Though once again dividing opinion, the esoteric miasma that is Ordo Ad Chao also picked up heavy praise in many quarters, and it was partly its success—critically and artistically—that convinced Blasphemer he had said all he needed to within the group. Thus in late 2008 he quit the band primarily to concentrate on Ava Inferi (a gothic/doom metal band based in Portugal, where the guitarist had moved just before recording Chimera) and black thrash outfit Aura Noir.
“First of all it was like a swansong,” he explains of Ordo Ad Chao, “everything was put into that and it was what I wanted Chimera to be. As soon as I did it I realized I wanted out and everything that could come up as a reason to leave the band suddenly was visible. It was something I’d probably blocked, ’cos I had made this ‘armor’ around me, I became very cold as a person, nothing really got to me. I didn’t care, I was emotionless at certain points, then you crack the bubble and see what is really going on. Six or seven months without seeing the guys and it felt so right—I realized this is not me anymore, I cannot motivate myself to play fast music anymore. It was not overnight, it started with the drugs shit in 2003 and I think I reached a low period of my life in 2005 and 2006 and I put a lot of effort into making Ordo Ad Chao and all the things that had built up went into that.”
The loss of the band’s songwriter for the previous decade was no small blow, but Mayhem would once again survive and carry on, utilizing Limbonic Art’s Krister “Morfeus” Dreyer and later Morten “Teloch” Iversen (Nidingr, ex-Gorgoroth/God Seed) and Charles Hedge (ex-Cradle of Filth) to take the band’s live show to audiences across the world and craft new recordings. Since then the group has played countless territories in various continents, even returning to headline a festival in Turkey in 2011, a country the band once vowed never to return to. As always they work on their own timetable but given their illustrious and complicated past, it would be a confident man indeed who would dare predict what the future holds.
29
CRADLE OF FILTH
BLACK METAL ENTERS THE MAINSTREAM PART I
FEW THINGS provoke as much contempt within the underground of any subculture, musical or otherwise, as “selling out,” but in black metal circles such disgust has been elevated to an art form. In fact, even in a book filled with Satanism, extreme politics, misanthropy, church burning, and murder, the inclusion of the following bands may well be the most controversial subject for black metal fans. Yet while some will lift their noses, the rise of bands such as England’s Cradle of Filth and Norway’s Dimmu Borgir—the two most successful acts to have emerged from the movement—is not only an important part of the genre’s history, but has arguably provoked even greater extremity from the underground. Whether this success is for good or ill remains a matter of opinion, yet only the most stubborn of readers will deny that both groups touched upon brilliance at times, and were initially rooted in the black metal movement.
CRADLE OF FILTH
“Fucking Hell! I have no words… this is the ultimate! Brutal, Original, Melodic, Atmospheric… This is among the best Black Metal recordings ever!”
—Quote from Samoth of Emperor used on flyers for the band’s debut album, The Principle of Evil Made Flesh
“I heard Cradle Of Filth for the first time in 1994 when Janto [Garmanslund, Hades] played their first album at his place and I was blown away! I must say that in my ears they almost invented theatrical-symphonic black metal, and demonstrated female vocals in a different way than I ever heard before!”
—Jørn (Hades/Hades Almighty)
Almost as soon as their debut album was released, Cradle of Filth became the most visible face of the black metal scene, a position they held for many years while nonetheless evolving toward a style that would be more accurately described as extreme symphonic, or extreme gothic, metal. Like their peers, the band’s sales during the early nineties were dwarfed by the more successful death metal bands of the period, but when success did arrive, it did so dramatically. Indeed, the band have gone on to sell millions of albums, a feat that has made them arguably the biggest extreme metal band aside from Slayer (depending on your definition of “extreme metal”), and one of the more successful heavy metal bands generally.
Of course, back in 1991 when the band formed, there were few who would have believed that such good fortunes could await, including eighteen-year-old frontman Daniel Davey. Born and bred in Suffolk, England, the young vocalist had discovered metal some six years earlier when a friend gave him a mix tape featuring the likes of AC/DC, WASP, The Plasmatics, and Anvil, as well as Slayer, whose song “Evil Has No Boundaries” was by far the heaviest thing he had ever heard. Triggering something of an epiphany, Dani was soon exploring the darker side of the early/mid-eighties thrash scene, in the process developing a particular passion for the early albums of Celtic Frost, Venom, Bathory, Destruction, Sabbat, and Mercyful Fate, due to their combination of speed, aggression, and theatricality. This musical journey collided head-on with a long-running interest in the dark side that had begun as a child with John Landis’ music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and eventually evolved into a fascination with Wicca and the occult.
“My dad had a load of Denis Wheatley novels,” Dani recalls, “and Suffolk, the environment I was brought up in, was kind of ingrained with myths and witches. When I was at school a couple of my girlfriends were practicing Wicca and witchcraft—it was just harmless fun, but it all rubbed off. A lot of people [into these things] are outsiders, sitting in the corner drawing pictures of their teacher being garroted, but it was nothing like that…. Having lived in a house that Matthew Hopkins [the] Witchfinder used to stay in… the essence of the place had that kind of vibe to it.”
In fact, it was this very English take on the extreme metal experience that kick-started Cradle of Filth. Having already been in a number of bands spanning punk/hardcore, indie, and metal—with names such as PDA, Feast On Excrement, and The Lemon Grove Kids—Dani formed his new group with friend and guitarist Paul Ryan, whom he had met at college and who had initially got into heavy music via the punk and hardcore scene.
“We were very lucky having shows put on in our area that were benefit shows for the Hunt Saboteurs Association [an anti-hunting group],” recalls Paul. “An older brother of another friend was very much into this scene; everything from Subhumans and RDF from the dub crust side to Discharge and then Doom, Extreme Noise Terror, and Napalm Death on the extreme side. At first I was intrigued by what I was hearing but it didn’t take long for me to totally love the extremity and freeness of it.”
“The one thing I feel very blessed to have seen was the birth of extreme music genres,” he continues. “Thrash metal had only just developed from metal, bands like Napalm and Carcass were viewed—and were—grindcore/crust punk bands. The term ‘death metal’ hadn’t even been heard at that point. We had a friend that used to buy all sorts of records from [London store] Shades and he came back with Entombed’s Left Hand Path and Cannibal Corpse’s Eaten Back to Life. As soon as that Entombed record was put on we were all like, ‘Fooooooooook!’ It blew our minds. Then Dani got Deicide by Deicide and we were completely in awe of it all. The whole death metal scene was starting to happen and Dani and I just knew we had to do something ourselves, hence the formation of the band.”
An early promo shoot between the Total Fucking Darkness demo and the Principle of Evil … album: Dani Davey and Paul Ryan (top), Paul Allender, Robin Eaglestone and William “Was” Sarginson (bottom). Photo courtesy of Nihil Archives.
Originally called Burial, the group soon changed their name to Cradle of Filth, due to a UK death metal band of the same name. Initiating Dani’s best friend John Pritchard on bass, and Darren Garden (a drummer found courtesy of an ad in a local music shop) into the fold, with Paul’s keyboard-playing brother Benjamin added shortly after as a session player, the band set about working their collective backsides off during 1992. That year saw the creation of two demos (Invoking the Unclean and Orgiastic Pleasures Fou
l), a rehearsal tape (The Black Goddess Rises), a split with UK death/grindcore outfit Malediction (called A Pungent and Sexual Miasma and featuring a mix of demo, rehearsal, and live tracks), as well as an aborted album entitled Goetia and finally the demo that clinched their signing, Total Fucking Darkness.
The band’s sound proved as filthy as their name, the group playing a lo-fi and violent yet atmospheric form of death metal with hints of thrash and punk alongside a dose of primitive synth. At this point the sound certainly had very little to do with black metal, having more in common with the eerie early nineties death metal of Norwegian bands such as Darkthrone and Thou Shalt Suffer.
“The first demo was a lot like [seminal American death metal band] Master,” Dani recalls, “but we were also a big fan of experimental death metal like Edge of Sanity.”
“We recorded in a caravan in a muddy field on an eight-track in an afternoon each,” says Paul. “Organic, literally, and sound-wise whatever we could get!”
“It was originally all about aggression,” Dani explains. “We had very basic keys but with a thick pipe organ or a choir sample and ’cos it was with heavy death metal it would freak people out. It wouldn’t be piled on, it would be just enough to send a chill down you. Later on we got more bombastic through listening to soundtracks.”
Indeed, the atmospheric and orchestral side of the band would develop into a defining characteristic, the group taking influence from the epic melancholy and romance of the UK’s death/doom scene that was exploding at the time with bands such as Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Decomposed, and Anathema.
“At the time we were still massive fans of Paradise Lost who summed it up best with [1991’s] Gothic, and that whole great English thing comprised of Decomposed, Incarcerated, and My Dying Bride,” explains Dani. “That kind of influence was what helped us change. We were almost part of that clique, that dark gothic movement in metal. It was a very dark atmosphere, a Charlotte Brontë atmosphere, almost aristocratic, what with Anathema harking on about ‘lovelorn rhapsodies’ and so on. We were really into the classical mythology of England and it felt very real. We were based in the spiritual homeland of witchcraft in England, so it had this pagan vibe attached to it which we just called ‘graveyard music.’ We were big literature heads, we were really into Bram Stoker, nineteenth-century authors, and penny dreadfuls. You also had movies like Coppola’s Dracula, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Interview with the Vampire, there were a lot of things that were coming out that added to the overall influence.”
Around the same time, of course, the black metal movement was reigniting around the planet following Norway’s lighting of its once-damp fuse. As the band continued to tape-trade and make contact with the international underground, it was impossible not to feel those waves reverberating.
“We were in contact with Euronymous and bands like [Greece’s] Necromantia, Impaled Nazarene, Moonspell,” recalls Dani. “It wasn’t just from Norway. There were bands like Blasphemy, Sarcófago, Master’s Hammer and Root, Mortuary Drape from Italy. It was all very far-flung. It all just fell into place. We were making really dark music and were listening to really dark stuff, then Darkthrone came along and sort of revived all those memories of Bulldozer and Razor, those thrash bands that used to dress up with eyeliner and stuff, and it felt cool and right for us.”
“The Deicide and Morbid Angel debuts had also swung it… I think that’s where part of the direction of black metal came from. A lot of people will think it’s bollocks, but I think the thing that started to divide black metal was Deicide. Even though it was Florida death metal, the aesthetics behind that release started the whole black metal thing again. It was a big influence. Everyone I was hanging around with at the time was listening to that and [Morbid Angel’s] Altars of Madness. The thing with Bathory is that suddenly everyone was like, ‘What’s your favorite Bathory album?’ but there was a big gap between that [coming out] and the later stuff. If that was such a big influence then why did things not kick off straightaway rather than in 1991 when it all really began again?”
Soaking up this wealth of inspiration, Cradle of Filth slowly but inevitably began to move toward what was still a very loosely defined black metal scene, and one that left plenty of room for musical maneuver. “This is obviously the second wave of black metal at that point,” Dani reflects, “but for us it was a revival of old ideals and imagery, and it picked up those themes from five or six years before. It didn’t feel like a revival of those sounds, it had an artistic freedom to it. It was a good idea that came from a dying breed of bands who fizzled out, ’cos all these [first-generation] bands did one or two Satanic albums then went off and sang about the forthcoming nuclear holocaust or something. That’s what I liked about the black metal movement, the experimentation which has now gone. I think it was more occult-based, and then it became colder and more necro later, and then everyone associated it with the icy north and the Nordic warrior and stuff like that, which I never considered. When I listen to Don’t Break the Oath or Infernal Overkill, that’s not what comes across.”
The death/doom influences were already beginning to make their way into the band’s sound by the second demo, Orgiastic Pleasures Foul, an opus that contains a significant synth interlude in the tellingly named “The Graveyard by Moonlight.” By now the band had gained the attention of a London-based label called Tombstone Records and been offered a deal for a debut album. It was a venture, however, sadly fated for disaster, and soon the band found themselves without the means to pay the studio for their recordings, thus losing all the finished songs except two, “Spattered In Faeces” and “Devil Mayfair.”
“The studio wiped the tapes,” says Paul, “as once recorded, the label changed their minds and wouldn’t pay! We had no money to pay for it ourselves so they binned it. A real tragedy that. From what I remember it was all in the death metal/grind vein. [Part of] ‘Devil Mayfair’ was actually played backwards on the third demo I believe.”
“We were young and naïve,” admits Dani. “Someone approached us and subsequently we couldn’t finance what we’d recorded—which ran to the grand total of £2,000—so it was taped over, because back then tape was precious. It was a good amalgam of British mentality and that kind of dark edge from [third demo and next recording] Total Fucking Darkness. It was slightly heavier, faster, and more death metal-oriented, quite like Darkthone’s debut. It was all part of destiny. I think things would have worked out differently, but that made us look at ourselves and decide to improve—get a second guitarist, get a full-time keyboard player, and be a bit darker with it all.”
To that end the group did indeed expand, becoming a six-piece with the addition of Robin Eaglestone (wryly renamed Robin Graves), who replaced John on bass, as well as second guitarist Paul Allender and Benjamin Ryan, who was now very much a full-time member. The first result of this new lineup was the third demo, Total Fucking Darkness, an opus that introduced the first glimpses of the sound the band would eventually become famous for. Though still including deep, growled vocals and fast, violent passages with frantic leads, the songs also incorporate far more prominent synths and slower and more melodic sections characterized by emotive chord progressions and steady percussion.
A range of flyers for the Total Fucking Darkness demo, 1993, featuring an earlier logo and a rather different aesthetic.
“I first auditioned as guitarist for the second demo but that didn’t work out,” Robin explains. “I didn’t hear from them again until Jon left to go to college and they needed someone to play bass. It was a fairly low-tech, cheap, four-track studio session run by a friend of Paul and Dani’s … these were bleak times in the middle of winter in a caravan somewhere out in the countryside. The Goetia album was sitting around on multi-track tape reel waiting to be paid for by the record company, so this new demo was a way forward for the band to get back on track with new things.”
“Pure and simple, the influence of black metal with bands like Darkthrone and Burzum,”
opines Paul of the band’s shift in sound. “As with death metal, as soon as we heard that we were totally in awe of the darkness of it.”
As promising a listen as Total Fucking Darkness was, the official debut that emerged the following year, The Principle of Evil Made Flesh, more than overshadowed it. Maintaining the fast, aggressive passages and catchy riffs, the iconic full-length poured even more emotion into the atmospheric sections, the synths now far more central to the band’s sound with several haunting instrumentals included. All the same, the synths are used in a more minimal fashion than on later records, rarely multi-tracked and mainly focusing around organ and piano parts, and this—combined with a clear but rather thin production—results in a uniquely esoteric feeling of mystery and depth, as if the recording had somehow been recovered from the dusty crypt of some ancient undiscovered temple. Such occult overtones were amplified by the eloquent blasphemies within the lyrics and the full-page adaption of the Church of Satan baphomet (designed by Cacophonous Records’ Frater Nihil), the overall feeling being one of devotion to some unholy yet righteous cause.
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 40