Cradle of Filth Frontman Dani Filth Talks New Album and His Love of Horror
Matt Boiselle
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When the mega-forces of both horror and heavy metal collide, there is a ripple effect that can be felt for miles, and all innocent bystanders can get caught in a concussion blast that can level big cities. We here at Dread Central had the privilege of snagging an interview with Dani Filth, the lead voice of the extreme metal group Cradle of Filth.
Their 11th studio album, titled Hammer of the Witches, released on July 10th, and is one of their strongest offerings in years. Dani was all too kind to take a little time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions, so sit back and enjoy!
DC: So give us the lowdown on the new album – what’s it all about?
DF: The main theme, Hammer of the Witch, is taken from the Malleus Maleficarum, which is a manual based in the 1520’s about the persecution and punishment of witch cults in Europe, and we just kind of turned it on its head because the translation is actually “Hammer of the Witch” – basically like the judge’s gavel as a weapon to crush the witches, witchcraft, and non-believers of the Christian faith. It’s about putting the power into the witches’ hands for retribution, repercussion, revolution. Much like Midian, one of our previous albums, a lot of our songs are quite hilted in the medieval, and I took this as a breath of fresh air because more recently we’ve done some conceptual albums and we’d gotten kind of bogged down doing that, and we didn’t want people becoming too embroiled in expecting every album to be conceptual.
DC: Did you have a hard time with the recording of this latest album, with all of the lineup changes you’ve undergone recently?
DF: Not really, as the new lineup changes were initiated out of necessity – we did undergo a tour at the beginning of last year (co-headlining with Behemoth), and we already knew that our guitarist, Paul, couldn’t do the tour for personal reasons. It was a case of the fact that we’d already booked the tour so we had to find someone to replace him, and literally at the 11th hour before the tour started, we found out that our other guitarist, James, had been dealing with a severe neck injury and had to undergo major neck surgery. He actually came to the Forum in London to come and see the show – we played really well on the tour – a lot of older material, which got great reviews, and we really grew together as a band, and that carried on throughout the rest of the year because we were planning a bunch of summer festivals. We did a month in Russia, which is kind of unique – I’ve never spent that long over there before, and we started writing behind all those dates, and we were in the studio at the beginning of December, and if you take Christmas and the weekends out of the equation, we were working 11-hour days, and overall it took us three and a half months to compile it all, and we also dropped some songs as well because we were looking at a LOT of material. We dropped 3 songs which were about 8 minutes long each, so over 24 minutes of music, literally.
DC: With this being your 11th album, do you ever get to a point where you step back and say, “I don’t know how much more I’ve got left,” or “I don’t know if I can top this” – does that ever enter your mind?
DF: Um, not really because people judge each album, but they really don’t know what the band has gone through to produce each one – we’ve never left the studio without being totally happy with each record, despite what many people say. The vocals are adapted to how the album sounds, and with this record, we go back to the twin-guitar, which is sort of the soul of our past, and the speed and rhythm section – it necessitates a higher voice, which was like Manticore – groove orientated, I suppose – a little more punk-like. When you’ve got a nucleus of songs at the beginning of a cycle, and you wonder where the direction’s going to go – I was inundated with lots of tracks, and there’s a moment when you say to yourself, “What the fuck am I going to write this album about?” You end up working so hard on the album that it comes together, and it seems at times like it comes together by unknown forces. Looking towards the next album, we’ve got to bail ourselves out of the water a bit, but when the time comes, we might even release those three songs that we cut, but it just didn’t fit in with this album as much.
DC: After the release of this album, what’s coming up for the band?
DF: We actually go and play Wacken Open Air Festival in Germany, and we leave on Friday, and the next three weekends are taken up by different festivals – I’ve got one in Finland, then the Czech Republic, and then the Summer Breeze where I’ll be preforming with Cradle of Filth and my other band, Devilment, in mid-August. Then we’ve got a mid-European tour starting on the 16th of October which takes us through to December, and we’re going to argue a tossover into South America, and I literally just got the tour dates for the U.S. and Canada, which starts three weeks into January, and that’s a seven-week tour. Then we’re looking at places like Australia and New Zealand and various other places around there. We’re going to be playing a lot of sets, and we’ve got such an eclectic mix of tracks that spans our whole career, and it includes fan-favorites and our favorites. I just said to the guys that we’ll play two or three off of the new album, and I don’t care what else you play as long as we play “Queen of Winter” – we haven’t played it in ages, and everyone threw in what they wanted to see in the setlist, and I think we’ll mix the setlist around as well.
DC: For the people that don’t know (and how they couldn’t, I’ll never understand) – you are a horror fanatic. How does your love for the genre influence your music?
DF: It totally does – growing up in the area, which I live in now (known as Witch County), which is a very old village, and in a house that was built in 1648 and was frequented by the Witchfinder himself, Matthew Hopkins, and that kind of rubbed off on us a little bit. The turning point for me as far as horror went was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and everyone discovered John Landis through that, at least people my age. I jumped from monster movies to B-movies to Hammer horror, straight into stuff like An American Werewolf in London, and on to the dreaded movies of the 80’s, when police in Britain descended on all of the movie stores and put them under an X-rating, which they weren’t of course. If you speak to anyone else my age in Britain, back in the day, if you wanted to rent any of the really bloody stuff from the video stores, it was under the counter, and the story runs throughout every village in England.
DC: All right, I’ve got a few questions for you that I’ll toss at you, and you give me the first thing that enters your head. One horror film that you could continually watch over and over again?
DF: I know it’s a little sad, but I really love Bram Stoker’s Dracula – I don’t love Keanu Reeves’s acting by any means, but it’s the amalgam of the visuals, and the fact that it’s quite adult. I love those big, Gothic feature films, and it’s the combination of that and the music as well.
DC: If you could implant yourself into any role, into any film over the course of movie history, what would it be?
DF: Well, I’m a little short for a Stormtrooper (laughs) – Dracula would be good – there’s been such a prolific list of actors who’ve played the part.
DC: The absolute worst horror film you’ve ever laid eyes on in your life?
DF: Off the top of my head, that’s really, really hard – I remember back in the day, I read a review of Species from Melody Maker, and the review ran only one word: feces.
DC: One CD that you cannot live without?
DF: It would have to be Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds – it’s a musical, but don’t let that put you off. It was done in the 70’s, and it’s apocalyptic, and it’s used for stage plays and giant martian machines, and it’s based on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first disc is about the coming of the Martians, and the second disc is about Earth under Martian rule, and there’s even a weepy pop track in there.
DC: Last one – any words of wisdom for the legions of Cradle of Filth fans?
DF: Thank you very much for your support, and we’ll be coming to the U.S. the third week of January – we’ve just got to nail down those dates, and we should be announcing that next week. We’ll be pretty much taking in all of North America and Canada, and it’s been awhile since we’ve been there, as we had an issue with our Visas, but that’s all been resolved. We’re very much looking forward to that because we love coming to the States and Canada.
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