CRADLE OF FILTH – The Finest Form Of Blasphemy

July 8, 2015, 8 years ago

By Aaron Small

feature black death cradle of filth

CRADLE OF FILTH – The Finest Form Of Blasphemy

When most people think of witches; pointy-hats, brooms, and cauldrons come to mind, but that’s not the case with Cradle Of Filth’s 11th studio album, Hammer Of The Witches. In fact, the title was inspired by a book written in 1486 by a German Catholic Clergyman named Heinrich Kramer. That book is Malleus Maleficarum. Shortly after its publication, Malleus Maleficarum was condemned by the Catholic Church; although it was later used by the courts during the prosecution of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries.  
 
Cradle Of Filth vocalist Dani Filth admits, “I’ve always had a copy of it, as far as I can remember. We live in the Witch County here in Suffolk. My wife and I used to live in a house that The Witchfinder General – the one that was portrayed by Vincent Price in the film The Witchfinder General, called Matthew Hopkins – once frequented, allegedly. So, I think that was the catalyst to buy the book years and years ago. I’ve actually got several copies of it. When the initial first songs started coming in, I was toying with this idea. I had to come up with something quite quickly, as a sort of rudimentary springboard. I saw the book on the shelf and thought, hmmm – the translation is Hammer Of The Witches – yeah, that’s quite cool. I see it as more they (the witches) have the power this time; rather than being oppressed. It kind of just grew from there. It’s really strange, rather than having a working title of ‘Bob’ or something like that, it was quite appropriate. Social media’s a wonderful thing. As soon as I mentioned it, people were saying they really liked it. And it was always the intention to change it, but it just kind of grew. It grew into a song, and that song flowered into the album title. The artist who worked on the album – Artus Berzinsh, a Latvian artist – did a brilliant job of bringing the lyricism to life; he liked it as well so he used it as a catalyst to start work from.”
 

 
Obviously avoiding the Halloween stereotype of what witches should look like, Berzinsh opted for tantalizing, nude creatures of beauty; that are bleeding. Years ago, record stores would not have stocked this, but now there are no record stores to worry about. “Exactly, that’s the damn truth isn’t it? Saying that though, the American version actually does have… they wouldn’t stock it. So someone had the bright idea of adorning them with some sort of skimpy garments. I don’t know why? It’s kind of like pre-Renaissance artistry, that’s what it was based on. Apparently that’s fine in an art gallery, but not on an album cover. The American version carries a slipcase, like a fake cover. You get the real cover as well, but you get that over top of it; ridiculous, I know. The same thing happened with Thornography. Everybody was going, ‘Oh my god, I wonder what the original cover was like? It must have been really, really bad.’ Nope. The original cover was exactly like that one, except the woman’s hemline on her skirt was about an inch higher; it was just ridiculous.”
 
The aforementioned Malleus Maleficarum is over 500 years old; another historic reference point contained within Hammer Of The Witches is Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. The first single and video, “Right Wing Of The Garden Triptych” refers to his best known painting (circa 1500), The Garden Of Earthly Delights. “I’m a massive, massive fan of Hieronymus Bosch,” spouts Dani. “In fact, I actually have a copy of that painting in my house. Every time I go to Del Prado in Madrid (Spain), which is a fantastic art gallery, I always drag a member of the band along with me to go and see the painting. This place has got hundreds and hundreds of rooms. There’s this one room, you’ve got that one at one end; it’s a big painting. And at the other end you’ve got Pieter Bruegel’s Triumph Of Death, which is the beginning of the Black Sabbath’s Greatest Hits cover, with all the skeletons marching people into the mouthpiece of Hell. That’s quite a cool room. But when I was at school, I had to study it – I didn’t have to, but I chose it as my end-of-term piece. The whole album’s kind of… it’s not really a concept record, but it’s all sort of based in the Middle Ages. There’s a track on there called ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, which concerns itself with The Crusades. It draws obvious parallels, when you read it, with religious turmoil that’s going on in the world today. Despite the fact that the last Crusade was hundreds of years ago, the division is still rife. We can put a man on the moon, TV on your watch, etc., etc., but spiritually we’re still pretty much inside fucking quagmire.”
 
Going into Hammer Of The Witches, Dani reveals that COF “didn’t really have any guidelines as such.” Once again, the band underwent a lineup change, recruiting two new guitarists, Ashok and Richard Shaw. This shuffle was unavoidable as “previous guitarist Paul (Allender) had some personal stuff going on, and we found out at the 11th hour that our other guitarist James (McIlroy) was undergoing quite extensive neck surgery.” Ashok and Shaw fit in so incredibly well! Not to belittle the accomplishments of the guitarists who came before them, but the pair sound as though they could have been in Cradle since day one. “Well, I can’t take all the credit for that,” says Dani. “The producer, Scott Atkins, was pretty much like a seventh member. We came to the studio with 16 tracks; you’ve heard the album, but there’s two bonus tracks on the special edition: ‘King Of The Woods’ and ‘Misericord’. They’re not any less quality; we didn’t actually know the running order until pretty much D-Day – delivery day. We just couldn’t decide on the running order. So, people may prefer one or two of the bonus tracks; it was just one of those things where the record company wants a special edition, so they always keep some songs back. But we had to drop some more songs, which were equally as good. Going into the studio with 16 songs may have been a little ambitious; but they might rear their ugly heads in the future on an EP or something. Scott was a real slave driver in the studio; he got the best out of everybody.”

 When Cradle Of Filth gathers to record an album, is it knuckle down to work, or is there a certain looseness to the proceedings? “We’ve done the whole, staying in bloody residential studios where everybody has their own room; there’s a games room, you’ve got cooks and cleaners. It’s expensive; it’s not only that, but you find minds’ drift when that happens. So this time, we really wanted to be embroiled in just working. We were doing 11-hour days, and the studio’s not massive. (Producer) Scott Atkins’ studio is about half an hour from where I live in the Suffolk countryside. Basically, we had a holiday home where people would come and stay, do their parts. But it was very remote and isolated. I guess the band’s a slightly different beast nowadays, in the fact that we are extremely professional. Whereas, if you went back about ten years, we were professional; but we also liked to party quite a bit. I think it shows in the album that we worked really, really hard on the record. Scott lived up to the namesake of the studio; it’s called Grindstone, and he pushed our nose to it.”
 
Lots of bands nowadays bring video cameras into the studio with them to film “the making of the album.” Did any of that go on during the Hammer Of The Witches sessions? “No. It’s quite a big distraction, to be fair. It’s not really our sort of thing, I suppose. We used to do that, but again, it was when everybody was mucking around; and nobody’s really that interested, I don’t think. It was talked about by the record company; we would rather get on and make a really good album, than play it up and stuff.”
 
“Deflowering The Maidenhead, Displeasuring The Goddess” is the second single from Hammer Of The Witches. “As is the case with most record companies nowadays, they’ve made a lyric video, and we’re holding back “Blackest Magick In Practice” for a full performance-based video later in the year. But the lyricism in that song kind of deals with the (idea of) the Earth as Mother Goddess in dire; sort of an eventual ‘I’m fed up with this,’ being suffocated, poisoned, choked to death, over-run… literally raped. She’s turned her other cheek for so long, and then deciding, that’s it.”
 
Delving further into Hammer Of The Witches, there’s a certain irony between tracks two and three – “Yours Immortally” and “Enshrined In Crematoria” – if you’re immortal, you would never be cremated. “That’s very true, but they are about two different things.” Towards the end of the album, “The Vampyre At My Side” appears, which somewhat harkens back to the early days of the band with the Vempire EP (released in 1996); and it also deals with immortality. “Well, ‘Yours Immortally’ is more like a declaration. It’s a real celebration, as is the album; it’s a celebration of metal in general. It was the perfect way to open the album, by professing our loyalty and devotion to the cause, as it were.”
 

 
In 2010, Cradle published The Gospel Of Filth; any plans for another book? “Well, bearing in mind that took about four years to write, I doubt it. I actually have a poetry book which is written, and illustrated by Sam Araya; the guy responsible for the Thornography artwork. I’m still a bit ginger about it, if you know what I mean, because when you have lyrics, they’re backed up by music. When you’ve got poetry, it’s there on its own; it’s isolated. I’m in no hurry really; that was written about seven years ago. It’s actually finding the right time to put it out… but what is coming, which will delight a lot of people… there was an original version of Dusk And Her Embrace, recorded in 1995. What happened basically was the band split in half; we had two opposing factions because we had two managers. Three members went one way and formed The Blood Divine; myself, (drummer) Nicholas Barker, and (bassist) Robin Eaglestone stayed. We were going through a load of legal disputes with the record company, which we eventually won after the course of a year. What that meant was, we delivered them Vempire, and that was our way of a settlement agreement. We won the rights to re-record Dusk And Her Embrace, so we took that album to Music For Nations. There was always an album recorded, we thought it was just going to sit on record company shelves forever. I got a phone call last week, and Sony are interested in reinvigorating the Music For Nations back catalogue, and that was one of the things they were quite keen on. So it looks like next year, which is apt cause it’ll be 20 years since Dusk And Her Embrace was released, that there’ll be a release for this long lost different version.”
 
On the live front, in addition to playing the major summer festivals such as Wacken, Brutal Assault, and Summer Breeze, Cradle Of Filth will take their Inquisitional Torture Tour across The UK and Europe throughout October and November. “The American Tour – we’ve got to make up for lost ground as it were. We had some visa issues last time. It was a real pain in the ass! I’ll tell you what happened. Normally we walk up to The Embassy about two weeks before the tour, everything’s fine, blah, blah, blah. And that’s the way it’s always been. Then of course, they changed the rules. So you had to go for a medical – no problem. Everybody booked in for this medical, then we found out the new protocol demands it can take up to four months to process this medical. Well that’s great. Two weeks’ time, we’re supposed to be in the bloody States. So we just couldn’t take the risk. As it happened, we got our results back in about four weeks. It was just ridiculous, but what can you do? It was a nightmare! It almost bankrupted the band. Now that we know all this, hopefully we’ll have no problem this time. Fore-warned is fore-armed. So the US and Canadian tour (slated to begin in January 2016) is going to be pretty extensive.”
 

 



Featured Video

KELEVRA - "The Distance"

KELEVRA - "The Distance"

Latest Reviews