At the dawn of the 1980s, the world's biggest hard rock and heavy metal bands were not blind to the emergence of an exciting new generation of raw, hungry and ambitious young British groups with aspirations to join them at rock's top table. As such, emerging NWOBHM upstarts Iron Maiden were booked to join Kiss and Judas Priest on tour, while Def Leppard hit the road with AC/DC.
Venom, however, received no such invitations.
"We never asked and were never offered anything," band leader Cronos told this writer. "I felt we were a totally different entity, and we didn’t want to be in anyone’s club. We knew from the kind of mail we were getting back then that our audience was extreme. I remember saying to the lads [guitarist Mantas and drummer Abaddon], Our crowd is going to be one fucked-up bunch of motherfuckers."
Among those "motherfuckers", Cronos came to learn, were an excitable quartet of diehard Venom fans in California who had formed a band of their own, Metallica.
"I had a friend who was a bootlegger and he sent me this VHS of Metallica playing in LA or San Francisco, and [guitarist, and future Megadeth frontman] Dave Mustaine was wearing a Welcome To Hell shirt," Cronos recalls of hearing Metallica's name for the first time, ahead of Venom's first headline shows in America. "And then when I listened to Whiplash, I thought, Wait, that’s fucking Witching Hour! They’re not just wearing our shirts, they’re stealing the fucking music as well! But they were young and enthusiastic so they seemed like a good fit to play with us, so we invited them to open the Staten Island shows [on April 22 and 24, 1983]. Those guys had so much energy and we all had a fucking great time."
