British black metal outfit Cradle of Filth pay their respects to a dark beauty and they call her Satan. Suffolk County, home to Britain's well-respected black metal outfit Cradle of Filth, still retains the pastoral splendor of the old English country-side. But whispers from the past echo a dark legacy. It's a region infamous for the exploits of the 17th century's self-styled "Witch Finder General" Matthew Hopkins, who in 1645 presided over 68 executions there. The area still bears the nickname "Witch County." Most of Cradle of Filth's members live in a village called Hadley, where Hopkins once stayed; just 6 miles away is Lavinum, where the accused "witches" died by fire.
Formed six years ago by vocalist/lyricist Dani Davey, Cradle of Filth foster the Sadean ideology of "vice over virtue." The band say they hold women in reverence and believe that Satan is a female deity whose beauty draws men away from God. They're well aware that, had they lived 350 years ago, such notions would have made them ready bonfire kindling-which is precisely the point.
The band's brand of black metal blends a thick twin guitar sound, courtesy of Gian Pyres and Stuart Anstis, with Damien Gregori's lush symphonic keyboards, bolstered by Robin Eaglestone's throbbing bass and Nicholas Barker's powerful, assaultive drum work. (At this writing Gregori has been replaced by Les Smith, formerly of Anathema.) Over this rich mix Davey unleashes his throat-ripping vocals, from a high-end screech to a dark profundo basso, enhanced by a harmonizer. Their last album, Dusk and Her Embrace, features the additional measure of spoken female vocals, adding another layer to the band's complex sound.
Currently in the studio at work on their third full-length CD, an album to be titled Cruelty and the Beast, the band have long drawn inspiration from a pantheon of writers, psychopaths and black magicians whose "illuminatory genius" informs their work, Davey said. Cradle of Filth's altar to art and sickness hold poets like Thomas Percy and Mary Shelley; Peter Kurten, a vampire/rapist who terrorized 1930's Dusseldorf; horror author H.P. Lovecraft; occultist master Allister Crowley; and Elizabeth Bathory, the 16th century Hungarian "blood countess" who is said to have murdered 650 virgin girls to bathe in their blood and since has become a source of much vampire literature and mythology.
Cruelty
and the Beast is partially concieved as a concept album on
the life of The Blood Countess herself, Davey said, adding that
he finds Bathory "totally fascinating-primarily because of
the isolation she had from so many other people, and the beliefs
that she held."
"She was a very disturbed woman," he said. "She
was renowned for being one of the most beautiful women in Eastern
Europe, and yet it was as if she were born under a black shadow.
She mixed a lot of her life with the practice of
witchcraft."
As for her virgin blood baths, Davey said they've been
"blown out of proportion": "I think that was just
one of the many things that she did. She was so beautiful that
she was worried that she would lose her power. She was able to
mask all the horrors that she perpetrated on other people, like
rolling naked girls in snow, having them bled; she used to have
an iron instrument that would spike women, hold them in a
death-like clutch, a bit like an iron maiden, I guess."
In many ways Bathory embodies what Cradle of Filth say they consider their ideal: a cruelly beautiful female. Their albums are notable for the use of gorgeous women, many of them famous British models. The band worship women in ways that go beyond standard heterosexual lust; for the band, the female principle is the powerhouse of instinct and will and therefore the enemy of a flesh-denying Christian ideology.
"We venerate women, because, according to the stories, they are the cause of man's estrangement from God," Davey said. "We use them to adorn our artwork and use the female temple as a canvas for creation and worship. As a male I can relate more to the female personification rather than a male God. I think it's just the fact that when I was young I knew a lot of women who practiced witchcraft, and a lot of that rubbed off on me."
"The theory of God is to me an unnatural anchor or chain. It's more natural to go with your instincts. Animal instincts are there for a purpose. If you deny sexuality, I think bizarre images will come to haunt you. That's evident in the clergy. In England, you have homosexual priests abusing children, and it's only now coming to light. Their cloth denies their sexuality. It's insubordination, it's reaction, it's a kind of anarchy-being very un-Catholic in belief."
The band's form of insubordination has mired them in controversy on more than one occasion. Last year in London, a fan wearing the band's "Vestal Masturbation" T-shirt was arrested. The shirt depicts a masturbating nun on the cover, with the slogan "Jesus is a Cunt" across the back. The fan in question, Rob Kenyon, was found guilty of committing an act of "profane representation" under a law dating to 1839. He was fined 150 (about US$240), which the band paid for. This past May, drummer Barker was arrested for wearing the same shirt on the way to the Dynamo festival in Eindhoven, Holland. He was released after two hours, although he was charged "creating a public disorder."
"Everything's censored over here. Basically, because of the bullshit in England, it was like having a go at the establishment," Barker said of the T-shirt design. "You know, I'm an adult, I can think for myself, yet we're told what to do, what we can watch and what we can't watch." Davey added: "It's all so ironic, because those shirts have been in print for almost four and a half years now. It's got nothing to do with the church. I agree, it's a very over-board statement to make, but it was an adversity, going against the usual mediocre statement of 'Jesus Loves You.' I mean, what does it mean? The 'Jesus is a Cunt' thing is just a reaction to that."
The band have adopted "Supreme Vampyric Evil" as their operating slogan, and they take the image very seriously. "Dani (Davey) is involved in a few of the vampiric societies," said Barker. "He's in there with the big boys, if you know what I mean. Obviously, all of us are strongly into vampires and shit; it's where we draw a lot of influence and inspiration from." Of Davey's actual practices, Barker said, archly, "I think he has tasted the blood."
Pressed for specifics, Davey talked about a blood-drinking ceremony, "a self-styled ritual that a female friend of mine initiated": "I had a self-realization, which was a combination of the physical pain involved with the sharing of blood among other people- with sterile equipment of course; in this day and age you have to be very careful- and also a dawning realization that we are all mortal, and that, if you can transcend through pain, you go through different states of being. 'Cause people in vampire cults for example believe that, eventually, you move yourself over and transcend death. On the Earthly plane."
Practices like the blood-drinking ritual don't take place in a vacuum, for Davey is fastidious about fine-tuning his environment and lifestyle to a point where he feels at home. "I've spent years developing exactly how I want to live, what I surround myself with, my friends, coming down to some minute detail to sharpen and focus my life in a certain direction. I've got no answers for anybody. Only I know what I am, what I'm into."
On the more mundane level of musical influence, Cradle of Filth see themselves in the line of British metallists like Judas Priest, Venom, and Motorhead. "We're very patriotic when it comes to the British metal thing," Barker said. "Because of that, it sets us apart from the run-of-the-mill Scandinavian scene. We're heavily into the 80's thrash metal thing too, 'cause that was kind of what was happening when we were 12 and 13, and that was like the first real taste of something extreme that any of us had. We were special guests to Venom in Milwaukee, and there's the possibilty of a U.S. tour with Venom. If someone were to have told me 10 years ago that my band would be playing in America with Venom, I'd have found it pretty hard to believe." Barker names Iron Maiden and Slayer as all-time influences. "Somebody else in the band might say Venom and (the black metal band) Bathory. The six of us just combine all our ideas and personal influence and it just comes out the way it does. There's no grand master plan when we come to write music."
Barker sees the current worldwide popularity of black metal as a part of a cyclical process. "It's the way scenes come and go. The death metal thing got big at the end of the 80s and the first three years of the 90s. Then that died out, and the black metal thing started happening. Now, especially in Europe, the black metal thing is saturated, exactly how the death metal scene became, and the old-style thrash thing and old-school metal seems to be getting quite popular in like a full cycle, and people are starting to appreciate the old stuff more. You listen to bands from Europe, and they're trying to copy Venom."
While Venom is in many ways the progenitor of modern British black metal, it was the genre's transit to Scandinavia that poured a black shadow over the musical style. The 1993 murder of Euronymous, a key figure in the Norwegian metal underground, by the self-styled "Count Grishnackh," brought nationwide attention to a music scene that reveled in pagan history, virulent anti-Christian activism and bloodthirsty lore of Viking times.
It's
not an attitude Cradle of Filth are eager to be associated with.
Said Barker of Scandinavian black metal: "We're kind of
keeping away from it. There's a lot of bullshit behind it all, a
lot of false pretense. A lot of them go for this white supremecy
neo thing, which we're not really into. We're British. We're not
a part of that. We sound different, we look different, and we're
treated a bit as an outsider anyway. You get a lot of people from
Scandinavia talking shit about us-bands like Satyricon, Marduk...
just talking bullshit-like they're the real black metal, and when
they see us, they're going to have a fight with us. You know,
playground stuff. They're just bags of hot air. We played in
Norway in December, and nobody showed up. These big hard guys who
talk shit about us whimped out at the last minute."