“Bass should stand on its own. It’s as powerful as the guitar”: Conrad Lant on his disdain for Ampeg SVTs and how he bought Andy Fraser’s Gibson EB-3 for £50 – “It was the exact one he played on All Right Now!”

Cronos of Venom performs at the Inferno International Metal festival on April 15, 2022 in Oslo, Norway.

When we asked Conrad Lant of Venom how he got into the bass guitar in the late 1970s he told this great story. “I got into bass through a guy letting me down! I'd joined a band as a rhythm guitarist, but one day the bass player didn't arrive. I was working at Impulse Studios near Newcastle, which later became the home of Neat Records, and I asked the guy there if I could borrow a bass. 

"We had a gig at the weekend and I figured I'd just play the root notes! I fell in love with that bass, a Gibson EB-3, and thought, ‘This is me!’ I bought it for 50 quid – and I was on 24 quid-a-week wages at the time, so you imagine what that was like – and it turns out it was Andy Fraser's bass, the exact one he played in All Right Now.”