Will Gould is rummaging around in a box full of human skulls. He’s on the hunt for one with the most teeth intact. After a thorough investigation, he picks up the perfect cranium and holds it out towards us.
“He looks great, doesn’t he?” Will declares, waiting for us to accept his macabre offering.
Thankfully, we’re not out grave robbing with Creeper’s vampiric frontman. Instead, we’re in a prop hire warehouse on the outskirts of his adopted hometown of Manchester. It’s like Toys R Us for theatre kids – an endless series of labyrinthine shelves and rooms crammed with everything from ornate Greek plinths to mock-up pubs, complete with bar tops and beer taps. The skulls aren’t real. At least we hope they’re not.
“No, they’re too light to be real,” Will answers without hesitation, before beelining over to a bloated corpse laid out on a stretcher and proceeding to poke the grotesque, purpled flesh with morbid fascination.
“One day all our bodies will be like this,” he says, a worryingly dreamy lilt to his tone.
Props such as these have been central to Creeper’s theatrical live show for years. Just before the release of their 2017 debut album, Eternity, In Your Arms, they held a mock-funeral parade at a show in London for songs they were never going to play again. At a gig in 2022, Will was ‘decapitated’ onstage at London’s Roundhouse.
Earlier this year, they announced their new album, Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death, with a show at Koko in Camden, which culminated with the brawny, hooded Mistress Of Death herself plunging a wooden stake through the singer’s eye. There are hundreds of props here, some of which will doubtless be used on future Creeper tours. Right now, Will is eyeing up one particular fake cadaver.
“I can’t believe we’ve not used this one yet!” he exclaims with a peculiar gleam in his eye.
Suddenly, it feels like the temperature has dropped a few degrees.
Will Gould may look like a cross between a hip young mortician and an undead member of The Sisters Of Mercy, and possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of both goth music and horror movies, but he’s a world away from being a gloom merchant. As he leads us through the prop store’s shelves, regaling us with a tale about his friend, ex-The Damned/ Sisters Of Mercy bassist Patricia Morrison’s recent encounter with a witch doctor (“There was blood and self-turning pages, it was really fucked up”), there’s something whimsical and childlike about the singer.
Describing himself as a “bumbling, goofy, Noel Fielding-type guy with a big nose”, Will’s jittery charm is infectious. His mind overflows with wonder as he squeaks around in his vegan leather platform shoes, constantly diverting his course to investigate giant stuffed lions and glittering trinkets.
“Sorry, I’m getting so excited to show you everything,” he admits sheepishly.
While gothic darkness plays a huge part in Will’s life, his childhood centred around the make-believe worlds of WWE, Disney and stage magic. The escapism all three provided was a place of solace for a “really anxious” young kid.
“I had a really bad stutter, and I was terrified of people,” he admits. “I would have loved to do theatre, but I always thought I’d just work behind the scenes.”
His interest in life’s darker side can be traced back to his early years too.
“My mum does tarot and Wiccan practices,” he says. “When she was little, her mum used to do séances and stuff in the house – there are so many stories of things flying around, smashing against the wall. And then I went to a Catholic primary school… there was a lot of mythology around in my youth.”
He pauses to consider where the religious section of the prop warehouse might be. It turns out to be quite close – but, once we lock eyes with a tacky portrait of a judgemental Jesus, we’re quick to scamper away and lighten the mood with some taxidermied squirrels sat on toilets.
As we saunter past slot machines, Christmas trees and vintage motorbikes, Will explains how he first discovered this Aladdin’s Cave of theatrical wonders. In the past, he’d build sets out of cardboard in his living room.
“It drove my girlfriend crazy,” he admits.
It was when Creeper began filming videos for Darcia The Vampire Familiar – the band’s eye-rolling, heroically apathetic spokesperson – that he realised he had to find a proper prop shop. Their first rental? A coffin, naturally. He leads us to the wooden casket that started it all, fondly placing his hand against the black, purple satin-lined box.
“We used this at the Roundhouse when we announced the first Sanguivore album, and it was Darcia’s big reveal,” he says, adding that they’ve used pretty much all of the warehouse’s caskets ever since.
It was Darcia who announced the release of Sanguivore II via a typically droll video. “If you hated Sanguivore and were waiting for Creeper to go back to their punk rock roots, boy, have I got some bad news for you,” she said in a social media post. Creeper are nothing if not self-aware.
“You have to have a sense of humour – we literally dress up as cartoon vampires,” says Will, leaning on a flimsy fake tombstone. “If you take it seriously, you’re missing out on half the fun.”
If the first Sanguivore album leaned into the singer’s love of The Damned, The Sisters Of Mercy and the brilliantly over-the top world of Meat Loaf and songwriting genius Jim Steinman, the sequel ramps things up even further, drawing on myriad influences ranging from Judas Priest to hair metal-era hitmaker Desmond Child, via 80s pop queen Belinda Carlisle – Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual) echoes the latter’s 1987 mega-hit Heaven Is A Place On Earth.
The album opens with a spoken-word narration provided by Will’s friend Patricia Morrison, warning of ‘a rock’n’roll nightmare’, before adding that ‘rock music is a horny vampire and tonight it is feasting on YOU!’. If Sanguivore was Bat Out Of Hell, Sanguivore II is The Rocky Horror Picture Show with vampires. And just like Rocky Horror, it’s sexy, funny, decadent and camp – and it knows it.
Where the first Sanguivore album told the story of a man, Spook, who was turned into a vampire by a bloodsucker named Mercy, the sequel follows the exploits of a fictional 80s vampire rock band who feast on the blood of their groupies. This touring vampire circus are being pursued by the Mistress Of Death, who takes great delight in beheading any befanged monster she comes across.
“These vampires are ravenous and killing their fans onstage,” Will explains. “Then the Mistress Of Death is the hero of the story, because she’s saving the fans from this vampire band.”
The Mistress Of Death is embodied in photos, videos and onstage at Koko by champion bodybuilder Sarah Page. But on the album, her role is voiced by keyboard player and co-vocalist Hannah Greenwood, who delivers a menacingly sexy performance on songs such as Razor Wire.
“Hannah is a better singer than me – and she’s better looking as well,” Will notes, catching sight of himself in one of the warehouse’s many mirrors (thankfully, there’s a reflection). “She has the ability to be so lovely, then flip to being really quite raunchy. She’s got some Joan Jett in her, while being a fantastic multi-instrumentalist – violin, piano. Incredible.”
When it comes to sex, Sanguivore II licks its lips and cranks all the dials up to maximum. From Will’s deeper-thana-freshly-dug-grave exhortation to ‘Swallow it, darling’ in Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual) to Parasite’s cry of ‘Suck, suck, suck!’, it makes the link between sex and vampirism explicit. It’s part of a bigger idea to turn the sexy, rebellious energy of rock’n’roll and what Will calls its “sleazy tropes” into something fun.
“There’s nothing less I want to see than a guy in a plaid shirt,” Will sighs. “Music is fun when it’s bisexual and sexy and silly and over the top, when an artist struts across the stage like David Bowie!”
As we continue our tour around the warehouse, Will explains that Creeper is a “family business”. As well as the band themselves, key members include the videographer Harry Steele and prop designer Ivy Upjohn, who crafted the skull throne that appears in the video to the single Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual), and is currently working on a batwing drum rig. And then there’s Clive, who makes Will’s severed heads.
“He makes it so they squirt blood and everything!” he exclaims, shaking his head in awe. “There’s even one that looks like my eye was impaled, too. I had a different haircut when he made the last one, so I either need a haircut or a new decapitated head.”
With so many props, there’s always the possibility of Spinal Tap-style embarrassments.
“On the last record, we wanted to have Darcia sat at a sci-fi spaceship desk, with loads of panels,” Will says. “We wanted her to be answering all these phones, because we had so many different things to announce – but we couldn’t get it up the stairs when we got it to our studio, because it was so heavy.”
Just recently, Will and guitarist Ian Miles rented some wooden stocks. “I’m usually getting Ubers with crazy things from this place, but we decided to just carry the stocks out of here,” he says. “We ended up stopping for a beer, then another… We ended up going into a bunch of different pubs with these stocks.”
Still, it’s impossible to resist the temptation of playing with new props.
“Sometimes you see something and it makes you think: what can we do with this?” says Will. He points at the figures of a cyborg and a spaceman. “Look! What about ‘Sanguivore Four: Sanguiborgs – Vampires In Space’?”
Surely ‘Sanguivore 3’ first?
“Well, I’m just planning ahead – and ‘Sanguifour’ just has so much potential for a fun name. We could get one of those huge space helmets, and put a severed head inside it. You walk in here and everything just writes itself!”
Dusk is falling and the warehouse will be closing soon. Will’s keen to keep the conversation flowing, so we head to a pub. Sometimes when he’s drinking in some of the city’s old man boozers, he gets called ‘Ozzy Osbourne’, but he laughs it off.
“Look at me – what else should I expect?” he says.
As we drink, he reflects on his journey to this point. Before Creeper took off, he worked as a door-to-door double glazing salesman, accosted people in the street trying to sell them film subscriptions, and spent time in a call centre. Now? He’s the black-clad frontman of a vampire rock band. Funny how things work out.
“When we started Creeper, the thought was always, ‘Fuck, do you remember how great it was when music was glam, eclectic and fun?’” he reminisces. “I’m not for a second trying to say what we’re doing is original. It’s not! We’re just old souls that want music to feel fun, and we want people to have fun with us. We want to provide a place where people can immerse themselves in something theatrical and let go."
“Creeper are just a collection of freaks,” he continues. “We’re all freakish in our own little ways, and work together perfectly. We’re a perfect salad, because it’s got the best bits of everything going on. We always wanted to bring back the flamboyancy to rock’n’roll, put the feathers back into punk rock. I believe Sanguivore II does that.”
Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death is out now via Spinefarm. Creeper's UK tour with Ice Nine Kills starts in Manchester on December 8 - for the full list of dates, visit their official website.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
