Metal Anarchy

During an interview with Laughingmonkeymusic, Venom Inc. bassist/vocalist Tony “Demolition Man” Dolan further addressed guitarist Jeff “Mantas” Dunn’s departure from the band. According to him, “it may not be forever.”

Dolan said the following:

“For those of you who don’t know, and I assume most of you do, but, unfortunately, a few years ago, Jeff took a major heart attack and we lost him. But they managed to bring him back to life; they saved him. Of course, I was next day in Portugal beside his bed, immediately from London, and we got him back up and going again. And I think his mind, it took a hit because it’s not every day you die and then come back to life and think, ‘What the fuck?’ So, yeah, scary, scary, scary, scary stuff. But he got his shit back together and was working through it all. And we ended up back on stage. So everything was going well. And then not last season, but the season before, we went to America. We had two [tour] halves to do. We did part one, and then his wife got diagnosed — got real sick — with something that could have been terminal. So they went into panic mode and, of course, they live in Portugal, and they don’t have a lot of friends who live near them who are English. So the focus had to be on looking after her. So we decided, okay, that’s the thing to do. We decided to maybe get a dep guitarist in. It was a bit last minute, so he could stay home. So there was an idea to cancel, but, of course, the whole tour had been booked as a single thing and just split into two. So that was going to be a bit complicated. So, I put a call out to Mike Hickey, who, of course, had been in VENOM for ‘Calm Before The Storm’ and the CRONOS band and was a friend, and said, ‘If Jeff couldn’t do it, is there any way maybe you could step in just to help us out?’ Of course, he said yes straight away. He lives in Boston. So, I put him with Jeff and they worked on some of the material, some of the finer points… So things were good. [Jeff] was getting then ready to do — the first festival we had was in Belgium for the next season. Of course, that was close to home, so him and his partner decided that that would be okay for him to do. The idea was to get him in and get him out as fast as possible, so he didn’t have to panic about her being by herself too long. And then we would do a call and three days went by and I hadn’t heard from him. And I texted him and he said he was in hospital. And I thought, ‘Oh my God. Something’s happened to his partner.’ So I called straight away and he said no, it was him. And I was, like, ‘Why are you in hospital?’ He went, ‘I had another heart attack.’ And it was, like, ‘No.’ So at that point it was, like, ‘Shit.’ He was already reeling from the first one. We assumed that was it, [that] it wouldn’t happen again because he was on meds and stuff, but it happened again. So his mind just totally went to shit and hit panic and the fear set in.

If [Jeff] goes, he wants to go on his own in his own slippers. He doesn’t wanna be running through an airport somewhere across the other side of the planet. And I totally get that. We’re all human. So the idea was to just, ‘Take your time. You just take all the time you need. I’ll continue with the [VENOM INC.] obligations.’ Because when you do a band on this level, you get money from your record label in advance and from your publisher in advance, and they want that money back. And the way you make it back these days is by touring to push the music which sells to pay them back their money. So even if I decided, ‘Oh, well, fuck it. I’ll not do it either,’ we’d be leaving a bit of debt that these people might want back. So I would continue. Fortunately, I used Curran Murphy from 72 LEGIONS, who was happy to come in and dep until Mantas got back fit, so we could do the shores that Mike Hickey wasn’t able to come out of America for personal reasons. So, that was it. We were set to do that. And we’ve never hidden the fact that we’ve got the door open for Jeff because he’s my brother. And we’ve been through so much together. But I wasn’t prepared to try and put him in a headlock or to try and force him into a corner where he had to make a decision because he’s sick and he had to take his own time to make his own decision.”

He also added:

“I know that yesterday was quite shocking — he made this statement, and everybody’s picked up on that — but it may not be forever. He may feel, in a year’s time, he feels great and wants to do it again. He will produce music in his studio because that’s what he does. And that’s his therapy and that’s great. And his social media he was doing, that was his therapy. So that was all good. When he stopped doing that, I thought maybe that’s not the best thing to do. And as much as, in my heart, I would like him to still be doing the tour and the shows, even through the whole season, we did Indonesia, we did all of South America, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Romania, Poland — I mean, we did huge shows, half a million people in Poland, 18,000 in Indonesia; I mean, it’s huge shows; every night in South America, I think it was three to six thousand people. So we did these incredible things and I wanted him to be there. But you have to feel good about it. And he didn’t feel good about it. So he had to sit it out and I had to accept that.”

[via Blabbermouth]