Cradle of Filth are an English
extreme metal band from
Suffolk, formed in 1991. Their particular
subgenre has provoked a
great deal of discussion.
The band's musical style evolved from
black
metal to a cleaner and more "produced" amalgam of
gothic metal,
symphonic black metal and other
extreme metal styles, while their
lyrical themes and imagery are heavily influenced by
gothic literature,
poetry,
mythology and
horror films.
The band has
successfully broken free from its original niche by courting
mainstream publicity (often to the chagrin of its early fanbase),
and this increased accessibility has brought coverage by the likes
of Kerrang! and MTV, frequent main stage appearances at major festivals
such as Ozzfest, Download and even the mainstream Sziget Festival
, and in turn a more "commercial" image. They
have sometimes been perceived as Satanic by casual observers,
although their outright lyrical references to
Satanism are few and far between, and use of
Satanic
imagery has arguably always had more
to do with the
shock value than any
seriously-held beliefs. According to a 2006 issue of
Metal Hammer magazine, they are the most
successful British heavy metal band since
Iron Maiden.
History
Early years (1991-1996)
Cradle of Filth's first three years saw three demos and a rehearsal
tape recorded amidst the sort of rapid line-up fluctuations that
have continued ever since (Cradle has generally had around half a
dozen members at any one time, but can boast more than twenty
musicians in its history). The band also recorded an unreleased
album entitled
Goetia prior to the third demo and their
style shift.
Goetia was set for release on Tombstone
records, but all tracks were wiped when Tombstone went out of
business and could not afford to buy the recordings from the
studio. The band eventually signed to
Cacophonous Records and their debut
album,
The
Principle of Evil Made Flesh, was also Cacophonous's first
release in 1994. A step up in terms of production from the
rehearsal quality of most of their demos, the album was still
nevertheless a sparse and embryonic version of what was to come,
with lead singer
Dani Filth's vocals in
particular bearing little similarity to the style he was later to
develop. The album was well-received however, and as recently as
June 2006 found its way into
Metal
Hammer's list of the top ten black metal albums of the
last twenty years.
Cradle's relationship with Cacophonous soon soured; the band
accusing the label of contractual and financial mismanagement.
Acrimonious legal proceedings took up most of 1995, and the band
finally signed to
Music for
Nations in 1996 after only one more contractually obligated
Cacophonous recording: the
EP
Vempire or
Dark Faerytales in Phallustein which, it has since been
conceded, was hastily written as a Cacophonous escape-plan. Despite
the circumstances of its release however, its handful of tracks are
staples of the band's live sets to this day, and "Queen of Winter,
Throned" was listed among twenty-five "essential
extreme metal anthems" in a 2006 issue of
Kerrang! magazine. The EP also
marked
Sarah Jezebel Deva's debut
with the band, replacing
Andrea Meyer,
Cradle's first female vocalist and self-styled "satanic advisor".
Deva has appeared on every subsequent Cradle release and tour, but
has never been considered a full band member, having also performed
with
The Kovenant,
Therion and
Mortiis,
and fronted her own
Angtoria project along
with Cradle's current bass player,
Dave
Pybus.
Music for Nations era (1996-2001)
Dusk... and Her
Embrace followed the same year: a critically acclaimed
breakthrough album that greatly expanded the band's fan-base
throughout Europe and the rest of the world. A
concept album of sorts based generally on
vampirism and specifically (though
loosely) on the writing of
Sheridan Le
Fanu, Cradle's inaugural album for Music for Nations set the
tone for what was to follow. The album's production values matched
the band's ambition for the first time, whilst Dani's vocal
gymnastics were at their most extreme.
The increasingly theatrical stage shows of the 1997 European tour
helped keep Cradle in the public eye, as did a burgeoning line of
controversial merchandise; not least the notorious t-shirt
depicting a
masturbating nun on the front and the slogan "
Jesus is a
cunt" in large letters
on the back.
The t-shirt is banned in New Zealand, a
handful of fans have faced court appearances and fines for wearing
the shirt in public, and some band members themselves attracted a
certain amount of hostile attention when they wore similar "I Love
Satan" shirts to the Vatican
.
Alex Mosson, the
Lord Provost of Glasgow from
1999-2003, called the shirts (and by implication the band) "sick
and offensive". The band obviously approved, using the quote on the
back cover of the 2005 DVD
Peace Through Superior
Firepower.
In 1998, Dani began his long-running "Dani's Inferno" column for
Metal Hammer, and the band appeared in the
BBC documentary series
Living With the Enemy
(on tour with a fan and his disapproving mother and sister) and
released its third full-length album
Cruelty and the Beast. A
fully-realised concept album based on the legend of the "Blood
Countess"
Elizabeth Bathory, the
album boasted the casting coup of
Ingrid
Pitt providing guest narration as the Countess: a role she
first played in
Hammer's
1971 film
Countess
Dracula. The album led to Cradle's U.S debut, and Dani
claimed it in 2003 as the Cradle album of which he was most proud,
although he conceded dissatisfaction with its sound quality.
The following year the band continued primarily to tour, but did
release its first
music video,
PanDaemonAeon, and an accompanying EP,
From the Cradle to
Enslave, featuring the music from the production. Replete
with graphic
nudity and
gore, the video was directed by
Alex Chandon, who would go on to produce
further Cradle promo clips and DVD documentaries, as well as the
full-length feature film
Cradle of
Fear.The band released their fourth full-length studio
album on
Hallowe'en, 2000.
Midian was based around the
Clive Barker novel
Cabal and its subsequent film
adaptation
Nightbreed. Like
Cruelty and the Beast,
Midian featured a guest
narrator, this time
Doug Bradley, who
starred in
Nightbreed but remains best known for playing
Pinhead in the
Hellraiser films. Bradley's line "Oh, no
tears please" from the song "
Her
Ghost in the Fog" is a quote of Pinhead's from the first
Hellraiser ("No tears, please. It's a waste of good
suffering...") and Bradley would reappear on later albums
Nymphetamine, Thornography, and
Godspeed on
the Devil's Thunder. The video for "Her Ghost in the Fog"
received heavy rotation on
MTV2 and other metal
channels, and the track also found its way onto the
soundtrack of the
werewolf movie
Ginger Snaps.
Sony interlude (2001-2004)
The longest-ever interim period between full-length Cradle albums
was nevertheless a busy time for the band.
Bitter Suites to Succubi was
released on the band’s own "Abracadaver" label, and was a mixture
of four new songs, re-recordings of three songs from
The
Principle of Evil Made Flesh, two instrumental tracks, and a
cover of
The Sisters of Mercy's
"No Time To Cry." Stylistically similar to
Midian, the
album is unique among Cradle albums in featuring exactly the same
band members as its predecessor, but is generally regarded as an EP
and often overlooked in the band's canon. Further stop-gap releases
followed in the form of the "best of" package
Lovecraft and Witch Hearts
and a live album;
Live Bait
for the Dead. Finally, the band (principally Dani) also
found time to appear in
Cradle of Fear while they
negotiated their first major-label signing with
Sony Music.
Damnation
and a Day arrived in 2003; Sony's heavyweight funding
underwriting Cradle's undiminished ambition by finally bringing a
real orchestra into the studio (the 80-strong Budapest Film
Orchestra and Choir replacing the increasingly sophisticated
synthesizers of previous albums) and
thus marking the band's belated gestation - for one album only -
into full-blown symphonic metal.
Damnation featured the
band’s most complex compositions to date, outran its predecessors
by a good twenty minutes, and produced two more popular videos: the
Švankmajer-influenced
Mannequin, and
Babalon
AD , based on
Pasolini's infamous
Salò.
Roughly half the album trod the conceptual territory of
John Milton's
Paradise Lost - showing the events of
the Fall of Man through the eyes of
Lucifer - while the remainder comprised
stand-alone tracks such as the
Nile
tribute "Doberman Pharaoh" and the aforementioned "
Babalon AD"; a reference to
Aleister Crowley. "Babalon AD" was the
first DVD-only single to reach the U.K. top 40, according to the
Guinness Book of
Records of British Hit Singles and Albums. Feeling that
Sony's enthusiasm quickly palled however, Cradle jumped ship to
Roadrunner Records after barely a
year.
Roadrunner Records (since 2004)
2004's
Nymphetamine was the
band's first full album since
The Principle of Evil Made
Flesh to not be based around any sort of overarching concept
(although references to the works of
H. P.
Lovecraft are made more than once).
Cradle's
bassist Dave
Pybus described it as an "eclectic mix between the group's
Damnation and
Cruelty albums with a renewed
vigour for
melody, songmanship [sic] and
plain fucking weirdness spat into the smelting bowl." Cradle's
growing acceptance by the mainstream was confirmed when the album's
title track was nominated for a
Grammy award,
but the band's
cover version of
Cliff Richard's "Devil Woman" for the
Nymphetamine special edition did little to convince its
detractors of the band's integrity.
Thornography, was released in
October 2006. According to Dani Filth, the title "represents
mankind's obsession with sin and self... An addiction to
self-punishment or something equally poisonous... A mania." On the
subject of the album's musical direction, Filth told
Revolver magazine, "I'm not saying
it's 'experimental', but we're definitely testing the limits of
what we can do... A lot of the songs are really rhythmical -
thrashy, almost - but they're all also
really catchy." A flurry of pre-release controversy saw Samuel
Araya's original cover artwork scrapped and replaced in May 2006,
although numerous CD booklets had already been printed with the
original image.
Thornography received a similar reception
to
Nymphetamine, garnering generally positive reviews, but
raising a few eyebrows with the inclusion of a cover of
Heaven 17's "Temptation" (featuring guest vocals
from
Dirty Harry), which was
released as a
digital single and
accompanying video shortly before the album.
Long-term drummer
Adrian
Erlandsson departed the band in November 2006. According to an
official Roadrunner press release, Erlandsson left with the
intention of devoting his energies to his two side projects
Needleye and the now-defunct Nemhain: "I
have enjoyed my time with Cradle but it is now time to move on. I
feel I am going out on a high as
Thornography is
definitely our best album to date". He was replaced on the 2007
world tour by
Martin
Škaroupka.
Cradle of Filth announced in early 2008 that their eighth studio
album was underway: "The world tour for the
Thornography
album, which last saw COF in Russia, Ukraine, UK, Romania, Slovakia
and North America with
GWAR is now complete
[and] the band has returned home to start writing for a new record
over the dark months in the rehearsal room.
The band's official message boards revealed parts of an interview
with
Paul Allender, the lead
guitarist, conducted by MédiaMatinQuébec: "We already have four new
songs ready and I have to say that they are... much faster than the
songs on
Thornography. [They] sound like old Cradle of
Filth... A mixture of
Midian
and
Dusk. . ." and
the album was released on October 27, 2008.
Godspeed on the Devil's
Thunder is a concept album about the legendary 15th
Century murderer
Gilles De Rais, a
French nobleman who fought alongside
Joan of
Arc and accumulated great wealth before becoming a satanist,
sexual deviant and serial killer. In an interview published in
February 2009, Dani talked about
Gilles
De Rais, and how his story manifests on
Godspeed on the Devil's
Thunder':
In an interview with
Metal Hammer,
Dani Filth confirmed that a new album was
in the early stages of development. A couple of songs are ready to
go and the band will begin recording in November 2009, with a
release planned in May or June 2010. Its sound is described as
"creepily melodic, like
Mercyful Fate
or a dark
Iron Maiden"
Genre
Cradle of Filth's first three demos have been claimed by reviewers
to emerge a
death metal sound, with
occasional symphonic elements. However, when they released their
fourth demo,
Total Fucking Darkness, their genre became
more akin to
black metal. Their "true"
black metal status however, has been in debate since near the time
they became popular. Dani, in a 1998 interview for
BBC Radio 5 for example, said "I use the term
heavy metal, rather than black metal, because I think that's a bit
of a fad now. Call it what you like: death metal, black metal, any
kind of metal...", while
Gavin
Baddeley's 2006
Terrorizer interview states that
"few folk, the band included, call Cradle black metal these
days."
The band's style has been described as
symphonic black metal,
gothic black metal, and dark
metal. However, the band's evolving sound has allowed them to
continue resisting definitive categorisation. They are audibly
influenced by
Iron Maiden, have
collaborated on projects like
Christian
Death's
Born Again Anti-Christian album (on the track
"Peek-A-Boo"), and have even dabbled outside of metal music with
dance remixes ("Twisting Further Nails", "Pervert's Church" etc),
although these have fallen by the wayside in recent years. In a
2006 interview with
Terrorizer magazine, current guitarist
Paul Allender said "We were never a
black metal band. The only thing that catered to that was the
make-up. Even when
The Principle of
Evil Made Flesh came out — you look at
Emperor and
Burzum and
all that stuff — we didn't sound anything like that. The way that I
see it is that we were, and still are now, an
extreme metal band."
Appearing on the
BBC music quiz
Never Mind the Buzzcocks on
April 9, 2001, Dani jokingly claimed Cradle's sound as "heavy
funk", and in an October 2006 interview stated
"We'd rather be known as solely 'Cradle of Filth', I think, than be
hampered by stupid genre barriers."
Discography
Band members
References
- "Hating Cradle has always been chapter one of 'Bluff Your Way
in Black Metal Elitism'." Chris Chantler, Terrorizer, Issue 177, December 2008,
page 70.
- Metal
Hammer, Issue 160, December 2006 - "British Steel", page
40.
- Cradle of Filth, Lovecraft & Witch
Hearts liner notes, written by Damien Gregori 2002
- Kerrang
magazine, October 7th, 2006
- Gavin
Baddeley - Lucifer Rising (Nemesis Publishing, 1994,
p.211)
- Metal
Hammer magazine, March 2003
- Metal
Hammer magazine, March 2003
- eg. Kerrang! issue 1130, October 21, 2006;
Terrorizer issue 150, November
2006; Metal
Hammer issue 159, November 2006
- Terrorizer magazine, November 2006
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