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Interview
by SashaS
27-9-2004
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| Cradle of Filth: the darkly majestic glo |
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Lethal malefactors
Cradle of Filth: a reincarnation of the ‘re-dead’
Cradle of Filth emerged from the depths of a night and few necropolises; although it could all be makeup, there’s never been anything cosmetic about the band's music. Nocturnal, dark, raven-like to the limit, other-side views, mal-seeding notion, releasing spirits, a party soundtrack for a zombie do at your local parlour…
After a short spell with a major players Sony, for ‘Damnation and a Day’, Dani and the backing members are back on independent Roadrunner [whilst their previous label, Music For Nations, was snapped up by BMG just before a merger with Sony]…
‘Nymphetamine’ is the name of the new disc [see our Review for more details] that Adrian Erlandsson was appointed to talk about. Founding member/frontman Dani Filth, guitarists Paul Allender and James McIlroy, keyboard maestro Martin Foul and/or bassist Dave Pybus would have probably skipped certain aspects of topics Adrian freely touched on.
“Privately we don’t have much contact, we are just a band. We see enough of each other when we are touring and last year we did 106 shows and that’s a lot of time spent together,” the drummer explains quietly and slowly, before picking up the story of their adventure with Sony.
“The relationship started out really good but majority of people left company and the people who signed us promised a lot of things to start happening in America. But, when it came time to release the album in the States, the head of Sony said he had no idea how to market the album and passed it on to an independent label. That certainly was a disappointment… The album also didn’t sell as well as we hoped and the communications were very difficult: whenever something needed doing, it would take our manager days to get in touch with the right people. We are better off with an independent label, we know we can talk to people and get things done.“
“Things were really bad and I’m gonna tell your about two instances so that young musicians can learn something about the major labels: we played at the OzzFest last year and were headlining the second stage; there was a signing tent and to get a ticket to go there you’d need to buy a CD. We were playing, on average, 7 to 10 thousand people a day but Sony only sent out 25 CDs the first day!?“
“Then, there was a tour CD and OzzFest wanted £1,000 to have one CoF song included on the it but Sony refused it. Then, Dimmu Borgir, got the offer and ended up on the CD although they had not played on the OzzFest!?”
A rest of fiends
“We were very frustrated by the whole situation and went in to make an album angry as hell but I don’t know how much that came out in music after all. The more important thing was the number of shows we played last year and gelled together as a band. A song like ‘Gilded C**t’ is directly inspired by live audience’s response. I’d say the songs were written with playing live in mind.”
“This album, for the difference from the others, has been recorded live, we all played in a studio at the same time. It was a real buzz and test of us as musicians to capture us at our best… I think it feels more like a live band playing… We’d play through a song few times and then start recording and do 6 to 10 takes of each song. We then re-listened all versions and choose the best intro from one take, phrase from another, chorus from the next one and edit it all together. The exception being ‘Nemesis’, that is all one take.”
“We want to continue recording, we want to start working on the next album, it takes a long time… We also plan to record two tracks we didn’t have time to finish during the album sessions and may be included on the ‘Special Edition’. We gonna record them anyhow.”
Necro-crusade
“We are starting this tour in South America, then the USA, Europe and few former Eastern Bloc countries. We played there before, in Poland and Russia and the Russians were really going mad. We had a lot of gear problems but the crowd was simply going mad. We are starting our tour in South America, we had only ever played Mexico, but this time we are all over the continent. The situation there is not great but we are promised good security.”
“Our European tour will not start until February next year.”
“There are places on the planet that are really hostile and wild… We planned to take our ‘Midian’ tour to Israel and had few shows booked… There were some rumours of the venue having received some bomb threats and we had to pull it. A band like us can‘t really go places where there is a strong religious feeling.”
“United States is a very religious country but we didn’t have any dead threats, not even in the Bible Belt; they banned Marilyn Manson and we were still selling ‘Jesus is a C**t’ t-shirts at the same show! They didn’t seem to have a very good control of the situation.”
Just don’t tell the Yanks, simply play the gloomy-but-glorious riffs.
SashaS
27-9-2004
Cradle Of Filth's album 'Nymphetamine' is released 27 September 2004 by Roadrunner
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