was in 1979, 1980. If you look at the photographs of bands through the '80s and '90s, a lot of people are hiding their names and their faces. They hide in shadows. And you look at their logos, and their logos are comepletely indecipherable. I think that whole thing about VENOM was like that. People talk a lot about backward masking on albums and hiding stuff, I think the whole thing with VENOM was a lot of that. It was a lot about hiding. We didn't play live gigs for about the first three years, and then when we did, they were very sparse and few and far between. I think the band was always about hiding, about being untouchable and almost insignificant. We could go to a pub and have a drink, and the three of us, if we were together, all looked like we were in a rock band, but a lot of people weren't aware of who we were. We didn't walk in and go, "Ta-daa! It's MOTLEY CRUE!" We'd walk in a pub, and people would go, "Fuck, they look sinister. They look menacing. They look like big guys. They're all long hair and leather, they look like they're in a band, but I don't know who they are." I think, subliminally, we deliberately did that, with the logo and the kind of hidden faces. I think that's another thing that's caught on that we did, which has nothing to do with the music, but has to do with the whole dark image.

Something else I've always wondered about is why on At War with Satan, did you guys decide to do a twenty minute song?

That's very much been a bone of contention of Cronos'. He wrote that piece as an extension to The Bible, The Book of Armageddon. I've said to him many times that I only wished he'd waited, and that he'd written it better, and we'd been better musicians to play it better, because it's a tremendous piece. The whole story's a wonderful story, and it's a wonderful piece, and we could have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a video. The thing was, at the time, that was where his head was, and if VENOM ends tomorrow, that will always be the great unfinshed work, because that's the piece we should re-think and write together properly and re-record, from my way of thinking, and maybe he'd agree. But the fact that it was twenty minutes, it could have three hours and twenty minutes. We never even once thought, "We should be doing three minute singles here," or, "We should be releasing albums of a similar nature." We didn't want to be different, it was just the right thing to record at the time.

Well, this is probably my last question. What can we expect to see at the Milwaukee MetalFest?

[laughs] Personally, I've never been to the MetalFest. I've heard about it of course, I'm aware of the bands who have played, and I'm aware from hearing from other bands from England who have played, that it's a very hectic affair. When I've looked at the flyers, and I think there's like forty bands on the day that we're on, I cannot logistically see how this can possibly work. So for me, when I was doing the last few gigs that we've done, and especially the Dynamo, I've spent a lot of time on the production. Everything had to be just so, and the right timing, sixty people on stage, and that kind of stuff, and I think for the Milwaukee thing, we're not going to get a soundcheck. We're going to kind of have to wing it. I think it's going to be a very punky, very raw performance. We're going to fit in with everybody else. We're not going there to be primadonnas and say, "Look, fuck, we do this and we do that, and you get the fuck out of the way, and these four bands can't play." We're going to go and just try and fit around everybody else, and make the best that we can of it. There will be a lot of pyrotechnics, there'll be a lot of backdrops, huge drumkits, fireworks, guitars on fire, all this kind of stuff. There'll be about an hour thirty of mainly what we consider classic songs, classic VENOM songs, interspersed with four or five new ones, and an apocalyptic ending. And that will be us doing the best we can with this gig. I honestly feel that the gig, for me, has a punk attitude. I don't see how it can not, with having that many bands on it, with having that many people to work together to give the audience the best that they all can. So, we're just going to want to fit in with all of that, and do the exact same as everybody else, and give everybody that kind of hope for that kind of topping on the cake at the end of the night. I hope that's the right attitude to go at it with.

Sounds like it is. I can guarantee you that everybody is going to go fucking nuts.

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant. I can't wait for this. We haven't been to the States for such a long time, and I hope that it feels like we haven't been away.