Burning The Cross
“Music... music’s important. That’ll be the first thing I’m looking for. Dance moves definitely, various outfits, headdresses, backhanders...”
The Manticore and Other Horrors, released in October last year, seems to have sparked a renewed interest in Cradle of Filth. Over the years the Suffolk-based band has endured countless lineup changes, stints with just about every underground metal label around (The Manticore was released by Peaceville in Europe, Nuclear Blast in the USA, and Roadrunner in Australia), as well as a brief period with Sony. Their numerous stylistic advances have divided, gained, and lost the group fans over the years, yet they remain firmly rooted in black metal.
The band's principal creative genius and driving force, Filth has been sitting at home all week getting his journalism work done for a bunch of publications, including Metal Hammer, Terrorizer, and “this magazine that's a bit 'street', and 'cool', a bit underground”. He's in remarkably good spirits, and recalls the band's earlier days with lashings of cheekiness.
“I started the band when I had just turned 18,” he says fondly. “I took a year out from what I thought was going to be a burgeoning career in journalism, basically just to live on the breadline and to see if the band would work. We gave it a year, and in that year we did three demos, an album that became a defunct album, because fortunately we didn't have money to pay for it, and so the masters were taped over, otherwise we would have been stuck with some two-bit record label for the rest of our life. So yeah, it was 100 per cent dedication to see what would happen, and it has been downhill all the way since then!”
In terms of its critical response, The Manticore and Other Horrors has been looked upon a little more favorable than some of the band's other recent efforts.
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“Each album is a sort of monolith unto itself. We don't try and replicate ourselves. We try and do something different with each and every release. But this album in particular seems to have gone off the scale with a lot of people. We started our press campaign as it were in Europe last September, and it was like 'wow'. We were so overwhelmed by the response from the journalists alone. It was like 'we thought we'd been forgotten by you lot'. It was really, really good.
The band's forthcoming visit to Australia will be their first in four years. A tour of Asia will precede our shows, although unfortunately the Chinese government denied the band's application to gig on their mainland.
“I used to hear the phrase 'big in Japan', but now it's 'banned in China'. I quite like that,” laughs Filth heartily.
“Yeah, I mean who would have thought that? We had several dates in China, and you would have to get permission for them, and plan it out, like getting a bloody office block, various letters have to be delivered and signed, and that was all good, and then suddenly they decided, 'Nope, we don't particularly like you'. So those dates have now been condensed into one show in Hong Kong, which apparently used to be under British rule, so it's sort of like China but not mainland China. Apparently the strict communist regime doesn't apply so much there.”
The band has also faced bad luck with US officials this year, who cancelled their headlining run with Decapitated and The Faceless only weeks out from the shows.
“Basically what happened was, several of our touring party had to go through the medicals, which hadn't been disclosed before,” he begins to explain, sounding a little more bitter than before. “We've been in and out of America for twenty odd tours, and this was the first time it happened. It was like new protocol. It was no problem at all really, and the medicals were passed, but what it meant was before you took the medical, there was up to a 14 week wait for the results to come back before they could process the visas, and this was like a month before going into America. So we didn't know whether they'd take two days, or the full 14 [weeks]. We couldn't risk going any further into a tour, and accruing costs, and having people fly out, and fans turn up at the venues, etcetera, and we wouldn't be there. So we had to make the decision there and then that we had to cancel it. There was nothing we could do.”
The Manticore and Other Horrors saw the band writing in a way that had never previously been embraced in exactly the same way. Guitarist Paul Allender, drummer Martin Skaroupka and Filth put together the effort as just the three of them.
“It wasn't too different, other than our drummer Martin undertook the keyboards as well,” says the screeching singer of how things changed. “It kept it quite concise and more manageable. We brought in a new bass player, because we parted with our previous one, who left to tour with Prong, and that tour overhung on top of our recording commitments, so we had somebody else come down and play bass from Scotland, who is now our regular touring bass player, and he's confusingly called Daniel Firth,” he says with a giggle.
“The recording process was brilliant as well, because we basically hired two studios at the same time. So because we had extensively demoed everything, it allowed me to go in pretty much from the word go in a separate studio and begin doing the vocals at the same time as the drums were being redone, because I was doing them to a well-thumbed click, etcetera. It basically folded time in half for us, because I didn't have to wait until everything had been done and find out that I've only had two weeks to do the vocals.”
For their forthcoming Australian tour, local supports were to be picked by Cradle of Filth from a shortlist generated by an online voting system. Filth is quite excited by the concept - but what is he looking for in an ideal support band?
“Music... music's important. That'll be the first thing I'm looking for. Dance moves definitely, various outfits, headdresses, backhanders...” he trails off into laughter once more. “But no I mean something that's going to complement.. because we have The Amenta supporting us on three of the shows, and in Perth a band called [Claim] The Throne, and they both complement, because it's not too stylised – it's not too like Cradle of Filth. It's pointless going out with three bands that are very similar, so I'm looking for something that complements the rest of the bands, and is original, and has a good fan base.”
Cradle Of Filth will be playing the following dates:
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