Interviews_CoF_I2

Natural Born Chillers: Interview with Cradle of Filth
From Terrorizer magazine 1996

Cradle of Filth are already a bona fide and controversial phenomenon, but
with the release of 'Dusk And Her Embrace', things look set to really take
off for Britain's biggest black metal band.

Nick Terry travelled to Suffolk to unearth some mysteries from the bands
native soil.

We've been waiting for dusk. Of course. Today, a Sunday, has turned out to
be a freak oasis of sunshine amidst the growling chill of autumn. So it's
not until six that we arrive at a village church in Suffolk - here's one we
prepared earlier - for the photos. This is old witch country: Matthew
Hopkins, the infamous Witchfinder General, once stayed to hold court in
Hadleigh, home to several of Cradle of Filth. It's also an area with more
than its fair share of haunted houses and ruined, rural castles. As the sun
sets, you almost begin to believe the talk of countryside atmospheres. A
spectacular red sunset passes before us, and soon, the churchyard is
suspended in gloom. Alright, you can come out now.

Needless to say, the six members of Cradle of Filth (the candelabra, star of
many a recent group photo, has now been retired with the arrival of
ex-Solstice guitarist Gian) fail to treat the church with anything vaguely
approaching reverence. After all, it's but an empty vessel, void of any real
aura, just another part of the local landscape. Pretty enough, but utterly
meaningless.

On the parish noticeboard, inside the miniature nave, next to the notices
about services and communions, some errant choirboy has created a cross out
of spare drawing pins. Spying this, Stuart and I simultaneously remove the
pins creating the 't' and stick them back in again, this time somewhat lower
down. An inverted cross. Apart from the stray beer cans and cigarette butts
we abandon, this little prank is the only tangible sign of our presence we
leave behind. In anycase, stone doesn't burn too well.

Back at bassplayer Ron's Ipswich flat a little later, the interview has
begun, all two hours of it. So why didn't you burn down that church?
"Because we're not a cartoon," Dani replies, firmly and without conviction.
"Because there's no point." The six of you and the two of us from Terrorizer
probably outnumber that church's congregation. "Exactly," Dani replies.
"People can't see any trust in any kind of God. People know the way the
world is going, they can see how cataclysmic it is, and it's like pleasure
now, or pleasure later. Satanism to them, or the image of Satan, is
something people are interested in; they wanna know about it because it's
something to cling to. It's much more of a commercial entity than God is at
the moment, because the concept of God as a spiritual force is lost to this
world."

That's why we weren't smitten by lightning when we devil's crossed that
threshold, right?

"If you've got shares in God, sell," Damien, the band's keyboard player,
adds.

New guitarist Gian takes up the thread. "The Nineties are a very productive
decade; there's been such an outburst of literature, more even so than music
or film, and now the only people who go to church are the older people, and
young people who are reading and learning are deciding not to bother, so the
people who go to church are dying out."

Indeed.

"I remember reading that Immolation in Terrorizer earlier this year," Damien
continues, "and they were banging on, they'd come back and they were trying
to make a bit of a buzz going on and on about Christianity and how you've
got to stamp it out, oh please, it's really not that important. It's really
not that much of a blasphemy to say something like 'Jesus Is A Cunt': nobody
thinks it's that relevant to their lives anymore."

Nothing's shocking. That was a lesson I learnt long ago, in what seemed like
freer times, and a lesson I've had to discard from bitter experience.
Sometimes, it seems as if anything can offend, whether it's Black Metal's
Quixotic crusade against Christianity or a mere T-shirt. Each month, it
seems, we hear of yet another attempt to ban or censor extreme music, but
none of this means our world is so crassly under seige, that a simple
T-shirt can really constitute a fullblown act of rebellion. Instead, it's
simply a mark of difference, a sign that we've simply seceded from the
majority. And each month, even in our world, someone, somewhere, writes in
Terrorizer, either to complain about Cradle of Filth or, more recently, to
voice support for the band in the wake of the arrest earlier this year of
Rob Kenyon for the 'crime' of wearing a Cradle of Filth T-shirt. As causes
celebres go, it's not much. As the first indication of a coming crackdown,
it barely even matters. But it's one of the more telling little incidents of
1996, proof positive that noise, and the clothes it garbs itself up in,
still has the power to annoy.

We've had associates of the band who have been arrested for wearing T-shirts
in local towns," says Nick, the drummer. "Nothing has come of it other than
they've had the shirt confiscated and been fined. That's as far as it's
gone."

Damien: "A friend in Ireland was wearing one, where I live, in Ulster, it's
really backward. He got a trouncing by young men, a group of them,
thoroughly kicked in the head and severely beaten for wearing this T-shirt.
It's like they were saying we're all 17 and we can't accept that."

"It's unfortunate that someone as nice as Rob Kenyon has been prosecuted for
it," Dani comments, "and Cradle of Filth stand behind him as far as it goes.
We're prepared to help him out. I don't think he'd ever go to prison over
it, but if he did, it would highlight the fact that there is censorship,
really strong censorship. If we're meant to appeal to everyone, what are we
doing playing this kind of music? Our music is bigoted and over the top."

Nick: "All it boils down to is a couple of bored policemen walking through
Soho late on a weekend night, they've got f*** all else better to do, and
they decide to nick him. There's some woman with her cunt f***ing hanging
out of a window down Soho, and they walk past that, that's normal, but some
guy's got a T-shirt on, it's a little bit provocative, and the same
policemen who nicked him walk past that."

Do you think it's easy or hard to seperate out the controversy from the
music with Cradle of Filth?

"Cradle of Filth aren't that kind of band where these slogans are very
relevant to the music or the lyrics, or even a lot of the image," Dani says.
"People might expect some kind of Sid Vicious thing. The statements are cool
and we put them on a T-shirt, okay, now we've got your attention. Maybe it
will overshadow the music, but does that f***ing matter? If we sell more
records and people enjoy it, then fine. Maybe it might get people who are
not into this sort of music into it."

It's been three years since the church-burnings and murders, and as long
since Cradle of Filth first tried out those infamous T-shirt slogans. In the
interim, much has changed. The vampire, not the Viking warrior, is the hot
commodity; Gothic Metal, not Black Metal, is the wave of the present. Cradle
of Filth deserve some of the credit (and blame) for this state of affairs.
Their imagery and music never did lend itself that easily to convenient
categorisation: even as far back as their 'Principle of Evil Made Flesh'
debut, you could never describe them as purely Black Metal, something which
has aggravated and annoyed certain factions among the scenesters, and
delighted a hell of a lot more.

"Nobody ever nowadays considers Mercyful Fate as a Black Metal band," Dani
comments, "but they are the greatest, so where are the barriers which say
this is that and that's this? There's a lot of darker, Gothic bands who get
called Avantgarde Doom Thrash Industrial Egyptologist Metal. There's plenty
of Black Metal bands and you look at the pictures and you think, oh my God,
f***ing hell, he's hoeing a row of cabbages in that one, in his school
uniform."

So you're not worried that scenesters might think the Gothic imagery is too
obvious or slick, 'not Black Metal enough'?

"It's more a case of coming up with something that will stand in people's
memories," Dani continues. "We could quite easily have shit song titles,
like Dissection or something. Sometimes it's good just to be a little bit
obvious. The connoisseurs of Black Metal might say we're a little too
obvious. But that's how we are, and people grab it. If you swathe yourself
in mysticism all the time, 'I am Lord Thule of Irrigated Bollocks', well,
no, he isn't. Not when he goes down town and cashes his giro."

So you'd argue for a wider definition of what Black Metal is?

"I think Suicide were one of the ultimate Black Metal bands," Damien chips
in.

"Or Diamanda Galas, or things like the Misfits and Danzig, especially the
aura of those bands," Dani adds. "People say we're not trying to segregate
ourselves as that kind of music, which we aren't, but obviously we are Black
Metal."

What about Goth?

"The Goth thing has got blown out of all proportion. We're not into the Goth
scene when it happened but primarily the Goth imagery, the Gothic literature
from years ago. When I was young I used to like about four Goth bands, and
the rest..."

So? Same as everybody else.

"And what a bunch of wets they were. They've got this great vampiric image,
but their music sucks like The Smiths; they needed a right big poke up the
jacksie with something. It's all about vampirism and death, and the
literature, as hammy as some of it was, but the music was just so weak.
Morrissey running around with a daffodil up his arse."

"Goth definately needed to discover Metal and vice versa," Damien adds.

Yeah, it's almost like you have to say it in a German accent, Gothic-Metal,
'cos that's what it's become and where it's popular.

"The Germans haven't got a clue about it. It simply means anything ambient
and they all have their hair swept to one side, shaven on the other. They
don't know what Goth is about."

But we English do. We invented it, we consumed it; we make it now. This
isn't a jingoistic statement, simply an acknowledgement that there are
reasons why a band like Cradle of Filth couldn't come from anywhere else.

If you except the Ulster-born Damien and the Dewsbury-bred Gian, this
pastoral corner of Suffolk is Cradle of Filth's home turf and native soil.
There aren't any primeval forests here to walk through; they were all torn
down long ago to create pastureland, the land then hijacked from the
peasantry five centuries ago during the great Enclosures. Stone walls, sheep
and the threat of Farmer Palmer shooting first and asking questions later
are more the order of the day than discovering a Viking's paradise.

In town, Ipswich, the hunt is on for an offie that can sell us enough
alcohol to lubricate proceedings sufficiently. A little bit later, back in
Hadleigh, something a little more potent is being sought out to really,
really smooth things out.

Everywhere you go, there's the same ensembles of rural and semi-suburban
housing, winding tarmac roads and farmland... as well as more of those
bloody churches. It's new territory for me; barring a visit to Norwich four
years ago, this is my first time is East Anglia. But already it feels mighty
familiar, and exceedingly similar to all those places in Hampshire,
Buckinghamshire and Somerset me and my friends grew up in (and moved away
from). In other words, to all those places in which we discovered the joys
of music, the picturesque shitsvilles like Winchester, Bournemouth,
Aylesbury and Stevenage that dot the landscape of Southern England.

'Dusk And Her Embrace', Cradle of Filth's third release and second full
album, says more to me about this landscape than any other release since
Fields of the Nephilim's second album, way back in 1988. And it does so
without addressing this countryside in anything other than an oblique
manner. If you dig behind the facade, wipe off the corpsepaint and sweep
away the trappings with which Cradle of Filth surround themselves, you'll
only discover the reasons the mask was donned in the first place. Namely,
the idiocy of provincial life, and burning desire to discover something
beyond it.

'Dusk...' is not just a step upwards for Cradle of Filth - it's their first
album for their new label Music For Nations - but also for the genre they
supposedly inhabit. Both sonically and musically, most everything about
'Dusk...' screams 'major release' at you. Of the nine songs, six were
previously semi-recorded last year as demos for the sessions of the original
'Dusk And Her Embrace', an album that was essentially lost during the split
which led to the formation of The Blood Divine from ex-Cradle members. Other
portions of the same material have already appeared on this year's 'Vempire'
mini-album, namely 'Queen of Winter, Throned' and 'Nocturnal Supremacy',
while the remaining tracks have been augmented by three totally new
compositions, 'Humana Inspired To Nightmare', 'Graveyard By Moonlight' and
'Malice Through The Looking Glass'.

"You'd have to completely dissect it and go down to a note by note situation
to work out the proportion of what's new," says keyboardist Damien,
beginning the band's explanations. "It varies from the original riffs are
there, right through to riffs that have been completely overhauled and bear
only a passing resemblance to what they were. To that extent, the whole
thing's been overhauled."

Nick picks up the thread: "When we originally recorded it, it was recorded
in demo circumstances; no way was it good enough to be an album."

"I'd hesitate to start going on too much about the original versions," Dani
adds. "80% of people wouldn't even have heard of them, that they existed. I
wouldn't want people trying to get hold of the original, because there
really isn't one."

With the sessions taking a full two months, running hugely over time and
over budget, plus the presence of Cathedral producer Kit Woolven to ensure a
smooth mix, the making of 'Dusk...' clearly is at odds with the norm within
the Black Metal genre. And thus the band have managed to up the ante:
without sacrificing the essence, namely the music, 'Dusk...' is a massive
challenge to the European scene and its habit of recording everything in the
nearest toilet cistern. It's a challenge which has already been answered by
portions of the European elite with scorn and derision: Dissection and the
French label Osmose Productions have been busy joining in the chorus
bad-mouthing the band in recent months. Needless to say, Cradle can give as
good as they get.

Damien: "I can sense grumblings about production values and what's
appropriate and what's not. But it's just a step up."

Dani: "To make a production sound nasty is like trying to hide behind
mummy's skirt, really. We didn't go in there saying, right, we've got really
good instruments, let's make them sound shit. We went in there thinking,
f***ing hell, we've got all this new equipment, let's use it. They're
saying, let's sound shit. Perhaps they're also saying, we're all completely
mad."

Damien: "That's what amazes me about the Darkthrone school of production.
You can see where they're coming from; what they're trying to do is
Necrohell Studios in their bedroom, but they're missing the point, they
really are, because if they're looking back to the Bathory thing they fail
to see that Quorthon was trying to get the best sound that he could with the
equipment available to him."

But many of these bands are trying to hark back deliberately to almost like
the quasi Punk phase of Thrash and Black Metal; it's a conscious aesthetic
they've chosen to pursue.

Dani: "I think the 80s had much better productions. We were listening to
those 'Speed Kills' compilations the other day, one of the first records
that highlighted the Thrash genre, and the production on even the shittiest
bands was excellent. Look at Kreator on 'Extreme Aggression'. Slayer, Exodus
and Bonded By Blood, that f***ing guitar sound..."

Nick: "Bands today are in awe of that shit because it was done so cheaply."

Most of the things you've just mentioned are also a lot tighter musically
than bands who're setting out to recreate a retro-Thrash feel.

Gian: "Thrash bands of that era were totally tight as a gnat's chuff. Even
the ones like Possessed, that weren't that tight, they were 15 years old and
still at school."

Nick: "It seems like the cool thing these days is that every band raves on
about how they're like into the 80s thing like f***ing Possessed, early
Exodus, Kreator, Sodom, f***ing Destruction and all that shit, and we were
sending out fliers back in '93 on the underground that have a Cradle of
Filth biography saying we were influenced by Bathory, Mercyful Fate, Sodom
[list repeats ad nauseam], when we were really a demo band, and now, because
the scene's like blown up, they're doing the same shit."

Dani: "They're trying to get the lost magic they had when they were a kid
and heard Thrash for the first time; it was magical for at least two years.
The Black Metal thing has maybe faded a little bit. I think they're probably
feeling they're age, aren't they, looking at the cover of 'Endless Pain' and
going, oh, I wish I was 15 again. You think, yes, that was good, but I don't
remember it being a special force."

At this point, Damien comes out with a pronouncement that floors everyone.
"The retro Thrash thing was actually prophesised in Revelations. No, no..."
"Uvavu," intones Gian. Everyone cracks up. "I firmly believe this. In the
last days before the second coming of Christ, of the major signs that the
end of the cycle was coming, one of the things you might have noticed is
that there would be no new ideas, that there was a constant recycling of
what has gone before. People are scared to commit themselves."

Dani: "I think that means something a little bit more prolific than the
Bathory albums being spewed out again!"

But why should someone who wasn't around then care about these old bands?
How relevant do you think it is to someone who's of the generation after
you, who maybe knows yourself and Emperor, and sees countless interviews
discussing and dissecting the minutiae of the spikes and bullet-belt
brigade?

Damien: "Utterly irrelevant, mostly."

He is practically shouted down again.

"A 16 year old now," he continues unperturbed, "if you played him some of
these LPs, and talk about what was good about it, but it's difficult to
actually convince him it's extreme. So much has gone on since, that it's
difficult to argue that it actually sounds out there. The retro Thrash thing
can be as cool and genuine as the Black Metal thing when that came out,
though."

Nick: "Don't you think it's relevant in the 90s because people have killed
for it, in a manner of speaking? I remember seeing pictures of Varg Vikernes
just before he was sent to prison where he was wearing a Bathory T-shirt."

Stuart: "It doesn't matter at what time you get into a genre; you're always
going to look back and get into some of the earlier stuff."

It does seem as if the scene vanguard has decided to ditch corpsepaint for
bullet-belts; do you think that bands will start easing off on the other
Black Metal trappings, for instance start dropping Satanism?

Dani: "It's part of the shock factor of this kind of music. They did have it
back then, but not in such a brash way, not in your face. It works in the
context of the music, it's more than anarchy, it's going against things that
people don't actually believe in, against the structure of society and the
police."

Damien: "If people saw it as a vehicle and abandon that, it implies it
merely was a vehicle. I find it slightly bizarre to talk about promoting
your career in the context of your beliefs. We get asked things like 'are
you Satanists?', and it's a really difficult thing to answer, even if you
could see yourself in such a narrow category and then answer yes to that
question, it's like, would you want to, to them?"

Ah yes, beliefs. If there's another thing that marks Cradle of Filth out as
inextricably provincial English, in the best sense of the term, it's their
beliefs. Out in the sticks and suburbs, this combination of drabness and
beauty seems to incite such interests. Back in the 1980s, it was places like
this that were rapidly overrun by the burgeoning Goth movement, that
understood and made sense of it far better than the Batcave scene in London
or the Leeds fraternity. Out in the Home Counties, Goth meant the
fascination with the mystical, the occult, with horror film and literature
and with anything old. Looking back, from the ground up, from the point of
view of the teenagers and twentysomethings who made Goth what is was, the
enigmatic and seemingly pretentious Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim,
and not the Sisters of Mercy's Andrew Eldritch, was the ultimate Goth
figurehead. That the rest of his band - known joshingly to me as The Satanic
Mechanics - were obviously thick as pigshit really didn't matter.

Like the Nephilim, Cradle of Filth live and breathe this fascination with
the esoteric and magical. In this case, though, you don't get straight
answers not because they're too thick to explain themselves, but because
they just won't.

"Normally, you've got four or five people in a band of whom only one has
anything to say," says Damien. "But we've got too much to say. And you
really don't want to know what we're involved in."

So you're not going to Reveal All, then?

Dani: "If it was spelt out, it would be like insects moving from one thing
to another. That's Cradle of Filth, right, let's go onto the next thing
that's a little bit more mysterious. Towards the beginning of the century, a
lot of authors and poets were always misinterpreted if they hung around with
those kind of people, like members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, as being
occultists, like W.B. Yeats and D.H. Lawrence. There's a very thin line
between being practitioners of art and indulging in free whim. If you're one
side of this veil, and you're that way inclined, those people who are always
trying to grasp for answers say, what exactly is it about, can I see
something? Can I have a visitation tonight? Like anything in life, you
always stand on the outside looking over into a fresh pasture."

"Aleister Crowley was probably a really, really nice chap. A lot less evil
than the New Labour leader. De Sade, was he a libertine or a Satanic author?
He knew nothing of occult circles but just stressed and expressed his own
free will, as jaded as it was. But he's someone who always stands out in the
annals of history; in the 100 most evil people in the world, he'd be in the
top twenty."

Dani smirks, and his tone changes.

"I know," he sniggers. "Perhaps we could in this room right now change the
course of history by inventing a new kind of evil. Like excremental sex,
which we all practice, don't we, we're actually therions and master
magicians in the art of it, therefore we are the most evil people in the
entire world."

A pause. And another smirk.

"You want me to sum up Cradle of Filth? We're obsessed by cruelty, possessed
by fire, controlled through hatred, and killed by death."

The room erupts again in howls of laughter.

"No, but seriously," Dani concludes, "do you really think Aleister Crowley
sat down and thought, I wonder what the really evil people are like? If you
know roughly what you are and what people have tagged you, then you are
that. A lot of what Satanism is about is just recognisable signs and symbols
to cover up the horror of what it is. Some people know exactly what they're
here for, perhaps they've got some kind of sexual fetish, but they're not
prepared to indulge in it. And that's why you get the dogma of a tag like
Satanism. I think everybody knows where they stand, but they're too scared
to admit it."

Laboriously written/html-ised by Scott Langstaff ([email protected])
with much thanks to Nocturnal Heartbeat
Published in Terrorizer Magazine

From the Haunted Shores COF page (http://hauntedshores.simplenet.com/cof/)