cradle of filth
Sep
21
11.42am

HARD NOISE: CRADLE OF FILTH // Snapping At Death’s Heels


For album #12, Purveyors of Brutal Darkness, Cradle of Filth have tapped into the world of Victorian era gothic.

For the uninitiated, this was a period where myths of science and myths of spirituality combine forces filling society with a newfound penchant for death, decay and destruction, which is all you’ll find on the new album, Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness of Decay when it drops this Friday. To learn more about the subject and how it turned into an album, we caught up with the man himself Dani Filth.

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW BELOW!

Hysteria: You guys are now on the cusp of releasing album #12. This must be an exciting time for the band.

Dani: Very excited. Very tired as well. I’ve had my birthday last weekend, well last week so the celebrations pretty much carried on through Sunday. Had family over and went to football in London, etcetera. Then straight to London first thing Monday for four days of press. Then two full days of press here in Germany.

Also the new album is shaping up to be an absolute beast. So, Cryptoriana, the Seductiveness of Decay. I read that this one was heavily influenced by Victorian gothic horror which is amazing. Did you have fun kind of playing with that topic?

Definitely yes, it’s something that’s very close to my heart. At the time, when we were writing the record, just prior to writing the record, I’d been reading a lot of collected ghost stories of people of MR James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Benson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that sort of thing. It’s been my forte anyway, the Victorian era. A period completely draped in morbidity. I love what they considered to be the science of spiritualism. At what appeared behind the curtain and that was a very big thing in the Victorian era obviously. It was a British Empire and that was built off the backs of maintaining territory around the world so lot of you know skirmishes and battles and soldiers going off to fight. Obviously the industrialism was also built off the backs of the poor and workhouses and child labour. Yeah there was a real infatuation with the closeness of death. That scene in the Penny Dreadfuls at the time, like serialised comics that were always about macabre subjects. A lot of the works of fiction even though they’re very romanticised, but the Universal monsters had its home, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula obviously, Frankenstein, H.G. Wells, the Abysmal, etcetera.

Then you could also see it in the love of things like Momento Mori, which is the photographing of the dead. You know sitting there with your loved ones who’ve died. Resurrection men would dig up coffins to sell to doctors for science. The list is literally endless. So it’s a fascinating subject.

Darwin was a big believer in spirituality as well. Ironic considering the advances he made to science.
[DANI]

One of the things about Victorian era gothic or horror is that it was around about the time when Darwin kind of came in with the origin of species. As you mentioned before this element of science was kind of brought into the supernatural.

Darwin was a big believer in spirituality as well. Ironic considering the advances he made to science. That’s the thing, Victorian scholars believed and authors and other people in prominent positions, Queen Victoria herself believed in spiritualism and communication with the dead as a science.

Another thing about this album is a lot of talk from you guys about really putting an emphasis on the live front. So you announced what your kind of most encompassing dates for the UK area in years. What’s inspired you to kind of get back out on the road and really kind of dig deep and put in the hours on the highways?

Well we’ve, after 20 years of my previous management, we parted companies due to her retiring. Our new management wanted to reboot the band obviously because he’s taken over and wants to turn a new page. You see all that begins with coming off the back of an album. So now that that’s done, we know that we have plans afoot for Loud Park in Japan. The British Isles Tour, but next year the actual main bulk of the tour which is a One World Alliance ticket tour where everybody has those tickets that take you right around the world, but you have to do it in certain sectors in a certain order.

So we start up in Europe for eight weeks, then we’ve got a little bit of time off, not a great deal to go to Central/South American and North America. Then we come to Japan and Australia. Then we do Indonesia and Philippines. Then head back to England, I think to do a festival here. That is pretty much as far as we’ve got, although we do know that that world tour is gonna extend further than that. Yeah, we are looking forward to it. It’s gonna be a lot of hard work. The current lineup is very stable. We get on those people like I’m seeing a lot. The fact that we can go to these some new places, Tel Aviv, for example.



Wow!

It’s exciting enough!

I feel like it’s been a while since the same team has been brought back for a Cradle of Filth album or have I got that wrong?

We use the same studio, the same producer, the same artists although this time we used a Latvian Contemporary artist. We took the whole band over to Latvia and we compiled the budget, sort of the photography, the video and the artwork into one. We had him do everything. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video but it’s a real work of art, a real labour of love. Had a massive crew working on it. That’s something we wouldn’t have been able to afford had we done it in somewhere like London, which would have been horribly expensive. Plus I knew that he’s a bit of a creative genius. By that, I mean that being a great artist and director and musician and author. I just trust him that he could come up with the goods as it were. The video looks amazing. The artwork looks amazing. That was a really good thing.

WATCH >


Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness of Decay comes out tomorrow, 22 September. Read our review here!




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