Cradle Of Filth are one of the few bands to not only recognise extreme metal’s bombast, but fully lean into it. Where so many peers screamed in all seriousness about Satan and gore, Dani Filth’s act wove Victorian horror tales with bold string sections and operatic vocals.
Their face paint and bondage gear made the whole package too OTT to ignore, and within a handful of albums the band were the mainstream’s shorthand for audial maximalism. Dani and his gremlins have now spent more than three decades haunting metal’s front lines, and these are the lessons he’s picked up along the way.
MAKE SURE YOU CHOOSE YOUR STAGE NAME CAREFULLY
“When did I start calling myself Dani Filth? I think it was around Cruelty And The Beast, which came out in ’98. People started to refer to me in the press as Dani Filth, so I just put it down in the album booklet. It stuck pretty quickly, but it’s been a bit embarrassing. The postman sees it all the time. I get parcels for ‘Dani Filth’, ‘Count Filth’… ‘Count Backwards.’ Ha ha ha!”
SUFFOLK IS DRIPPING IN SPOOKINESS
“I lived in a village called Hadleigh for a long while, up to the point we recorded [2000 album] Midian. It was a big inspiration: the whole place is very spooky. I lived in a Georgian manor at one point – unfortunately, I just had an apartment there – and then in one wing of a 16th-century cottage. Matthew Hopkins [infamous witch-hunter, and inspiration for Vincent Price’s 1968 horror film Witchfinder General] apparently stayed in that very house at one point in his illustrious career.”
IT SUCKS FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH SOMETHING
“I enjoyed school until I got to sixth form and got a bit too rebellious. We had a chaplain there and I purposefully wound him up by wearing controversial t-shirts. I’ve had a recurring nightmare where I see my exams and haven’t done anything. I think back to it when I wake up and go, ‘You know what? That was pretty much true.’ Ha ha ha!”
STICK IT TO THE MAN
“Around 15, 16, 17, I listened to American hardcore, thrash metal and everything. It was our gaggle of skateboarders that got that law made: ‘Skateboarding is not a crime’ or whatever. Ours was the first village, apparently, in England that installed CCTV, just to spot us skateboarding! And they went to such lengths that they actually put all this shit on the road. It was like gravel, but it was in the tarmac. People were pissed off because they had to drive their cars over it! It was just so we didn’t skateboard down the high street… which we did all the time.”
IF YOU’RE IN MUM’S HOUSE, YOU STICK TO MUM’S RULES
“I used to have a dreadful punk band who rehearsed in my mum’s living room. It was all fine and dandy until she got a new carpet and then our drummer forgot to put his mat down. He’d just oiled his new drum pedal. I tried covering the stain up – it was only a couple of days of pushing the sofa over it at a slightly obtuse angle before I was discovered. Never happened again.”
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED…
“Cradle started wearing corpsepaint after about a year. At first it wasn’t supposed to be corpsepaint: we were fans of goth stuff, the imagery more than the music. We looked a little bit like the more old-school bands, like Celtic Frost, where it was more sullen than full-on badger make-up. The first photoshoot we did, we didn’t have any black paint, so we used boot polish. That was not a good idea. It doesn’t do your eyes much good.”
…DON’T SHOVE SURFACE CLEANER INTO YOUR EYES
“It’s been trial and error since then. Backstage at [1998 vampire festival] Vampyria II in Camden, someone swapped out my contact lens solution. I don’t know what happened, but I put detergent in my eyes instead of contact lens solution. My eyes felt like they were being pricked with needles for a week.”
NORWEGIAN BLACK METAL GAVE RED FLAGS FROM THE START
“I became pen pals with Euronymous [late Mayhem guitarist and Norwegian black metal ringleader, murdered by Burzum’s Varg Vikernes in 1993] after sending our demo tape to him. He sent me a nice little letter, nothing overtly weird. I think he mentioned in his second letter how much he admired [notorious dictators] Pol Pot and Nicolae Ceaușescu for the way they could control the populace, but that’s about as misanthropic as it got.”
JUST BECAUSE IT’S A CLASSIC DOESN’T MEAN IT’S GOOD
“I got about three or four letters from Euronymous. I did have them in my copy of [Mayhem’s debut EP] Deathcrush, until a wily character that I thought was a friend stole them from me a long time ago. I still have an original copy of the EP from 1987, but me and my friends just regarded it as a crappy thrash metal, death metal thing. Not once did we consider it black metal, other than it having a spiky logo with inverted crosses.”
YOU SHOULD BE FREE TO WEAR WHAT YOU LIKE
“Around ’99, they arrested someone in London for wearing a Cradle Of Filth ‘Jesus Is A Cunt’ shirt. He refused to take it off, mainly because he didn’t have anything else to wear. They tried to prosecute him by reintroducing a by-law from the 17th century, which got everybody up in arms: ‘This is like 1984! What happens if they want to prosecute me but can’t? They will just find some other way of doing it?’ Eventually it was thrown out of court, and he contacted us and we sent him another t-shirt. I think we paid his court expenses.”
LEAVE THE ELDERLY ALONE
“Whilst we were filming [2001 horror movie] Cradle Of Fear, Alex [Chandon, director] came down to shoot a documentary for us. He got in his mind that old people were incredibly creepy, so he was going to turn up at a nursing home with a film crew and talk his way in. He rocked up at 11pm, pissed out of his head, trying to blag his way in. The guy on the door was completely bewildered and got a bit like, ‘Guys, you need to fuck off.’"
DON’T DO DRUGS, KIDS
“We found some magic mushrooms while we were recording [2003’s] Damnation And A Day near Battle [site of the Battle Of Hastings]. The whole field next to my chalet was full of them! I talked one of the guys in the band – who’d never, ever touched anything – into doing them and he spent the whole night talking to the wallpaper. We all decided, ‘Why don’t we walk into Battle? We might see some ghosts from the battle itself!’ I don’t remember much after that. It was immensely fun!”
ALWAYS LEAVE THINGS AS YOU FOUND THEM
“We stole a cross from somewhere. If you look at our DVD [2005’s Peace Through Superior Firepower], there’s a bit of footage of our old keyboardist with this massive cross walking through the mist of the battlefield. It was pretty epic – even more epic on magic mushrooms. I think we got it from an English Heritage signpost, and if that’s the case I think we returned it. Just doing our bit for the country.”
MONEY CAN MAKE YOU DO STRANGE THINGS
“Damnation… was on Sony’s money, and it was good money. We went through a phase of carrying BB guns everywhere and shooting each other. We got in a lot of trouble: we found a milk churn and, when we bought these guns in a hunting shop, they also had these crowscarers [small explosives designed to keep birds off farmland]. We bought loads of them and dropped them into this milk churn with a basketball. The thing would fire up and it’d go beyond the clouds. It was that powerful!”
BEING IN A BAND IS ABOUT MUCH MORE THAN MUSIC
“What keeps Cradle fun after 30 years? The promise of the lease on my second yacht! The first one’s getting terribly shabby. To be honest, I love it. It’s a lifestyle and it doesn’t stop at music. It’s about literature, film, performance, so many things. There are so many hats you can wear in a band, and it’s great embracing it all.”
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER
“The pandemic was a bit of a reset button for me. You may have got a bit jaded at everything that’s expected of you as a band member. Sometimes you’re put in situations where you are like, ‘Why am I dealing with this? I’ve just been put in front of 60 journalists in a foreign country with a translator, on my own!’ Since then, I’ve been more appreciative and, to be completely honest with you, it’s never going to last forever. Metal itself only stems back to Black Sabbath 55, 56 years ago. There’s no blueprint for how long this could last.”
The Screaming Of The Valkyries is out now via Napalm.
