Dani Filth is aware of the reaction Cradle Of Filth have provoked over the years. “You might hate us but at least you’ve heard of us,” says the vocalist, visionary and sole remaining founder member of Britain’s most recognisable extreme metal outfit, with a laugh.
“There are bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica that everyone knows. Builders who only listen to daytime radio know them. If there’s to be an epitaph for the band, it would be nice to be in that position and just be remembered as Cradle Of Filth.”
They might not be in the same commercial league as Maiden or Metallica, but Cradle Of Filth enjoy a level of notoriety and success that has taken them way beyond the black metal underground that spawned them more than 30 years ago.
The vampire fangs and make-up, blasphemous shirts and bizarre TV appearances have all helped to make them a name that resonates in the wider cultural consciousness. People who couldn’t name a Cradle Of Filth song know who they are but, behind the imagery and cunning stunts, there has also been biting and often beautiful music.
“We did get a lot of flak for it,” shrugs Dani, referring to the flurry of publicity and controversy that the band have often deliberately courted. “People said we were a t-shirt band. They’d go, ‘You’re a shock-rock band like W.A.S.P.’ and I was like, ‘Fantastic, I embrace it.’ That’s why I got into metal – for escapism. I want my rock stars dead or living in fucking Porsches and a bassist with his guitar on fire. And when all the dust from that stuff fades and you’re carrying on and 14 albums along, you still have the same respect.”
Cradle Of Filth’s journey began in the sleepy Suffolk village of Hadleigh in 1991, when teenage metal fan Daniel Davey teamed up with friend and guitarist Paul Ryan.
“Paul is still our booking agent and he will hate me talking about him in the press,” Dani laughs. “He prefers working from the shadows, but back then he had a job so he funded it and I did the grunt work, like sending tapes out and doing interviews. I did my first interview with Metal Hammer from a phone box outside the post office with people queuing outside.”
The fledgling band was inspired by everything dark and extreme, from the gothic death-doom hybrid of early Paradise Lost and Anathema to horror movies ranging from Clive Barker’s adaptation of Candyman to Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.
And then there was the second wave of black metal, a murky musical and cultural force emanating largely from Norway, which lit a fire under the nascent Cradle Of Filth. Although still resolutely underground, black metal exploded into the wider public consciousness early in 1993, with lurid magazine covers detailing church burnings and violence.
Among the scene’s most prominent bands were Emperor, who travelled to the UK that summer for their first UK tour, with Cradle Of Filth joining them on the bill.
“The main thing I remember about the tour itself is there was a lot of interest but not many people,” Dani recalls. “Over the years I’ve heard so many people say they were there that I thought we must have played Wembley Arena. But the London show had maybe 200 max. At the Edinburgh show, there were more people onstage than in the audience.”
It would later emerge that members of Emperor were central to the chaos unfolding across the North Sea, with guitarist Samoth jailed for arson and drummer Faust for murder. Asked if there was a sense that Emperor and their peers were really getting involved in some genuinely extreme acts, the singer pauses.
“It was all a bit standoffish with Emperor at first,” he says. “The first gig was with this Christian doom band called Mourn, and there was a thing where Emperor were supposed to have smashed their crosses. It was all, ‘My God, your Satanic war is starting!’ In reality, we’d broken the cross lugging stuff in a corridor and just chucked it somewhere.
“Things warmed with Emperor and in Liverpool there was a party at Darren White from Anathema’s house. Faust was totally legless and he was telling me all about how he murdered [a person]. He wasn’t really boasting about it. It was part of the conversation. It was going in one ear and out the other, because I was more on a different train of thought. But after it all came out, I suddenly thought, ‘Was I withholding information? Or was I, you know, like an accomplice to this?’ So I knew this, but I didn’t believe it.”
That particular evening ended, Dani says, with pictures being taken of the Emperor drummer passed out and piled with teddy bears, a Bible and somebody’s lapdog, neatly pirouetting from the horrific to the ridiculous.
Black metal was a scene of outsiders, but the fact that Cradle Of Filth were British meant they were outsiders within it. That probably helped them avoid becoming involved in the worst of what was happening. Instead, they set about stamping their mark on this evolving movement.
Their first attempt at recording an album in the shape of 1992’s Goetia ended in disaster when the studio wiped the master tapes following a payment dispute with the band’s label, Tombstone.
Scrapping the songs, they started again and released The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh in 1994. By Cradle’s later standards it was raw and primitive, though it was still expansive for the time, with a British folkloric and Hammer Horror twist.
But it was followed by more tribulations in the shape of wrangles with their new label, Cacophonous. They’d already recorded a version of follow-up, Dusk… And Her Embrace, and it looked like history might repeat itself with a scrapped second album.
“The band fractured into two halves following two different managers,” Dani recalls. “I stayed with [drummer] Nicholas Barker and [bassist] Robin Graves, and we took the label to court with legal aid. I remember going to meetings with our lawyer in black metal make-up in this posh area in Putney because we’d just been doing a photoshoot.”
The upshot was that Dani’s version of the band was able to retain the rights and re-record Dusk… for a new label in exchange for a final EP for Cacophonous. The latter was 1996’s V Empire Or Dark Faerytales In Phallustein, released just four months before the re-recorded Dusk… And Her Embrace.
“That’s why we had two very big releases in 1996,” Dani continues. “The difference being that Dusk… came out on [powerhouse independent metal label] Music For Nations and suddenly we had really great press and trips to America.”
Dusk… And Her Embrace changed things for Cradle Of Filth. The late 90s and early 2000s represented a pinnacle of creativity for the band. They might have received flak from black metal fundamentalists for stretching further away from their roots, but Dusk… and 1998’s follow-up, Cruelty And The Beast – a concept album inspired by medieval Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial killer Elizabeth Báthory – saw them define their own sound and style.
It was still stinging and vicious, but now more fully imbued with that arch gothic sweep. They were no longer strictly a black metal band; they were simply Cradle Of Filth. They were also all over the media during this period. Dani wrote a regular column for this magazine, but it wasn’t just the metal press they appeared in.
They starred in BBC documentary Living With The Enemy, which paired them with a fan’s disapproving mum, while Dani would later appear on comedy music quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks. But their unexpected status as black metal’s most high-profile band came with a large side-order of notoriety.
In 1993, they had created a shirt for the Emperor tour featuring a masturbating nun on the front with the words ‘Vestal Masturbation’, and the words ‘Jesus Is A Cunt’ in block capitals on the back.
“We were crying with laughter: ‘We can’t put this on a shirt, can we? Fuck it, we are,’” Dani recalls of the shirt’s inception. “It wasn’t necessarily Satanic, it was more anarchic at the time. We couldn’t think of a better figurehead, although Hitler came up. You know, Hitler is a cunt.”
Whether the band were courting controversy or not, they found it in 1996 when a Cradle fan named Rob Kenyon was arrested in London for wearing the Vestal Masturbation shirt. He was subsequently found guilty of Profane Representation under the 1839 Act and fined £150.
“They tried to reintroduce that centuries-old law to punish him for it, which became a national issue,” says Dani.
The band’s then-drummer Nicholas Barker was also arrested the following year for wearing the shirt, although he was released without charge. But it was a different outfit that nearly got the band shot during a press trip to Rome.
“We were doing pictures outside the Vatican,” Dani says. “All of a sudden we were surrounded by very excited guards pointing submachine guns at us. Our keyboard player, Lecter, used to dress as a priest and apparently it’s illegal in Italy to impersonate members of the clergy. I was genuinely shitting it, and they only let us go because we had a concert to do, and it became apparent there could be a mini-riot if we didn’t show up.”
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Cradle Of Filth’s unlikely ascent continued into the 2000s. They were signed by major label Sony for 2003’s cinematic Damnation And A Day. It was a measure of their ambition that the album featured the 101-piece Budapest Film Orchestra including the 40-piece Budapest Film Choir.
“We made the most of it,” says Dani with a grin, of their time in the major label sunshine. “We’d be at the Ivy Club or a Sony party where Madonna was on the dancefloor. It was cool, but we were obviously well out of place. We knew what was going on.”
2004’s Nymphetamine was the band’s biggest commercial success, but Dani says they never really came close to genuine mainstream crossover.
“The gulfs are just so vast between us and a band like Metallica,” he muses. “On the Ozzfest tour [in 2003] we pulled up in El Paso and people mistook our bus for Ozzy’s. I thought the bus was going to be pushed over, but as soon as they realised it wasn’t Ozzy, it went dead again. I had dreadlocks at the time, though, and at least we got free shots in the bars because people thought we might be Korn.”
Cradle’s output during the 21st century has been remarkably consistent. There have been divisive moments, such as 2006’s relatively experimental Thornography, but there have also been classics and fan-favourites including 2008 Gilles de Rais-themed concept album Godspeed On The Devil’s Thunder and 2015’s Hammer Of The Witches, which dug deeply into the historical atrocities and persecution committed in the name of religion in the band’s home county of Suffolk.
There have been no pauses or hiatuses during that time, although there have been a lot of line-up changes. Dani has been the sole constant member for the whole of the band’s existence, though he insists he isn’t difficult to work with.
“I think we’ve had 35 different members but we’ve only sacked maybe three and coerced a fourth person into leaving,” he says with a shrug. “I do ask a lot of my troops, and being in a band like us and away from home, it takes its toll. People start families or want to concentrate on their own bands, but it can’t be that terrible an environment considering two of our members [guitarist Marek ‘Ashok’ Šmerda and keyboardist Zoë Marie Federoff] just got married.”
He says his own commitment to the cause has only wavered once, after the release of 2012’s The Manticore And Other Horrors. Their six-piece line-up had already been reduced to a trio and when long-time guitarist Paul Allender left, the band hit its nadir.
“It was a low point, but really the bar is high with this band,” Dani says. “We’ve had so many good things happen that you can’t be there all the time. And really it set us up for a total renewal, like Cradle 3.0.”
Which is where we find Dani and Cradle Of Filth today. New album The Screaming Of The Valkyries is a distillation of everything that made them so delectable in the first place, and single and opener To Live Deliciously provides a manifesto of sorts.
“As long as you’re not a cunt, you can quite easily live your life unfettered of law and constraint and how people expect you to be,” the singer says, with shades of a potty-mouthed Aleister Crowley. “It’s about living life to the fullest while you’re here. I’m going to be doing this for the rest of my life, so I might as well do it deliciously.”
The Screaming Of The Valkyries is out now via Napalm. Cradle Of Filth play Mystic and Download Festivals in June, and tour the UK from July 6.
