On Friday the blackened metal monster that is Cradle Of Filth will release its eleventh longplayer, the delightfully dark Hammer of the Witches. Editor Matt Lawrence recently chatted with founding member and frontman, Dani Filth, about the album, its creation and the lure of all things witchy.
Formed in Suffolk, England in 1991, Cradle Of Filth, has carved itself a unique niche in the realm of heavy music.
Put simply, it is beyond peer.
Even from its now somewhat primitive (in the scheme of things to come) debut release, 1994's The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh, Dani and his bandmates had created a sonic beast which embraced the frenetic discordant attack of the Norwegian black metal bands, took nods from the instrumental finesse of fellow countrymen Iron Maiden, and was laced with spine-tingling cinematic, and at times symphonic, ambiance.
The harsh, yet melodic soundscapes, were capped of course, by Dani's unparalleled vocal attack, which ranges from piercing high screams through to blood-curdling growls.
Hammer of the Witches is the band's first release through Nuclear Blast Records, and it is the first on which guitarists Richard Shaw and Ashok, and keyboard player Lindsay Schoolcraft appear.
The 11 new tracks certainly nod to the past, with the dual guitar attack akin to that heard on seminal releases Dusk And Her Embrace and Cruelty And The Beast.
Songs like Enshrined In Crematoria, Deflowering The Maidenhead and Right Wing Of The Garden Triptych are classic Filth.
Dani said that line-up changes were made out of necessity.
''We undertook a co-headline tour across Europe with Behemoth and we knew before we started it that our guitarist Paul (Allender) couldn't do it for personal reasons and then pretty much the eleventh hour came up and our other guitarist, who was suffering from quite a severe neck injury which had been plaguing him, had to undergo major neck surgery, so he was out of the equation and we suddenly had to make a choice ... are we going to do this tour, are we going to pull it and we managed to find someone else, a friend of Martin's (drummer) who lives in the Czech Republic with him, called Ashok.
''We were like a revitalised band for that tour. We were garnering lots of favourable reviews, we were playing lots of our older twin guitar harmony material and getting on famously as a band and just decided after that, that it was a great springboard to start writing from.''
Dani said the new album’s lyrics were very much inspired by the music he received from his bandmates.
''When I got three or four of the tracks it gave me inspiration and I thought, 'yeah, alright, I know where the direction is going, it's got this flavour','' he said. ''I was looking at my library and I saw Malleus Maleficarum - that gives me an idea.
''Malleus Maleficarum was like a guide book from the middle ages. It was about the persecution and prosecution of witch cults across Europe. The definition of that title is Hammer of the Witches, as in the hammer being the judge’s gavel. It was about crushing the witch cults that supposedly were rife across Europe and obviously hundreds of thousands of people were sent to their death innocently because of this book, because of this treatise, and our interpretation of that is quite the opposite. It's about resurgence, revival, revolution. It's about the power of the hammer and the strike being in the witches hands as opposed to their persecutors.
''It's not a concept record, but the artwork by the Latvian contemporary artist Arthur Berzinsh would probably lead you to believe it was, because he's done a fabulous job of creating a walk-though of all the lyricism. It is kind of themed. It has a deep medieval theme to the album - demonology, withcraft, mythology, etc, and The Hammer of the Witches title bleeds across into several songs, but its not entirely a conceptual record as we have done in the past.''
Unlike when the band started out, Cradle Of Filth members are now scattered across the globe. The modern age, means collaborative album writing is easily achieved despite distance.
''We're literally spread across the known galaxy,'' Dani said. ''I've got two bands. I've got a local band called Devilment, which is doing very well and we rehearse physically every week because everybody's based in the locality in which I live, and Cradle obviously has spread their wings and people have gone further afield and has got people in Scotland, the Czech Republic, Canada, England. But we spend a lot of time together.
''Some of this album was written whilst we were on the road. Ideas were practiced in soundchecks and on tour buses and hotel rooms. We got together obviously before we recorded the whole album as a band, but file sharing and Dropbox is a godsend and it's not really much different from me taking away a cassette as I did in the old days from a rehearsal and working on it at night as it is for Martin sending me some ideas for orchestration or drums or whatever at two in the morning nowadays. It's not much different really. You can just do without the carrier pigeons now we've got email. It hasn't changed the process.
''We spend so much time together as a band anyway on tour, and specially for the upcoming world tour that we'll be undertaking, that to be perfectly honest, the last people I want to see in my entire life when I get back from the tours are the rest of the band. I'm sick of them, absolutely sick of them. Sick of their farts and their snoring.''
As anyone familiar with the band’s previous works would come to expect, the creation of the new album was no slap-together effort. Dani says the recording took about four months to complete.
''The whole album took about a year to do in general from its first inception, but we were doing a whole lot of things as well, like 19 dates in Russia and then I went straight on tour with Devilment, supporting Lacuna Coil and Motionless In White, and we had a whole bunch of summer festivals as well,'' he said.
''It was literally four months in the studio, a very isolated studio. The band flew in and stayed at like a holiday cottage, whilst I was there every day, basically because it was about half an hour from my house. It was good. In the past we'd used residential studios with a games room and a cook and everyone had their own room, but it's expensive and also people start getting bored and the band's all together; let's go down the pub and the nightclubs, let's go shopping, let's shit people, let's blow things up, that sort of thing, where this was very concentrated. Eleven hour days. Didn't work the weekends, fortunately.
''Literally I would get home, see the wife for a little bit, go to bed, get up and just repeat and be very much in the zone and totally focused on it, which I think worked wonders really for the album itself. And the fact that it was out of the major population area, it was right in the Suffolk countryside, very little people about; that isolation and closeness with nature really helped nurture the album as well.''
Dani Filth is highly regarded within the heavy metal fraternity for his darkly poetic and rather gothic lyricism, painting vivid pictures via his words to accompany the rich soundscapes.
As suspected, he takes his role quite seriously as part of an orchestrated whole artistic piece.
''My kind of expectations when it comes to a band is that you take the music first and foremost, as it's the most important thing, and then if you can dress that up, if you can make good lyricism to go with it and if that can then extend to great artwork and the artwork can then extend to a great video and great clothing and great live show – they’re things that bands have to excel at. I enjoy that stuff anyway; when you emerge from the studio you come out of this cocoon and then suddenly you've done all of the real hard work and you've done the stuff that's pulled the life and soul out of you and then you want to express it and you've got the opportunity to do that visually. I find that the most exciting part of it to be fair ... its exciting doing an album, but when you're in there for four months, there are times when you'd just like to slit your own throat.''
Cradle Of Filth has recently released the first dates of its world tour to coincide with the album's release. Europe is first on the agenda, followed by South America and America early next year.
He said that Australia would be on the schedule some time after that.
''It's a very sort of rejuvenated feel in the band at the moment,'' Dani said. ''I think there was a time in our career where it got a little turgid at one point, where everything was a bit frigid and there was no enthusiasm for a little while. There's always been a fire with the creative side of the band but it's just got to extend further and engulf everything and then the world's your oyster at that point.
''I can say this without any prejudice because I'm a singer, I just hang around with musicians; the musicians in the band are fantastic and because of having two guitarists join at the same time they're working very much in tandem off one another and it means we can plunder our entire back catalogue and we're actually arguing right now about the track list for live ... if we played everything that people wanted we'd be playing for like five days in a row. That's the only problem we have at the moment is that everybody wants to play so much. Queen Of Winter, Throned is my contribution to the setlist. I'm not letting that go.''
In some ways, Dani is surprised by his band's longevity, but in others it’s exactly where the young man who started out expected his band would be at this point.
''I'm 41,’’ he said. ‘’When I was young, 41 was like f**king old. But I feel younger than ever really. I've stopped drinking and been a bit more healthy, play a lot of soccer, and I think just my head is in a very good space at the moment as well.
''When I do think back about the band literally in its first inception, you always have it in your head when you picture yourself, being successful. You don't think of yourself, 'oh I wanna be in a band and play in front of two people and a dog'. It was always on a big stage. It's about trying to realise that dream and make it work and fortunately we've managed to do that through thick and thin. It's been hard along the way and we've worked incredibly hard to get where we are and to keep where we are, but the main thing is you have to be 101 per cent into it at all times, every facet of your art, and that's what we do. Give us the ingredients to make are big black metal cake and we'll do it.''
So what is it about allusions towards the darkness that seems so attractive to heavy metal fans around the world?
''Because it's forbidden,'' said Dani. ''And the actual terminology, the word occult, means hidden. And I think that's half the fun isn't it? That's what attracts people to religion, because they don't really know. There's no proof. You're free to create anything in your imagination.
''It's just something that's been part of me growing up in this area - witch country in England; rural locations - growing up watching horror movies and monster movies and then discovering metal and then finding out that both of those work very much in tandem. It's just been part of my life forever.
''And the great nineteenth century literature which I studied at school; a lot of that was based on the occult, vampirism, witchcraft. So it just made complete and utter sense that all these things would come together in the big smelting pot. I think people are scared and they like living a little bit dangerously. They like the ideology and mythology behind it all. I think it's very important as well.''
Amid the supposed darkness and macabre imagery, Dani is keen to point out not all is necessarily as it seems.
''There's a track on the album called Onward Christian Soldiers which deals with the crusades,'' he said. ''Despite hundreds of years having past since the crusades, we're still in the same moral dilemma and a moral cesspool religiously and spiritually. The Mohammedans and the Christians are at each others throats still despite the fact that we've advanced so far technologically; we've put a man on the Moon, put TV on your watch, make cars that run on electric.
''Spiritually we're still f**king idiots and I think the album relates to the fact that we now also live in a time where we're a lot more compassionate and people can explore their spirituality. People do want to be practitioners of what people call witchcraft and they're free to do so without fear of persecution.''
