“Loving hard and getting high/Hell’s the place I’m gonna die,” growled Cronos on the punk-paced flip of Venom’s first single. From their self-produced artwork to their shock value lyrics, Venom (formed from the ruins of Newcastle metallers Guillotine, Oberon and Dwarfstar) upped the ante on the supposed Satanism of previous British heavy metal. They even included some bare-faced backwards masking beneath the A-side’s low tribal stomp and corrupting wordplay. Issued in the midst of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) explosion by Wallsend indie Neat (first home to Tygers of Pang Tang, Fist and Raven), those lyrical extremes may have been tempered on this old school sounding B-side, but were more than compensated by its visceral buzzsaw guitars and gargling broken glass vocal delivery. A noisy rampage, it was given the faintest dust and polish for their debut LP Welcome To Hell – a ragbag of demos, albeit super heavy and filthily unrefined ones – that impacted on all future forms of extreme metal. While Venom summarised their contributions on the back cover thus: “Cronos – bulldozer bass and vocals, Mantas – chainsaw guitar dives, Abaddon – drums and nuclear warheads”, such silly assertions now seem relatively mild given the depth of their influence, more than compensating for the artfully crafted two-word rejection letter EMI sent just a year earlier.