Written by Mid-way through Dedication, track number 20 on the Beastie Boys‘ fifth studio album, Hello Nasty, rapper Mike D gives an unexpected shout-out to “Newcastle – where Venom are from.” The reference likely went right over the heads of purist hip-hop fans, but this wasn’t the first time that the New York trio had referenced the legendary English metal band. On their 1992 album Check Your Head, Mike D, Ad Rock and MCA incorporated a snippet of Cronos’ band live onstage at Trenton, New Jersey’s City Gardens on April 2, 1986, on their song Mark On The Bus.
“Venom fucking rocked,” Mike D enthused to me in 1995. “They had the speeches, the routines, the metal! Venom were an early crossover band. I used to listen to this hardcore radio show in New York, and they used to mix stuff like Venom in amongst the Black Flag and Minor Threat.
“We thought Venom were excellent. But then they came to New York to do some gigs, and we found out that they weren’t joking at all! They were a serious band, and that kinda let a lot of us down!”
Famously, when the New York trio were signed to his Def Jam label, producer Rick Rubin persuaded Slayer guitarist Kerry King to play on the their hit single No Sleep Till Brooklyn.
“I don’t think he liked the song,” Rubin admitted to Rolling Stone in 2016. “I think he just thought it was bizarre… I don’t think it spoke to his aesthetic. And honestly, in retrospect, I don’t think he really spoke to the Beasties’ aesthetic. They didn’t really like him either [laughs]. It was kind of mutual.”
But it was through their immersion in hip-hop that Beastie Boys, who started out as a hardcore punk band, rediscovered their love of classic rock and metal.
“I used to hate bands like Led Zeppelin,” Adam Horovitz admitted. “But when hip hop DJs started using those chunky riffs, we started checking out old metal shit again.
“’70s metal was definitely the coolest. AC/DC had some fly records, Sabbath had some cool shit. So had Kiss and Krokus.”
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Venom’s 1986 shows in New York and New Jersey were legendary among the area’s hardcore fans because the Newcastle band headlined above Black Flag. As he couldn’t personally attend, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, another fan, asked Black Flag’s roadie Joe Cole to record the show for him.
“The between-song raps are the stuff of legend,” Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins recalled. “We gave a copy of the tape to Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth who made a 7-inch single of all the between-song-raps, and it is beyond belief, it is so cool.”
Speaking about his fondness for Venom to Vice in 2016, Moore explained, “They were a heavy metal trio, long hair and pentagrams and the whole thing, but the sound was this hybrid of really thrashed out punk rock hardcore mixed with the tropes of metal, and it was really underground and kind of cool.”
Venom – Live, a seven inch single consisting purely of Cronos’ on-stage ‘banter’ was released by Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label in 1991.
