Cradle of Filth

BIOGRAPHY

These are heady days for those of us who wear our devotion to metal like a badge of honour. The deafening beast of the dark depths has lived to roar and rampage again and the scene has never been in a happier or healthier state. But don’t be deceived. Metal never really went away. In fact, its current fortitude stems entirely from the bands that never surrendered; those brave, liquor-soaked men whose total disregard for the vagaries of fashion and finance kept them glued to the grindstone through metal’s mainstream wilderness years. Now, as seems wholly fitting, the greatest of these are finally reaping their rewards and hitting new creative peaks as they surge unstoppably onwards and upwards. And, as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in 2006.


Just as the gravel-lined, turd-stained streets of urban England gave heavy metal to the world back in the late ‘60s, so that small country with the big voice continues to be the place where the world’s finest dark metal band rest their weary, alcohol-ravaged heads after another sonic killing spree. Love them, hate them or both, Cradle Of Filth is back again to fondle you while slitting your throat. Thornography has arrived.

Recorded at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire, England, with renowned metallic production genius Rob Caggiano (Anthrax, Bleeding Through) and mixed by Andy Sneap (Killswitch Engage, Arch Enemy,Trivium) at Backstage Studios, Derbyshire, Thornography is the band’s seventh full-length studio album and their second for Roadrunner. The follow-up to 2004’s widely acclaimed meisterwerk Nymphetamine it’s a scintillating and terrifying collision between the familiar and the unexpected. It’s the dark, destructive and unsettling sound of a globe-conquering heavy metal band at the height of their sick, twisted powers, and the continuation of a proud, priapic and unhinged legacy that stretches back nigh on 15 years.

When Cradle Of Filth released their now legendary debut album, The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh back in 1994, the notoriety surrounding the Black Metal scene – and its spiritual epicentre in Oslo, Norway, in particular – was reaching fever pitch throughout Europe. These legions of the damned and disgusted took metal further into the abyss than it had ever been before, stripping away its worldly concerns and reducing it to a pure and chilling core of impenetrable black menace. Cradle Of Filth were undoubtedly inspired by this sea-change in metal’s ongoing evolution, they had their own plans for disseminating their own distinct, gothically-erotic propaganda and swiftly defined their own left hand path. Their disdain for playing by the rules was startling in its intensity from the very start.

Throughout the ‘90s, Cradle of Filth – led by vocalist, lyricist and crypt-crawling master of ceremonies Dani Filth – beavered tirelessly away, producing a series of peerless extreme metal classics that drew from an endless, dizzying array of inspirations and influences while always maintaining that instantly recognisable heart of filthy darkness. The brutal and brief Vempire mini-album and the lustrous, lascivious Dusk & Her Embrace (both 1996) began to reveal the band’s great sonic range. Later taking into account the slithering concept piece Cruelty & The Beast (1998) and the Clive Barker-inspired Midian (2000) – not to mention their excursions into the visual realm of film and promo– the Cradle Of Filth sound showed itself to be a many-headed creature. It was one that took delight in confounding both the purists and the critics who continually assailed the band’s motives and creativity even as their fan base expanded and their status soared. With a line-up that seemed to be constantly changing – thanks, perhaps, to the cobweb-encrusted revolving door that rumours suggest marked the entrance to the band’s rehearsal space during this period – the music was never allowed to stagnate; fresh blood and its revitalising effects remained a permanent weapon in the boys’ macabre arsenal.

As the 21st century dawned, Cradle Of Filth unleashed the epic, ambitious Damnation And A Day - a sprawling, theatrical masterpiece that has yet to be truly recognised for either its semantic depth or its thrilling levels of metallic artistry. Quietly walking away from a fractious partnership with their previous label, the band eventually found a logical home with Roadrunner Records. It was a match made in hell that spawned what was, until now, almost certainly the strongest collection of songs in the Cradle canon, the mighty Nymphetamine. Wildly varied and as heavy as anything the band had ever recorded, it was widely hailed as a triumph and led to yet more gruelling treks around the world, where their rabid fan base lurks in every shadowy corner waiting for their latest fix of barbaric drama and blood-soaked belligerence.

And so to 2006, where Cradle Of Filth find themselves in the enviable position of being in a league and class of their own. Having long since outstripped the achievements of their one-time contemporaries, the band are now firmly entrenched in a rich vein of form. The current line-up of Dani Filth, guitarists Paul Allender and Charles Hedger, bassist Dave Pybus and drummer Adrian Erlandsson is the most solid and powerful in the band’s career and Thornography is the resounding, conclusive proof. With songs as brutish, bombastic and diverse as “Libertina Grimm,” “Tonight In Flames,” “Cemetery & Sundown,” “I Am The Thorn,” “The Byronic Man” (featuring HIM’s Ville Valo on guest vocals) and a deranged cover of Heaven 17’s ‘80s pop gem “Temptation,” the world’s biggest and best extreme metal band have never sounded so exhilarating, so vital, so venomous…

“There are a lot of characters on this album,” says Dani Filth of the new opus. “There’s no central concept. It’s more along the lines of Nymphetamine in respect of diversity of content, both lyrically and musically. We spent the whole summer of 2005 working really hard on writing the material and making sure it was the best of songs we’ve ever written. Which undoubtedly it is. It’s obviously our best material thus far. It’s far more rhythmic and catchy and easily the heaviest thing we’ve done, especially on the production side of things. And there’s a real retro feel to the record, in terms of style. It’s slightly experimental for us and a lot of people will be surprised I think at the level of diversity we've managed to achieve with this, especially having worked with other musicians and having our first band instrumental included (Rise Of The Pentagram). We started to write and got into a habit of coming up with tons of stuff. Everyone would be working on ideas and we’d pool it all together in the dank confines of our rehearsal room. We kept stirring the cauldron and adding or subtracting accordingly. Thus each song has its own sound and feel in relation to the concept behind each track. And as per normal, it's all in good taste!
For example, Libertina Grimm, (which concerns itself with a haughty little vivisectrix and her dissonant life of crime) meanders through a succession of twists and turns as if to mimic her dark, labyrinthine obsessions with the dead, before finding foothold with a real primal, sex-laden hook. She might be mad, but before all else she's groovy!"

Louder, harder, faster, heavier, darker, catchier - the unstoppable force that is Cradle Of Filth slithers menacingly forward, crushing the opposition and striking warped, blackened glee into the hearts of misanthropes and malevolents the world over. The nightmare continues…may we never wake up!

Cradle of Filth is a heavy metal band formed in Suffolk, England in 1991.
It has been embraced and disowned with equal fervour by various metal communities, and its particular subgenre has provoked a great deal of discussion.
The band's sound evolved from black metal to a cleaner and more "produced" amalgam of gothic metal, symphonic black metal and other extreme metal styles, while its lyrical themes and imagery are heavily influenced by gothic literature, poetry, mythology and horror films.
The band has successfully broken free of 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 and Download, and in turn a more "commercial" image.
It is sometimes perceived as satanic by casual observers, although its outright lyrical references to satanism are few and far between, and its use of satanic imagery has arguably always had more to do with the shock value than any seriously-held beliefs.

According to Metal Hammer magazine, it is the most successful British metal band since Iron Maiden[1] (although this position has lately been rivaled by Bullet For My Valentine and DragonForce). In March 2003 "Babalon A.D. (So Glad for the Madness)" 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.


Cradle's first three years saw four demos 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 eventually signed to Cacophonous Records and its debut album, The Principle of Evil Made Flesh, was also Cacophonous's first release in 1994.[2] 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.[3]

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,[4] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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".[6] Deva has appeared on every subsequent Cradle release and tour, but has never been considered a full band member,[7] having also performed with The Kovenant, Therion and Mortiis, and fronted her own Angtoria project along with Cradle's current bass player, Dave Pybus.



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. 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.[9] 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.


The infamous "Vestal Masturbation" t-shirt design.Cradle's star continued to ascend in 1998, as 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)[10] 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,[11] 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.[13] 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...")[14] and Bradley would reappear on later albums Nymphetamine and Thornography. 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. Midian created a rift in fan opinion which has only increased with time: whilst taking the band to new heights of commercial popularity, it also provoked cries of "sell-out" from die-hard fans of the early albums.[15]



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.[16] 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[17] by finally bringing a real orchestra into the studio (the 80-strong Budapest Film Orchestra and Choir replacing the increasingly sophisticated synthesisers 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 (So Glad For The Madness), 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[11] - while the remainder comprised stand-alone tracks such as the Nile tribute "Doberman Pharaoh"[18] and the aforementioned "Babalon AD"; a reference to Aleister Crowley. Feeling that Sony's enthusiasm quickly palled however, Cradle jumped ship to Roadrunner Records after barely a year.[19]



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."[20] Cradle's growing acceptance by the mainstream was confirmed when the album's title track was nominated for a Grammy award,[21] 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.[15]

The band's most recent album, 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."[22] 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."[23] The artwork by Samuel Araya featured to the left is a modified version of a previous album cover that proved controversial and was scrapped in May 2006, although numerous CD booklets had already been printed with the original image.[19] 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"[24] (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 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".[22] On July 1st, 2007, the German darkwave/gothic band Samsas Traum stated that Adrian Erlandsson would be playing drums on the forthcoming tour for the new album, Heiliges Herz—Das Schwert der Sonne, for which Erlandsson has also recorded the drums.



Cradle of Filth's first three demos bore a death metal feel, 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.[25] 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...",[26] while Gavin Baddeley's 2006 Terrorizer interview states that "few folk, the band included, call Cradle black metal these days."[27]

Their format differs from most black metal, and they have thus, at one time or another, been labeled symphonic black metal;[28] extreme gothic metal;[29] melodic black metal;[30] satanic metal;[31] vampyric metal;[32] speed metal;[33] death metal;[34] brutal death metal;[35] melodic death metal;[36] and horror metal,[37] some of which are regarded by critics and fans alike as entirely apocryphal categories. They are often dismissed for a perceived lack of credibility, along with bands such as Dimmu Borgir whose success followed in Cradle’s wake[38].

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 their controversial[citation needed] 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."[22]

Appearing on the BBC music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks on April 9 2001, Dani wryly claimed Cradle's sound as "heavy funk", but his stated position on the band’s genre is that "We'd rather be known as solely Cradle of Filth, I think, than be hampered by stupid genre barriers."[22]


Discography


The Principle of Evil Made Flesh - (1994)
Vempire or Dark Faerytales in Phallustein - (1996)
Dusk and Her Embrace - (1997)
Cruelty and the Beast - (1998)
From the Cradle to Enslave - (1999)
Midian - (2000)
Bitter Suites to Succubi - (2001)
Lovecraft and Witch Hearts - (2002)
Live Bait for the Dead - (2002)
Damnation and a Day - (2003)
Nymphetamine - (2004)
Thornography - (2006)

Official Site:
http://www.cradleoffilth.com/