Monthly Archives: May 2026

DOA ’96

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Exactly 30 years ago was the final day of Dynamo Open Air in Eindhoven. The Saturday headliner was Venom, the Sunday headliner was Slayer, and I was lucky enough to have a backstage pass so I could interview the Gods Rock’n’Roll, to whom I had laid down my soul more than a decade earlier. I shall spare you the details of many miscommunications that happened in the days leading up to the actual interview, but these could roughly be summarized by sharing that I had spent much of Saturday afternoon waiting at the wrong hotel, and then them having no time anywhere else that day. That Saturday had been busy for them indeed, as it also included their performance that was to be captured on the “The Second Coming” VHS (yes, VHS – no DVD version has been made available a.f.a.i.k.). Thankfully I had more or less run into Mantas that Saturday, so I managed to have the briefest of chats and got him to sign some CD liners I’d brought with me. After lots of trials and tribulations, thankfully, I found out Abaddon and Cronos were going to be backstage again to see Slayer on Sunday. So, after that show, I found myself in a dressing room with the Venom drummer and their bassist/vocalist.

But first I would like to take you on a little journey. A journey that started when my then classmate Jos Hermans exposed me to Venom for the first time. The date was 12 May 1984, and the song was “Warhead”. I think it’s hard to imagine the extent to which the energy, raw vocals and general ‘evil’ atmosphere of that track appealed to me. Gone were the days of me listening to pop, then Focus, then Kiss, then Saxon, and here started the time when no sane parent would consider my musical taste even halfway decent. The shock factor doubtlessly played an initial role, but after a few weeks I was irretrievably lost in the metal universe. “Black Metal” and “At War with Satan” were my faves, though I have to confess most of it was tape trading back then. I don’t think Messrs Lant, Dunn and Bray ever earned anything off me until I started buying CDs and DVDs. I was a nerd at the time, so my name in the Commodore 64 scene went from “Wizkid” to “Cronos”, and it hasn’t changed since ;-). Once I started digging Venom, the gates (of hell, I suppose) were wide open to allow Abattoir, Kreator, Destruction, Sodom, Nasty Savage and a slew of other bands in.

The interview was awesome. Cronos was my hero – I had watched him countless times on the “Bloodlust” live video that aired regularly on “Monsters of Rock” on Sky Channel (Tuesday afternoons, if I recall correctlly, 16:00-17:00 CET). Both him and Abaddon were friendly and courteous, patient with my questions and, in the end, with my bag full of CD liners I’d wanted them to sign. I remember their girlfriends hanging around in the background, becoming ever more restive. The end result was a pretty cool interview, which can be found here in all its fanboy glory.

Later that year, Venom released their reunion album, “Cast in Stone”, which was pretty good. Not much later, they split up again. The Venom name was used by Cronos with a varying line-up of guitarists and drummers, whereas Mantas and Abaddon continued as Venom Inc. Right now, I believe we have Venom Inc. with Tony Dolan and two other guys (i.e. no classic former Venom members at all), Mantas Abaddon Venom (a band that as far as I know only performed on Keep it True this year), Mantas Venom (a band that performs slightly more often) and, of course, Venom with Cronos and two other guys (John Stuart “Rage” Dixon on guitars and Danny “Danté” Needham on drums). Cronos is not interested in playing with Mantas and Abaddon again, which I think is an utter shame. I’d give my right nut (or at least some of my money) to see them play together again. Mantas regularly streams on Facebook, where he talks about cats and metal. You can interact with him there, too. I still regularly play my fave Venom albums and occasionally watch the “Seventh Date of Hell” video (this one was actually released on DVD, yes!).

Before I sign off, I’d like to spend a few words on Slayer. I didn’t like them too much when I saw them perform for the first time, during their “Clash of the Titans” tour (with Megadeth, Testament and Suicidal Tendencies) in 1990. I thought they were just a lot of trebley noise (this was before low-fi Norwegian black metal had ever entered my aural cavities). I had their excellent “Show no Mercy” and “Live Undead” on vinyl, but their stage show did nothing for me. I did walk into Jeff, Tom and Kerry at Dynamo Open Air that same Sunday, just long enough to get them to sign CD liners. By then I had got their double live CD “Decade of Aggression”, which caused me to like them a whole lot more. After that, I saw them live at Graspop in 2000 and 2002, Dynamo Open Air 2004 and during their “Big 4” performance in 2011. Yeah, I warmed up to Slayer, though I lost interest in their new music after Dave Lombardo left the first time.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is not the chaos, the backstage confusion or even the interviews themselves, but the simple fact that this music endured. Thirty years is a long time. Festivals disappear, friendships fade, bands implode and reform under various monickers, and heroes inevitably grow older. Yet somehow those old Venom and Slayer records still carry the same electricity they did when I first heard them as a teenager. Not many things survive that intact.

About the T-shirts: “ST NEWS” was the magazine I’d interviewed them for. VIRUS (an acronym of “Vereniging van Intense Rockende Utrechtse Studenten”) was a metal loving student society I was a member of back then.

Synth Sample

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Today marks the 40th anniversary of “Synth Sample”, the first production that my best buddy Frank “Antiware” Lemmen and me (“Cronos” of the ACC – Amazing Cracking Conspiracy) ever made on the Atari ST. This was back in the day when I only had a monochrome monitor (early Atari adopters will relate) and preciously little software to play with. We had “Degas” (a drawing program) and plenty of time on our hands, so Frank and me set to making a bunch of pictures (some of them not too bad, even if I say so myself) and then used the “N-Vision” slideshow program to show them with background music. The background music was made using Activision’s “Music Studio”, though none of it by ourselves.

The name came from a bunch of programs on the Commodore 64, where musicians (or sometimes music rippers like Frank and myself) created little compilations of tunes. Usually, those tunes were ripped from games (and also sometimes sent by musicians themselves), and then spread among software swapping contacts. The C64 had many games that were quite naff, but had good music (“Knuckle Busters”, anyone?). Sometimes the games were so difficult that you couldn’t even hear the whole tunes (“The Last V8″…). So if you took the music out you could listen to it without having to play the game. We weren’t really good demo coders, so it was more about the music than about any, shall we say, visual effects. The ACC later released other “Synth Sample” titles on the Atari ST, but by then mainly on colour monitors.

To those of you who have never owned an Atari ST, all this talk of monochrome and colour monitors certainly sounds odd. A short explanation might be in order. Well, 40 years ago you didn’t have limitless colours and huge screen resolutions at 100 Hz. Some monitors had a certain number of pixels and a certain refresh rate at the cost of the number of colours. In the case of the Atari ST this meant 640×400 pixels at 71.25 Hz in black and white (on the monochrome monitor) and two resolutions with more colours, of which the most popular was 320×200 at 50 or 60 Hz with 32 colours (on the colour monitor). These days, an Apple watch has a resolution of 410×502 pixels… Anyway, many Atari ST owners used to have two clunky monitors on their desks, because some stuff only worked on 640×400 whereas practically all games only worked on 320×200…

If you are in a mood to be underwhelmed, check the CODEF version of “Synth Sample” by clicking here (press N to go to the next tune). You can download an image here (for use in an emulator) and the real deal as a ZIP file here (for real Atari ST hardware),

CODEF, by the way, is the Canvas Oldskool Demo Effect Framework, that allows you to create even way more cooler and advanced demo effects using the HTML5 Canvas object – the last and most ‘advanced’ one I ever made, “Out of Bounds”, can be seen here (with Commodore 64 tunes and some nice demo effects).

Douglas Adams died 25 years ago

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A sad day today, but not as sad as 25 years ago, when Douglas Adams died. Douglas Adams, the utterly funny author of the classic “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and the possibly even greater “Dirk Gently” books. I cannot emphasize how much I think every single person should read these books, preferably yesterday. When I read these, back in 1988, it changed my writing style forever – and I suppose I see it as a compliment if people think my writings are inspired by him, or even if I am a copycat or plagiarist. I’d like to think his novels even changed the way I function, which was further influenced by reading Terry Pratchett, Grant Naylor and Tom Sharpe books (and, to a lesser extent, those by Craig Shaw Gardner). I have, for example, this weird habit of noticing occurrences of the number “42” in real life, and keep track of them for a future issue of “ST NEWS“. Even my family has been conditioned to help me with this.

I very rarely read books twice, but I have read the four first “Hitchhiker” books 4 times and the two Dirk Gently books 6 times – numbers which are only likely to increase in the future (the only the book I read more than once was “Lord of the Rings”, and that was only two times).

Douglas was an atheist so I cannot say I hope he’s up there with his favourite deceased people, but I would like to think his energy will be swirling around some or other galaxy somewhere.