Conrad Lant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since October 2006. (help, talk)

Conrad Thomas Lant (aka Cronos), born in London's South Kensington borough, UK, in 1963, is a musician who is the vocalist and bass player of the influential first wave black metal band Venom, from 1979 to 1987 and from 1995 to this day.

After leaving his high school band Dwarfstar, he joined a band called Guillotine as a guitarist in 1978, where he met Jeffrey Dunn (aka Mantas). In 1980, the original bass player left one week before a gig. Instead of not playing the venue, Lant took up the bass and they changed the band name to Venom. He continued to play the bass throughout his career in Venom. In 1981, the band's vocalist Clive Archer left, leaving Lant to take over this role too.

Lant left the band in 1989 to pursue a solo career and occasionally featured in many other bands of a similar genre, including: Cronos, Enthroned, Cradle of Filth, Warpath, Massacre, and Necrodeath. He also produced some of the albums for other bands.

Venom tried to continue without Cronos but only managed a couple of releases before calling a halt on their efforts in around 1993 due to lack of sales and poor concert attendances. Cronos reformed the original Venom line-up in 1995 and headlined the Dynamo Festival in 1996 to a staggering 90,000 fans.

In 1999, the band went on to headline the Wacken Festival in Germany and play a one-off show in Holland before they were forced to take a break after Cronos was injured in a climbing accident which left him unable to play bass or sing for a few years. He took to the computer to pass the time and studied games programming, learned 3D software skills and worked as the main multimedia engineer for the computer companies K-Class Systems and Globalfibre.tv.

Cronos again reformed Venom in around 2003 with his brother Antton on drums and recruiting Michael Alan Hickey. After the next couple of years of planning and intensive rehearsals, Venom released their latest album 'Metal Black' in early 2006 on the Sanctuary Group label Castle Music, and they embarked on a sold out world tour. Cronos also appeared on David Grohl's heavy metal side project Probot in 2004.