“It’s a little different from my day job,” says Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth in regard to his new, secondary band Devilment. “It sort of just developed… I was approached by a friend, (guitarist) Daniel Finch, just to help out and I drunkenly agreed at a party. Over the last couple of years, we’ve just sort of gone from there. They couldn’t find another singer, I was quite enjoying what was happening with it; proper members were joining as opposed to mucking around. So we just decided to do an album. Scott Atkins, who did the last Cradle album and is doing the new Cradle album – which we’re writing at the present – produced it. He’s done Behemoth and Amon Amarth as well. We just sort of nibbled away at the record over the course of a year. Then it literally just got snapped up by Nuclear Blast, and here we are. It’s crazy ‘cause I was overworked with one band, and now I’ve got two bands.”

Devilment’s debut album is titled The Great And Secret Show – which is also the name of a book written by fantasy and horror author Clive Barker (Hellraiser) in 1989. “It’s not actually about the Clive Barker book at all,” admits Dani. “I was literally on the phone in my office, looking for a title for a track we were working on, and I saw The Great And Secret Show on a bookshelf; I thought, that’ll work for this. The working title then grew into a proper title; it was very apt. Then that song title grew into the album title, and it complemented the artwork, done by Drake Mefestta, as well. Subsequently, Nuclear Blast have been very gracious to give us a 28-page booklet; so you’re going to be able to get it out, but I think you’re going to have a hard time getting the bloody thing back in again cause it’s so thick,” chuckles Dani. “It’s an amazing walk-through of the ideology, the lyrics. It’s almost like entering this otherworld, this netherworld of wonderland that exists parallel with ours that not a lot of people get to see; almost like an occultist realm.”

The album cover seemingly depicts an intended escape by one of Jack The Ripper’s victims. “We never intended to put Jack The Ripper on there,” interjects Dani. “It’s just that when I saw this album cover, I thought it looks like an alley in Victorian London with the crooked garrets, the full moon, and the fog-bound weather. So it was a nice touch to give the impetus for her to disappear, to be led astray, or led out of harm’s way. Maybe her mind is playing games to rid her of the horrible things to come.”

Earlier this year, an amateur forensic investigator and author named Russell Edwards, claimed he had DNA evidence proving Jack The Ripper was actually mentally-ill Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski. “I know they’ve got to run a couple more tests to make sure that is indeed the case,” comments Dani. “But it looks like he did quite a lot of work on it, tracing a descendant of Kosminski. Ironically, that guy lives quite close to where I live here in England. The auction where he bought the actual garment – the shawl that has the traces of blood on it – which I also find a little weird, that someone would keep… cause the policeman who picked the shawl up thought, ‘this would be nice for my wife, it’s quite an expensive thing.’ So he gave it to his wife and his wife kept it, but didn’t wash it. That’s the thing that gets me; that I find a bit strange. She didn’t want to wear it ‘cause it had blood stain on it, so she didn’t wash it but she kept it.” And this dates back to 1888. “But if you think about it, at the same time it was a massive, prolific case so I suppose she may have been thinking, this might be worth something at some point. Anyway, it was actually bought in Bury St. Edmunds, which is the next town along from mine here in Suffolk.”

Another notable character found within The Great And Secret Show is Hindu Goddess Kali, who comes to life in the song ‘Mother Kali’, where she’s described as “Apocalypse’s daughter.” “When that song was written, it had kind of an ethnic loop going. So it brought that to mind anyway, that kind of imagery and mysticism. I’ve spent a lot of time in India and I’ve got quite a few books on Kali; Cradle did a Kali shirt in 2000; Midian-era. I’ve got a few Kali statues in my house. I thought it would be a good time to do a song about Kali.”

While “Girl From Mystery Island” was not inspired by the 1937 Australian film Mystery Island, it does relate to a much more famous movie. “Really it’s a metaphor for someone that’s attracted to an interesting, exotic woman who you can’t quite understand, or come to grips with where she’s from; there’s a strange taboo surrounding her. The metaphor I was using was Ann Darrow more than anything; the dancer that Kong takes a liking to in King Kong. In my mind, I guess I was thinking Mystery Island was a little like Skull Island.”

 

Not counting the lyric video for the aforementioned “Mother Kali”, the first proper video from The Great And Secret Show is for a song with a wickedly delightful title, “Even Your Blood Group Rejects Me”. “To be perfectly frank, we didn’t choose it, the record company chose it; and we humored them. But all the songs are our babies, and you don’t have favouritism amongst your children. That’s one thing Scott (Atkins, producer) was very good at doing in the studio. He has this policy; or at least a maxim - there are too many bands polluting the metal highway, and he didn’t want us to be a casualty. That was his phrase. We turned up with 16 tracks and he instantly whittled those down to 11. We did a cover as well, which is on the bonus CD. And there’s this massive film score version of ‘Even Your Blood Group Rejects Me’ by Spencer Creaghan. So the whole point really was to concentrate on the ten songs that are on the album, and the bonus track, rather than spreading ourselves too thinly. It was like, ‘These songs are alright, but they’re not brilliant, so let’s sweep them away.’ That was a good policy actually.”

“I do strongly believe nowadays, just because of the advent of streaming and downloadable tracks; people ripping everything off the minute it comes out – or even before then. Everybody seems to be putting so much on the records… you get the first born child stapled to the front and people still want more. I think it’s actually making music suffer because all the really great albums of the past, you don’t get more than ten songs. I remember four songs per side, maybe a running time of 35 minutes. I don’t think more is necessarily better. Going full circle, that was the whole premise behind Scott whittling the album down, and why we like all the tracks. While we weren’t bothered when they (the label) said they want ‘Blood Group’, we understood they wanted something with a heavy groove, and something that was the perfect length as well. The video is just brilliant! It does it total justice ‘cause it’s sort of a fucked up, warped performance video.”

The bonus track alluded to earlier is a cover of Midnight Oil’s smash hit from 1987, “Beds Are Burning”, which features guest vocals by Dani’s good friend, and the star of MTV’s Jackass, Bam Margera. “It’s the same length but we beefed it up,” reveals Dani. “It’s very dark with a reverse keyboard line on it that’s really, really creepy; a bit like The Exorcist or a John Carpenter hook. And it’s got a huge chorus. Why we did it? Our tenure with Cradle Of Filth, over the years we’ve fucked with some pretty hysterical songs; we’ve got King Diamond singing on ‘Devil Woman’ by Cliff Richard, and Dirty Harry on ‘Temptation’. We did ‘Stay’ by Shakespeare’s Sister, that’s another quite strange song we bastardized. I think that was the premise really, and the rest of the band allowed me to come up with the idea because it was my birthday. So we learnt it… we were still humming and hawing in the studio about undertaking it, but it turned out brilliant, it really is. We didn’t want to make a really big deal about it – we’ve got Bam on there and I suppose you could forgive us for trespasses in that respect. But we didn’t want to put it on the main crux of the album, and it won’t be a video; unless someone gives me a helicopter and a speedboat. If I get those two things, it definitely will be a video.” Bam Margera is recognized as a skateboarder, prankster, television and movie star; those attributes aside, he isn’t known for his vocal prowess. “Bam actually sounds a little like Pete Steele (of Type O Negative) on it. People think he’s going to be squeaky and rappy; he’s not, it’s really good. Maybe it is a good thing that not everybody’s got to hear it yet ‘cause it’ll come as a surprise to people that it’s actually quite a fucking good song!”

“Psycho Babble” is the title of the other Devilment bonus track. “It sounds like it suggests. Its closest brother or sister on the album would be ‘Laudanum Skull’. It’s actually the first track we worked as a band; it’s a bit more metal than it originally was. It’s actually based on… a couple years before I’d written some notes about the subject. There was a serial killer where we lived in Ipswich. They called him The Ipswich Ripper, but he wasn’t a ripper. He actually strangled prostitutes and dumped their bodies. That’s what I’m going to do when the band falls through, I’m going to convert my car into a death-hearse and take tourists around,” jokes Dani. “But I wrote some notes on it ‘cause it really touched the town; nobody dared go out. I was on tour at the time, but it did draw a lot of comparisons to the Jack The Ripper case, then this song sprung from that.”

Analyzing his almost over-crowded lot in life, Dani attests, “Devilment is definitely a second band (as opposed to a side-project or hobby). Me - more than anybody, is going to live to regret that. Just for the fact that I’m living literally on coffee and borrowed time. When we come back from the Devilment tour (at the end of November), Cradle is straight in the studio. It’s got a release date of the 15th of June. All the press, I can only say how good Nuclear Blast have been with the amount of work and support they’ve put into this album. They’ve really taken it to heart and done a top job. I guess I was being a bit naïve to think that it wouldn’t be as busy as when Cradle gets to do stuff. So I’m doing all that by day, and by night I’m a psychopathic killer – no, sorry! I’m Cradling. It’s full-on at the moment.”

Dani delves further into the new COF album. “It’s amazing! We’ve had, again I know, a bit of a lineup shift. But that was due to our previous guitarist Paul (Allender) who we parted ways with. He wanted to take some years out of the band to concentrate on what he was doing, and he wanted to bring some mystery back into the band. But it’s very hard to take time out, even if you were financially secure. You get an itchy trigger finger, you get bored. Then this tour came up, co-headlining with Behemoth (in February 2014). We didn’t need to do it because it was outside of our touring cycle for The Manticore And Other Horrors. But we wanted to do it because Behemoth were bringing a new album out after so long, and they were really good gigs. It was just exciting, it was a great tour! It was right after Paul had kind of left the band; that made us more resilient toward doing it ‘cause we’d cancelled the American tour due to visa issues. It was a total fuck up! We didn’t want everybody to think we’d pulled out of something else. Then bad luck again struck us with our other guitarist, James (McIlroy). He’d had this neck problem for quite a while and was booked in for surgery; he literally couldn’t play guitar, it got that bad. In fact, I think he might be out for a couple years.”

“So, at the last minute we were saved by finding a Czech guitarist, Ashok, who is a friend of (drummer) Martin’s. And a guy here in England called Richard Shaw. We went out and did the tour; it was phenomenal! They really got the Cradle vibe. So when we got back from tour it was like, let’s fucking write. The stuff harks back to older material, not in the feeling, in the atmosphere. There’s a lot of very fast twin-guitar harmonies, fast time changes, and big symphonic parts. Heart-rending melodrama and nocturnal war rampant; it’s all there. In fact, they’ve been so prolific they actually wrote almost two albums worth. I had to stay, stop writing! But it’s great, the return of the ten-minute long epic. I’d liken it musically, at this stage – ‘cause we’ve only roughly demoed three or four songs, to the stuff we were doing on Cruelty And The Beast or Dusk And Her Embrace.”