Venom

On a night Mantas remembers as a Thursday in May 1979, on Judas Priest's Killing Machine tour, teenage Jeff Dunn watched guitarist K.K. Downing run onstage and told an interviewer decades later, "that wasn't a human being, that was a god." Three years on, as Mantas, he wrote "Countess Bathory" for Venom's Black Metal — and admitted its mid-song breakdown wasn't original: "the bit... was my little tip of the hat to 'The Ripper.'" The title track's chorus line does the same trick with a lyric borrowed from Priest's "Exciter." Priest remains, in his words, his "favourite band of all time."

listen: upstream & heresource: Voices From The Darkside — Venom/Mantas interview, 2020 (Judas Priest riff/lyric homages, the 1979 Killing Machine tour, Motörhead/Lemmy ethos, satanic bible and punk-influence denial, the Guillotine myth denied) ↗share

1976

The RipperJudas Priest

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1982

Countess BathoryVenom

listen forCue up "The Ripper" and let it run past the verses to its stop-start centre section — a tightly coiled, palm-muted riff that drops the tempo before Priest snaps back to speed. Find the same structural move inside "Countess Bathory": after the galloping verse, Venom's guitar drops into a near-identical breakdown figure, the tribute Mantas named outright. It isn't a cover — Venom rebuilds the riff around Cronos's growl — but the shape of the pause-and-strike is unmistakably borrowed.

Mantas has said it took years of re-recording old Venom songs before he recognized the debt he owed Motörhead's guitarist, Fast Eddie Clarke: it was "only years later... that I realised just how much of an influence Fast Eddie Clarke's playing was in my early songwriting attempts... that loose clanging rhythm and blues infused solos certainly must have soaked into my musical subconscious." The original, Clive Archer-fronted lineup even worked up "a very respectable version" of Motörhead's "No Class" at their unpaid, pre-fame church-hall rehearsals.

listen: upstream & heresource: Voices From The Darkside — Venom/Mantas interview, 2020 (Judas Priest riff/lyric homages, the 1979 Killing Machine tour, Motörhead/Lemmy ethos, satanic bible and punk-influence denial, the Guillotine myth denied) ↗share

1979

OverkillMotörhead

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1980

In League with SatanVenom

listen forPlay "Overkill" and listen to how little the guitar does beyond driving eighth notes under Lemmy Kilmister's bark — the riff is rhythm, not melody. "In League with Satan," Venom's first single, runs on the same principle: a blunt, repeating power-chord figure that never resolves into a hook, just speed and pressure. Where Clarke lets an occasional bluesy fill breathe through the wall of chords, Mantas keeps his flatter still — the debt absorbed, then stripped down further.

Asked point-blank what inspired the band, Abaddon didn't hesitate — "and Black Sabbath, of course" — and Cronos jumped in: "they were already doing all this dark shit, evil lyrics and that." Mantas later located the debt in his own hands: "Red Light Fever," the first song he ever wrote for Venom, he called "definitely Sabbath-influenced in the beginning with that string bend, and the rest of it is just bluesy rock and roll, which, I guess, is what a lot of Sabbath was, also." In their unpaid church-hall days, the trio also worked up covers of "Paranoid" and "Children of the Grave."

listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar World — Jeff "Mantas" Dunn on the Very Best of Venom, 2017 (Countess Bathory/Black Metal's Judas Priest homages; Red Light Fever's Black Sabbath string-bend mechanism) ↗share

1970

ParanoidBlack Sabbath

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1981

Red Light FeverVenom

listen forListen to the bent, blues-scale phrasing guitarist Tony Iommi works into "Paranoid" once the riff opens up for the solo — a slow pull against the string, used as punctuation. "Red Light Fever" opens on the same move: a single note dragged upward before the riff locks into a straight blues-rock shuffle, the exact "string bend... bluesy rock and roll" Mantas pointed to when asked about the song decades later.