Masters of grim and romantic black / death metal, for the last quarter of a century, Cradle of Filth are back with their new album- Cryptoriana: The Seductiveness of Decay, their 12th offering in their catalogue of bleak and compelling records, spanning back to 1991. Another masterpiece of dark imagery created by front man, Dani Filth’s evocative lyrics, depicting horror fuelled tales and exploring the relationship between love, lust, desire, terror and death. It shows signs of progression while still holding onto that traditional and ominous Cradle sound.
Along with the ferocity and tempo of the percussion, guitars and melodic keys, this record is intricate, ‘Achingly Beautiful’, heavy, at times thrashy and so detailed that it will seep into your gray matter before you even realize that it has dug it’s twisted, dark, gothic inspired roots in, transporting the listener into the depths of another time, filled with macabre intrigue with the allure of gloomy romance.
We talk to front man and founder of Cradle of Filth, Dani Filth, about the upcoming world tour, art, censorship, Dracula’s blood thirst, skeletons in kitchens and of course the new record – “the essence of what the album was all about: that dark, romantic, gothic, Victoriana.” (Dani Filth)
SCENEzine: Hi Dani, it’s Sarah from SCENEzine Australia, how are you?
DANI FILTH: I’m good thank you.
SCENEzine: That’s good, thanks for taking the time to chat to us today.
DANI FILTH: My pleasure.
SCENEzine: So where abouts in the world are you right now?
DANI FILTH: I’m at home in England.
SCENEzine: Oh yeah, are you on a break from shows at the moment?
DANI FILTH: Ah, well hardly a break, we’re just working towards getting the album released and all the other things that go with that. Just preparing for the world tour.
SCENEzine: Congratulations on the new album, ‘Cryptoriana- The Seductiveness of Decay’, your 12th studio album. It is so hauntingly beautiful, with consistent adrenaline inducing guitars and percussion, specifically on tracks like ‘Wester Vespertine’ and the subtitle track- ‘The Seductiveness of Decay’. I found the vocals are incredible with their dark compelling imagery, depicting terror and romance. I’m a little bit in love with it to tell you the truth (laughs)
How does this record resonate with you personally?
DANI FILTH: Yeah it’s alright (laughs)
SCENEzine: (laughs)
DANI FILTH: Ah yeah, we’re proud of it. The whole concept came about having been to Brno, the Czech Republic as a band, that’s where one of the guitarists lives and we did that last Summer. We did that as a…well not as a training exercise you know, or as a feel good camp, well kind of because we did a lot of sight seeing as a band and team building, but to collate all our ideas people had mulling around whether it’s whole songs or parts of songs or you know just a stylized riff that they thought could work in context and we basically came back from being there over the course of a week and a half, with most of the album written, although obviously it metamorphosized quite a bit during the Autumn as we sort of improved upon it and polished it etcetera. It was only then, when I had the majority of the album in front of us, that the theme of the record presented itself.
Sometimes you have an idea and say this is a great idea or I think this is great idea for a record and that kind of steers people in the right direction, but this time it was so scrift off the back of touring, that’s because the band are under new management, the manager debuted the band and get us out on this big world tour, but it was about five or six months premature, so I hadn’t actually started thinking about what to base the album off as we started writing so that was a little different.
SCENEzine: So it kind of took on a life of it’s own?
DANI FILTH: Yeah, I mean it as good because when we had the crux of the album written, the ideas were able to present themselves into a theme from the collection of songs.
SCENEzine: Is there a particular track that you find yourself gravitating towards, now that it’s all sort of said and done?
DANI FILTH: You know what, I haven’t listened to it for about 3 weeks (laughs) the only track I’ve listened to recently is “Achingly Beautiful” because that’s the new lyric video that will be coming out to coincide with the release of the record, and the reason I haven’t listened to it, not only because I’ve been busy but I think maxed out on the record around my first slew of interviews. I had to go to Germany and London and you know, France and Italy and yeah I was listening to it a lot then and I suddenly realised that I’d overdone it (laughs) so I held back otherwise I’d grow to hate it.
SCENEzine: (laughs) Yeah I can definitely can relate to that, even just as a fan, listening to your favourite record or a new record of a favourite band over and over again, you have to give it a break so you don’t ruin it for yourself…
DANI FILTH: Exactly.
SCENEzine: Speaking of music videos, you’ve got the music video out for ‘Heartbreak and Séance’ another track from the new record, it’s so beautifully dark and detailed with the falling snow and candles everywhere, were they real bodies that you’re standing on?
DANI FILTH: They were absolutely yeah. The director was actually the artist as well, he undertook the artwork for our previous album, “Hammer Of The Witches” and we obviously wanted to use him again because the artwork for that was amazing. Then I found out from one of his peers that he was supposedly a better video director than he was an artist, at which point, I was like well that can’t be so. So then what we did was we put all our eggs into one basket, we basically took the artwork budget and the video budget and the photography budget for the album, travelled to Riga in Latvia because we knew it was going to be a lot cheaper than doing it somewhere like London, which is Arthur Berzinsh’s home city, that’s the artist, and we were so glad we did because when we got there, we were totally blown away by the enormity and the scale of the set and the crew and props and the…ah, you mentioned the bodies but the amount of extras that were part and parcel of the video.
What I’m most proud of I think is the fact that there’s absolutely no CGI involved, because normally people they just turn up they go to like a disused warehouse and they fill the caption?? Behind it and this is just so lovingly put together that I think it just really played on the essence of what the album was all about, that dark, romantic, gothic, Victoriana.
SCENEzine: Yeah I think it perfectly encapsulates that and the makeup artistry too, because I’m a makeup artist by trade, I was a little infatuated with the makeup in it; I thought it was beautifully done….
DANI FILTH: Yeah yeah, especially we’ve got a lot to thank them for, having about three hours sleep, turning up to the airport and still having loads of black on the back of the neck and around your ears and everywhere else (laughs)
SCENEzine: (laughs) Yeah we just do our job and then let you deal with the repercussions of it…
DANI FILTH: Well yeah you literally just give us a load of ah baby wipes and say there you go, get on with it.
SCENEzine: (laughs) yeah that’s it. So you mentioned the artwork before on the record, I think it does a really good job of depicting the story of the relationship of the desire, love, horror and death with a play on Sandro Botticelli’s, The Birth Of Venus (c 1486- icon of the Italian Renaissance) I love how you’ve got her coming out of a coffin instead of a clamshell (laughs)…
DANI FILTH: (laughs) Well that hints the title ‘Cryptoriana’, you know, it’s a play on words and obviously insinuates Victorian’s love of everything macabre.
SCENEzine: How important is it for you to have that correlation between the music you write and the art that depicts it?
DANI FILTH: Well it’s important to us, as a theatrical band we like to be very visual, whether it’s the videos, the artwork, lyricism, on the stage performances, photo shoots etcetera, etcetera but we leave a lot to people’s imaginations. So although it’s quite easy to see what the album actually is about from the cover, there’s a lot left to the imagination, so you can kind of depict your own ah you know, feelings about what you think the album’s about and the symbolism where you see fit.
SCENEzine: With the artwork that you’ve had in previous albums and merch, t-shirts things like that, what are your experiences with censorship, have you had many with the band’s designs?
DANI FILTH: Well strangely enough, despite the fact that you can go to any art gallery in the world and see nipples, in America they’ve put a….and I didn’t even think about, literally didn’t even think about it, but they’ve actually had to put another cover over the top of this cover, with some of the women’s hair covering one of the nipples, which is alright with me because literally you would not notice the difference and it also gives a chance for the extra cover to carry a load of our previous albums and on the back, Devilment’s album, on the reverse, so it’s no skin off our noses… But yeah, it’s been a bit ridiculous, the same thing applied to “Thornography” and there’s no nudity on the front of that album, it depicts a lonely with John the Baptist’s head nestled between her legs and all they were bothered about, which was really ridiculous, was the length of her skirt, because it came past the knees and they actually made us do it again, but with a longer skirt on.
Obviously yeah the Jesus shirt, caused a bit of controversy in it’s day and only recently, I think it was last year, there was a this thing in New Zealand, with the woman, it was being displayed as part of a…as God knows what to be honest, and it was in the sort of, sealed off, 18 only to enter area, and she spray painted it so nobody could see it and she got arrested and in trouble.
That’s obvious though, that was something that we did when we were at the tender age of about 19/ 20….not in 1920 (laughs) coz that would make us really old.
SCENEzine: (laughs) yeah… I remember hearing about that story. Speaking about that morbid fascination between love and death with the lyrics that are quite evocative, sensual and dark, which is obviously evident in the subtitle of the new record- “The Seductiveness of Decay” What is your earliest memory of intrigue into tales and themes of grim romance?
DANI FILTH: I think it would’ve been at school and having to read Edgar Allan Poe, I think that’s what did it with me and then seeing some of Rodger Corman’s work with Vincent Price’s, like starring in them, like ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1961 film) , ‘The Oblong Box’ (1969 Horror film) and yeah just being you know, blown away by it. I still love those old films, they’re amazing.
SCENEzine: Oh yeah. One of your older songs, ‘Nymphétamine Fix” is one of my old personal favourites, with it’s poetic take on bleak romance, featuring the beautiful voice of Liv Christine, I heard you mentioned that she actually sings on the track ‘Vengeful Spirit’, from the new record, what was it like getting to work with her again?
DANI FILTH: Yeah it was very last minute, this is the thing about being in the studio and working with producer, Scott Atkins. He’s a close friend of ours and because of that, not only do you feel very comfortable working with him and the fact that he’s close, there’s a lot of good interaction, he knows the band inside out, but it also means he can be very open about his feelings about the record. We were about two weeks into the mix when he turned around to me and said look this song just isn’t working the way it is, it’s sort of 70% towards what it should be, where as all the other songs are really good and to cut a long story short we just worked out that it just didn’t work the way the vocals were working at that time and we went through a few ideas and eventually ended up just saying well why don’t be try someone that’s worked in the past, we went through a list of people like Dirty Harry, some people that had done some narrative in the past like Danielle Cottington and we decided well let’s try Liv.
We managed to catch her just prior to her going on holiday, she actually postponed the holiday by two days just to get to the studio to try some ideas, and that’s basically how that came about. It was very last minute but it was worth the absolute panic that it entailed because it just came out really well. I mean, people would listen to Nymphétamine and this song, and would see the difference, in Nymphétamine she plays this very innocent character and the characterization in this song, well on this particular track, she plays a vengeful spirit so essentially she’s the main protagonist, like this woman who’s portrayed, commits suicide, who returns from the grave as this spirit who torments those who wronged her in life, which in context of the song, it’s me, so she’s the protagonist and I’m the victim and we both sort of feature as this cruel duet, but it’s a very, like I say, very different song to Nymphétamine, almost thrashy, but it’s cool because its very melodic as well which is something different to bring to the table.
SCENEzine: Yeah, I like that contrast of melodic and thrashy, it works really well, it feels like she was meant to be on it the whole time.
DANI FILTH: Yeah well that’s fate…
SCENEzine: Yeah. You’re music has a certain way of transporting the listener to a scene from some kind of horror film. As we’re fast approaching Halloween, what are your top 3 favourite Horror films of all time?
DANI FILTH: Ohhh God, that’s impossible! (laughs) It is impossible because it swaps all the time, so I can’t even answer that…
SCENEzine: (laughs) …or maybe your current favourites….
DANI FILTH: (laughs) That’s even harder! I’m a massive fan of ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1992 film) I really loved the juxtaposition of the just massive production and the acting and the grandiose nature of it and the darker aspects and the blood thirst and I just think its really, really well done and the music by (Wojciech) Kilar, was just amazing, just brought everything together and they still use that music for, you see adverts of Netflix, all kinds of things, and they always use that music in ‘Penny Dreadful’ when they have the scene with Dracula in it, they totally ripped off the theme music from Bram Stoker’s Dracula for it, it almost sounds similar if you get the soundtrack. Yeah they would be a list of about a thousand movies so I wouldn’t even go there (laughs)
SCENEzine: (laughs) fair enough. I did see a video somewhere where you showed someone around your house, not sure if it’s the house you’re in now, that you actually had a skeleton in your kitchen, are you still in the same place?
DANI FILTH: I am, but we don’t have the skeleton there anymore unfortunately, we had a very, very bad Plummer, who wired up our dishwasher wrong and it flooded, and it went under the floor and filled all that, it was all lit up and it just blew all that….so we filled it up and that skeleton now resides on my mic stand, on my previous mic stand.
SCENEzine: Aww that’s disappointing, but that’s a good spot for it now. Now, are there any plans, you mentioned a world tour earlier, so would that be including Australia anytime soon?
DANI FILTH: Absolutely, yes. I cant give you exact dates because our new manager is a stickler for everything being done at the right time, but I can tell you, its going to be in May next year, and its part and parcel of the world tour, a huge world tour in fact, in fact we’re in Europe for 8 weeks and have a week off (laughs) a week! Then we go to South America, North America, South East Asia, Japan and then Australia.
SCENEzine: That sounds amazing…
DANI FILTH: Yeah, so it’s definitely in May next year but as I said I can’t reveal all the dates as yet because he obviously wants synergy and to tile it up with record companies and what have you.
SCENEzine: Oh yeah, of course…
DANI FILTH: Yeah but obviously we’re really looking forward to coming back.
SCENEzine: Yeah, when was the last time you were here? I’m trying to remember…
DANI FILTH: Ahh was it about 2013 or 12? I think it was 2013, so four years ago…
SCENEzine: Yeah right, well definitely about time you guys made your way back, so we’re very excited to see you here again. Well thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us today.
DANI FILTH: My pleasure. If I could just direct people toward the Cradle of Filth and the Dani Filth Facebook pages, because they’re constantly being updated every day and you can find out more obviously about the touring and the album and more videos etcetera there and obviously the new album comes out on the 22nd of September.
SCENEzine: Yeah definitely, we’ll make sure those links are available so people can access all the latest Cradle news. Well we’ll see you next year then, thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us.
DANI FILTH: Yeah, lovely to talk to you.
SCENEzine: Yeah you too, we’ll see you soon.
DANI FILTH: Ok cheerio, bye.
SCENEzine: Bye, bye.
Interview By Sarah Thomson.