Years ago, Will Gould stood on the side of a motorway dressed as a giant pizza box and honking a clown horn. With no plans beyond putting on shows and surviving in whatever bands they were in at the time, the singer and his Southampton rocker circle took shifts in call centres, bars and food joints. They shared houses, slept on floors and mucked in with each other’s artistic efforts. By night they played gigs all over town. Bands including Phoenix Down, Little Girl Lost, Tight Like Strings and Our Time Down Here came and went.
From these foundations Creeper would be born, and then reborn multiple times, moving through punk, emo and glam incarnations before arriving at their current cocktail of rock and metal theatre; vampire rock’n’roll with Rocky Horror in its veins, epitomised by Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death. For now, though, Gould was advertising Dominos’ new stuffed-crust to irate motorists, wondering if he’d be doing shit like this forever.
“It was a pretty low point,” he says, smiling with the good cheer of a lifelong DIY spirit. “I needed the money, though.”
Helpfully, sales work like this was at least flexible. For three years, Gould and his guitarist friend Ian Miles juggled club nights and shoestring tours with accosting people on high streets across the south coast. It drew them out of their introspective shells.
“Really, that was a very big turning point in terms of confidence and learning how to be public-facing,” says Miles. “So it has really helped with what we do now.”
Today the pair are speaking from Gould’s new flat in Manchester. He used to live in an 18th-century church until the plumbing got too much, but the new place is still satisfyingly spooktastic. Two giant cuddly skeletons are draped over the sofa. A bookcase full of pumpkins stands in one corner. There are horror film posters and books about Disneyland. A pair of cats prowl in and out of shot. It’s like a child’s Halloween dream house.
“We like to describe Creeper as a family business,” Gould enthuses. “We already have more people than most bands, we’re like The Polyphonic Spree sometimes. It’s like trying to shoot a ska band every time we take a picture, it’s a nightmare. But on top of that, there are long-suffering people who have come on board and worked with us for a long time now.”
All wide-eyed energy and finely arched brows – part Richard O’Brien night-dweller, part children’s entertainer – Gould makes a charismatic ringleader for this family unit. It’s easy to picture him at the Meat Loaf tribute nights he frequents. Next to him, Miles is quieter but engaging, the ghosts of dark times with his mental health hanging faintly in the background. They’re a very likeable pair: film nerds and Jim Steinman fanboys, at the head of this Ed Wood-style gang with its recurring cast and B-movie-esque knack for homespun worlds.
Over time their circle has grown. Gould’s girlfriend Charlotte (daughter of Dare bassist Nigel Clutterbuck) does their make-up. Charlotte’s Cure-loving sister Beth is ‘Darcia the vampire familiar’, Creeper’s social media mascot. Patricia Morrison (Sisters Of Mercy, The Gun Club) appears on Sanguivore II. Everyone, including the six band members, wears multiple hats as required. Miles, who studied film techniques at university, does sound effects for their videos. It’s not difficult to trace it all back to their punk roots – the same all-hands-on-deck mentality that informs everything they do.
“We created this miniature, like an old gothic Victorian house,” Gould recalls of one video shoot. “Charlotte was vaping to try and make smoke from the side of it. It was making her feel sick because she was doing it so much. It’s always very DIY, all mucking in trying to make something. We’ve lost numerous house deposits on this band.”
For years Creeper dreamed of making their “Meat Loaf album”, and how they might pull it off. Following a stretch on Warner Music (for their first two albums) and some testing times, they learned an important industry lesson: no one will care as much about your band as you do.
“One of my biggest frustrations with music is when, as we’ve got a little bigger, someone will go: ‘You don’t have to do that any more,’ and then they do a really bad job,” Gould recalls. “So we’ve been like: ‘Let’s never have someone involved in this who doesn’t love it.’ Because it’s a labour of love. No one’s getting a huge payday at the end, so we do it out of love for the art part of it.”
That love emanates from their new album and all its blood-spattered bells and whistles. Tracking the journey of a vampire rock band raging across 1980s America, Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death follows in the theatrical, spandexed footsteps of 2023’s Sanguivore. Bodybuilding star Sarah Page plays the Mistress Of Death character, in hot pursuit of the bloodsucking band across the album’s track-list. Gould met her at a wrestling convention. For Creeper’s Bloodstock set this year, Page appeared in black leathers and an executioner’s mask.
“I knew we wanted her to be muscly, not some kinny girl in a cat suit,” Gould reasons. “We wanted her to look like something powerful, beautiful in a different way. She’s genuinely terrifying, but she’s the sweetest person ever behind that mask.”
Sonically, the ambitious, Bat Out Of Hell-shaped fingerprints of Jim Steinman are all over both records. In producer Tom Dalgety (Ghost, Rammstein, Royal Blood), they found a kindred spirit: someone who loved Steinman and Meat Loaf as unironically as they did. As soon as they’d finished Sanguivore, they knew there had to be a second part.
“We had this connection with Tom,” Gould explains, “who’d been the third man at the wheel. It was so fun writing with him. And we felt like: ‘Oh god, we could do a lot more of this.’”
“We’ve been referencing Jim Steinman for so long,” Miles adds, “since the beginning of the band. But this was the first time we got to dig in with a producer that had a really vast knowledge of him and his work. That’s why it’s the first time we’ve had a continuation of a record, and we haven’t just cut everything clean off and started afresh with a new aesthetic and sound. We weren’t ready to not write more like that.”
Sanguivore II finds them taking it all further. There are new-wave strains of Billy Idol. Floodland-era Sisters Of Mercy flavours. The cackling humour of Alice Cooper. Colour and shade that makes for a more nuanced listen than initial, bombastic impressions might suggest.
“What we try and do is get those big songs out there to hook people in,” Gould says. “That was one of the great things about Bat Out Of Hell for me; if you heard the title track, you could assume that the record was all one thing. But then, when you came in, you found all these elements of Motown and other things.”
Indeed, for all its lightness and knowing winks, Sanguivore II is no skin-deep romp. For every straight-up banger (e.g. the groovy thrash of Headstones, the singalong pomp of Blood Magick (It’s A Ritual)) there’s the stirring new wave of Daydreaming In The Dark, or the Alannah Myles Black Velvet-style sensuality of Razor Wire; hidden depths that hit hard. The sounds of people who love this music, and who’ve pulled each other back from various brinks: grief, alcoholism, personal demons, breakdowns.
Much of this peaked in Los Angeles where they made their second album, 2020’s Sex Death And The Infinite Void, Gould spiralling down in Hollywood while Miles (who’d been sectioned following a psychotic episode) wrote from a hospital bed.
“One of the things I love about our show now is that we come out on stage in this vampire make-up that slowly melts off during the show, revealing the human beings underneath,” Gould says. “We come on with a costume and you find something sincere under it all.”
For Gould, a “very confused” adolescent in 90s/00s Portsmouth, it all started with his parents’ record collection – which he inherited after their divorce. Roxy Music, T.Rex and Slade filtered into this musical diet. Around that time a friend of his dad lent him David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, which ignited a love for rock’n’roll myths and drama. In 2018 Gould would ‘kill off’ Creeper in a similar style at a London gig.
But it was The Rocky Horror Picture Show that sparked his most profound personal awakening. Initially he stumbled upon a VHS copy at his dad and stepmother’s house, thinking it was a horror film, until its themes of androgyny, kinks and sexual freedom proved otherwise.
“I know it’s fucking weird to talk about, but it was a really big part of sexuality for me, coming to be comfortable with myself. I’ll always credit it as being a really, really big part of that. I think it is for a lot of people.
“My mum took me to the live show when I was about fourteen,” he continues, “and we went to the bar and saw a load of really built, builder-ish dudes, tough-looking lads, in fishnets and stuff. I was like: ‘This is amazing! I love this. This is where I fit in.’”
Meanwhile in Romsey, Miles came upon …And Justice For All in his dad’s record cupboard. His father (an old-school metaller who loved Venom and Black Sabbath) didn’t much like Metallica, but Miles was hooked. It carried him through formative days on the Southampton hardcore scene, and into Creeper. You can hear it in the pace and gritty panache of the guitars on Sanguivore Part II.
“I was still a young kid, and it blew my head off. I was like: ‘Why is it so fast? Why are the guitars so loud?’ I loved it. I was sucked into guitar world. I remember reading the liner notes, smelling the sleeve and thinking: [he laughs sheepishly] ‘That’s what it must have smelled like in the studio when they were recording the record!’”
“But that’s how you feel as a young music fan, isn’t it?” Gould says. “It’s like you’ve suddenly discovered magic, or some sort of dark art.”
Translating that excitement into on-stage confidence has been a work in progress. Years of touring, setbacks and breakthroughs. Pressure to be the next My Chemical Romance (during their earlier, more emo-heavy years). Two years ago Gould was throwing up before shows as a result of panic attacks. Wearing full vampire make-up has been a turning point.
“I found it a lot easier to process the idea of going on stage and performing in front of people with the make-up on,” Miles says. “It’s really interesting how much of a profound effect putting a bit of paint on your face has.”
Fans responded accordingly, attending gigs in extravagant vampiric garb, their faces painted immaculately. It’s fostered a deep, friendly sense of community. Multiple generations convene at Creeper gigs. Extroverts in the moshpit and quiet souls sitting at the back, all of them finding something here. Much like those Rocky Horror shows, where Gould began to recognise his bisexuality.
“There’s some silly sexual overtones to it, but in the same way you see at Rocky Horror, no one’s going to mess with you at a Creeper show,” he says. “It’s a very accepting place, and I’m very proud of that.”
They buzz naturally between projects. During covid, Gould formed a punk band, Salem, while Miles released a darkly atmospheric solo album, Degradation, Death, Decay. It seems to have fuelled their multi-tasking, communal approach to all things Creeper. The haunted houses they create in their kitchens. The scripts they write. The gruesome sound effects they conjure. In another life they might have made pulpy horror films. Instead, they started a band.
“It’s allowed us to learn so many different skill sets,” Gould says. “I had to record myself squelching an orange to make an eye-gouging thing we did the other day. It’s all the stuff that we dreamed about when we were younger, making films, music, being collaborative with our friends. It does feel like a community project a lot of the time, and it couldn’t work another way for us.”
Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death is now via Spinefarm. Creeper tour the UK in support of Ice Nine Kills from December 8 to 12.
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