The dynamics of the band’s sound also increased notably with this release, thanks to Dani’s varied vocals, alternating between high-pitched screams and deep growls, and memorable spoken passages delivered by female vocalist Andrea Meyer, guest vocalist Darren White of Anathema, and Dani himself. The result was an album with a violent raw black metal feeling in parts, but one that also managed to further the evolution of symphonic black metal thanks to an air of genuine majesty and mystery. With its unusually sensual undercurrent and references to doomed romance, it also largely justified the tag of “gothic black metal,” though Dani is understandably keen to qualify that categorization.
“[It’s] gothic as in the melodrama, the architecture, the literature and the period,” he clarifies, “rather than the music of the seventies and eighties, which I couldn’t stand. I loved the look of the bands but the music was shit, without the drive of the guitars it sounded lackluster. There were exceptions like the Sisters [of Mercy, whom the band would later cover], but it was more the imagery.”
With all music credited to Cradle of Filth, the making of the record seems to have proved inspiring for all members concerned, and saw the writing shift from the Dani/Paul powerhouse to something approaching a group dynamic.
“In those days everything was fresh, so writing was a really good experience with Cradle,” explains Robin. “We were embracing everything going on in the UK as well as an uprising in darker styles from Norway. Though we never truly attempted to be a Norwegian-style band, it certainly lifted limitations on dark music in the UK and it all just started sounding more serious and atmospheric.”
Remaining a six-piece, the album saw the introduction of Nick Barker on drums, replacing Darren Garden (who is not, as many fans believe, merely a pseudonym for Darren White), and short-lived second drummer William A. “Was” Sarginson. “Darren as far as I remember had a lot of pressure from his parents and I think just lost the will to keep doing it,” Paul recalls. “We were sad to see him go, he was a great guy, younger than us and very, very funny… a great drummer too.”
Despite the popularity of Principle, “commitment issues” would soon come to haunt the band. Propelled by their success, they headed to a Birmingham studio in January 1995 to record the follow-up. Entitled Dusk… and Her Embrace, it was a recording that, like Goetia before it, would not see the light of day in its original form, at least at time of writing. With much of the album recorded, the band was hit by a rift that literally split them in half, the Ryan brothers departing along with guitarist Paul Allender. The three would soon form The Blood Divine, a band that expanded on the gothic and atmospheric elements of Cradle but largely removed the more identifiable black metal traits. Also in the group was the aforementioned Darren White and drummer Was, briefly a member of Cradle and also of Solemn and December Moon, Robin Eaglestone’s black metal side project.
“Speaking purely from my side,” reflects Paul Ryan, who went on to work with the highly successful booking group The Agency, “by this point we were so stoned most of the time, and things were happening so quickly, we just got disillusioned with it all and people just started to fall out with each other. The Blood Divine was fun while it lasted, but you live and you learn.”
Robin himself would also end up leaving Cradle for a spell during the creation of the original Dusk, temporarily replaced by one Jon Kennedy. Jon in turn would then return to Wales and his band Daemonum, who soon changed their name to Hecate Enthroned and for a time offered some competition to Cradle thanks to a similar sound and a high-selling debut. Complicated isn’t the half of it.
“After we wrote most of the Dusk album with the Principle lineup I walked out,” recalls Robin. “I remember we were halfway through the ‘Queen of Winter, Throned’ track so the rest of the band had to write one more song to have the album ready for the studio. This is where Jon Kennedy stepped in to do the album bass parts. Then the relationship between Cradle and [label] Cacophonous went all strange so that version of the Dusk album was never released and Jon Kennedy left. Ten months after I walked out, I rejoined the band and along with the newer members rerecorded lots of parts for Dusk.”
“It was very Emperor-inspired I guess,” ponders Dani of the original Dusk, which your author was lucky enough to hear and which unsurprisingly has more than a hint of Principle about its delivery and minimal synth work, “but because of the way it had been recorded we weren’t totally happy with it and that was a bartering tool to then get us off Cacophonous—offer some new tracks from that. So they held on to those masters and we bastardized them and rerecorded them for the proper Dusk album which we won the right to release. All very incestuous!”
Recruiting guitarist Stuart Anstis and a keyboard player called Damien Gregori (real name Greg Moffitt), the band crafted their last Cacophonous offering, namely Vempire … Or Dark Faerytales In Phallustein. Technically an EP but totaling thirty-six minutes in length, Vempire immediately stands out as a much bigger and more symphonic experience. Both the female vocals and synths (primarily performed by Greg, with additional work by Academy Studios’ Keith Appleton on the song “She Mourns A Lengthening Shadow”) are more prominent, a point underlined by the anthem-like revisiting of Principle track “The Forest Whispers My Name.”
“Without a doubt we were becoming more cinematic and very dramatic,” Dani explains of Vempire. “It was very mythological, with mentions of past glories. It was meant to be a big-sounding album, very ornate-sounding, a return, whereas Dusk was a little more cultured and brooding. I think [it was due to] Greg and also partly us listening to more orchestral music. It was about that time that we got into that and movie soundtracks. That was the beginning of it and helped shape Vempire.”
“Believe it or not, I answered a classified ad in Metal Hammer, something along the lines of ‘name band with record deal require keyboard player, own gear essential, immediate start,’” remembers Greg, now a prolific music journalist. “Coming into Cradle, I was not at all of that scene. I knew Mayhem through corresponding with Euronymous in the late eighties, but most of the early-nineties black metal movement passed me by as I was much too busy going to all-night Hawkwind concerts. Ultimately, I believe it was actually an advantage that I joined Cradle as an outsider. We had things in common—eighties thrash, Venom, Mercyful Fate, Sabbat, horror movie soundtracks—but I had no black metal axes to grind or points to prove. No one to impress.
The Black Goddess Rises, Cradle of Filth’s first, but not last, controversial T-shirt (see back print).
“I’m not sure what Benjamin’s setup was but my gear just seemed to sound bigger. It certainly wasn’t the studio, as both Principle and Vempire were recorded at Academy and produced by Mags. But I loved vast-sounding synths and I composed my parts as I would for a cosmic symphony rather than for some Hammer Horror effect. Ironically, up to that point, I had little time for keyboards in metal and my move to playing keys stemmed from my burgeoning admiration for seventies synth music—Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze—which remains my significant other musical preoccupation to this day. When I joined Cradle I could barely play—it was one of those ‘learn on the job’ scenarios that you hear about but never believe actually happens.”
Alongside new recruits Stuart and Damien, the EP also featured the talents of second guitarist and “December Moon member” Jared Demeter. Or rather, it didn’t, since despite a credit and a photo comprised of a Photoshop merging of Stuart and Robin, he was merely a bizarre—and largely successful—invention to maintain the illusion of a six-piece lineup.
The follow-up, released later the same year on the much larger Music for Nations, was the long-delayed Dusk … and her Embrace. Despite featuring pictures of new guitarist Gian Pyres within the sleeve, the album was created by the same key lineup as Vempire. The only notable change was that female vocals were now handled by “Lady Jezebel Deva,” born Sarah Jane Ferridge, who would go on to become a fixture in the band, both live and on record. Despite challenges in the studio and t
ensions within the group, who were balancing work with an increasingly voracious appetite for hedonism, the album proved a highly successful venture.
“Compared to the sessions for Vempire, recording Dusk was a long, laborious, and extremely expensive process,” recalls Greg, who was primarily listening to Greek composer and synth player Vangelis at the time. “It just seemed to take forever—about nine or ten weeks in the end. A version of the album recorded by the original lineup already existed in incomplete form and we used the drums from that version as the basis for the new recordings. To the original collection of songs we added ‘Humana Inspired to Nightmare,’ which I wrote in the studio, and ‘Malice Through the Looking Glass’ … to me, that song is that lineup of Cradle at its best, working together in at least some semblance of harmony. As for the other material written by the original lineup, well you can’t argue with it can you? I think we did it immense justice and I’m incredibly proud to have been part of a truly great British metal album which I still think is the best thing Cradle have ever done. There’s no doubt that the Dusk lineup which so many still speak fondly of could have lasted longer if we’d all just chilled the fuck out and acted like we were on the same team. We did have moments like that and they were truly amazing, but sadly they were rare.”
Featuring a symphonic sound similar to Vempire, Dusk pushed the gothic side of the band even further, both in lyrics and aesthetic, which continued in earnest with a very English, vampire-inspired theme, dispensing with the overt Satanism of the past, in part perhaps due to the band no longer being directly involved with either their Satanic advisor Andrea Meyer or the explicitly occult-minded Nihil. Despite the more gothic air, however, the album’s closing moments harked back to black metal’s beginnings, thanks to a piece of spoken word from none other than Conrad of Venom.
“I’d already checked out the band so I knew what they were all about,” recalls Cronos today. “The problem was I’d just had an operation to remove nodes from my throat, so I wasn’t able to do any singing for a while and [Dani had] wanted me to come down and do a dual vocal. I said, ‘I can do a spoken part similar to what I do on ‘At War With Satan,’ but I can’t do any volume singing,’ and they were happy with that. It was just good to go down and meet these young kids who had this great vibe about them and who were totally into what they were doing.”
“It was kind of embarrassing,” laughs Dani, who remains a huge Venom fan, and paid homage a few years later with a cover of the song “Black Metal.” “We were crammed into this little house in suburban Birmingham and then Cronos appears and starts telling us all these great tour stories. He was the rabid captor of bestial malevolence that I had named my pet rabbit after and worshipped and we were sat there with some cheap wine! But it was cool and lent a magic to it and kind of tied what we were doing with what Venom and Angel Witch were doing, another massive strain of black metal.”
In the intervening years, history has been rewritten by metal fans, to some extent at least, regarding Dusk … And Her Embrace’s association or disassociation with black metal, but it’s worth remembering that the album was generally regarded at the time to be a part of the genre, albeit the more commercial end of it, a point highlighted by tours with other rising bands of the scene such as Dissection and Dimmu Borgir. That said, the band was now indisputably breaking away from their peers, and Dusk ended up with reported sales of around half a million records, about twenty times that of their debut and a truly astonishing feat.
“We knew Dusk was a great album and overall even better than Vempire, so we weren’t surprised when it did well,” recalls Greg. “We’d just been the subject of a record label bidding war and had top management vying for our contract, so smart people in the business also saw that we were really onto something. What was perhaps somewhat surprising was just how mainstream black metal suddenly became, and looking back I suppose we played a significant part in that.”
“I think once we got past that original record company we spread our wings a lot more,” Dani states. “We were offered bigger things and were playing with bands outside the black metal genre, playing huge festivals, appearing in big magazines, it was exciting at the time. There was a lot of opposition, I remember Dave Mustaine branding us a ‘gay band’ around Dusk but we knew what we wanted to do, and more money meant bigger budgets.”
Like the band’s album sales, shirt sales were also thriving, with a number of controversial designs increasingly visible—not least the iconic Vestal Masturbation shirt, which features a topless nun masturbating with a cross and a back print declaring “Jesus is a Cunt.” Not one for first dates or job interviews then.
“It was one of those things we found hilarious at the time,” laughs Dani. “People looked at us as being a bit gothic and sensuous, so we did something like that. My then-girlfriend—now wife—posed in a blacked-out room in my house, and then nowhere would print it. She was actually working at a T-shirt printing place but they were having none of it. In the end we had to go to a place in a tiny little village that was printing up like flags and stuff!”
Cradle of Filth would continue to grow as the years went by, retaining elements of their black metal past while exploring more symphonic, gothic, and heavy metal territories along the way. Likewise, their aesthetic would become somewhat more indebted to a Grimms fairy tale or a Clive Barker movie than second-generation black metal as the years went by, the band’s use of face paints gradually moving away from what could be considered corpsepaint after Vempire. Nonetheless, Dani remains fond of the genre and proud of the band’s early years, as he explained to me in 2007 in an interview for Terrorizer’s first black metal special.
“The thing that I remember was that mystery and that it was totally new, people combining music and ideas. People were younger and a bit more naïve and perhaps, dare I say, a bit more imaginative because of it. There was a sense back then of rallying toward a collective goal. It was all black and white, it was all bad photocopies. I think it was the first [Burzum] Aske T-shirt that had Grishnackh on the back and it was so badly taken it actually looked like he was a towering Vampiric overlord, when in actual fact it was just a shit picture. It became mysterious because it was all rumor.
Two decades of Terrorizer covers highlight something of a shift in the band’s image.
“A lot of bands now are trying to recreate a scene or keep it alive and it’s born of nostalgia. There’s a lot of people still wallowing in that whole ‘We’re here on a Nordic mountain waving our sticks around, painted like badgers’ and it just isn’t the same. The moment passed about eight or nine years ago, there are still good albums and good bands, some of the best albums have been released long after that date, Craft’s last record for example, but I think the scene has burned itself out and maybe it’s for the best. Maybe that nucleus has been demolished by a hammer blow and now all these little pieces are forming themselves again and have maybe spread further afield and become bigger and better, but I think that original feel has died. But maybe that’s just me getting too old!”
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DIMMU BORGIR
BLACK METAL ENTERS THE MAINSTREAM PART II
“Everyone raves on about 1996’s Stormblast—and it is a decent record—but it’s with the follow-up that these guys really smashed onto the radar. Enthroned Darkness Triumphant stuck two fingers up at the traditional, lo-fi conventions of Scandinavian black metal by presenting a sound that was polished, professional, and powerful. They’ve since gone on to delight and annoy in equal measure ever since with their brand of unsubtle, bombastic metal. As far as I’m concerned, they long since left the domain of ‘real’ black metal but there’s no arguing with a good hook or riff and Dimmu know how to pen plenty of these.”
—Frank “The Watcher” Allain (Fen, Skaldic Curse)
FORMED IN THE SUMMER of 1993 by a trio of seventeen-year-old musicians—Shagrath (Stian Tomt Thoresen), Silenoz (Sven Atle Kopperud), and Tjodalv (Ian Kenneth Åkesson)—Dimmu Borgir rose from the black
metal scene that was by then well underway within Norway. Shagrath and Tjoldalv were old friends, having grown up as neighbors and schoolmates in the small town of Jessheim, and the two had met Silenoz around 1990/1991.
“Silenoz lived in a small place nearby called Nannestad and the first time I met him was at our local youth club,” recalls Tjoldalv. “In this place we were allowed to rehearse, I had my band with Galder [Thomas Rune Andersen] called Requiem [which played death metal and became Old Man’s Child in 1993], and Silenoz had his death metal band called Malefic and used to rehearse at this same youth club, so I believe this was the first time our ways were crossed.”
Already heavily into thrash and death metal, the members were converted to the black metal cause by the Helvete scene and the wave of new music emerging from Norwegian acts such as Burzum, Immortal, Emperor, Satyricon, and Darkthrone.
“No trend, no fashion, no peace, no fun, no life, no light”: An early Dimmu Borgir flyer shows a young and unpainted Shagrath.
“I left quite a lot of money at Helvete,” Silenoz recall with a laugh, “I can’t remember who tipped us off about it, but it was like a fucking revelation—all these obscure albums and the mystique surrounding the shop made quite an impression on a fifteen-year-old kid. Oslo is like forty minutes from where I grew up, so it’s like the ‘big scary city.’ We just went there to buy records and leave, we were too young to be taken seriously I guess at the time.”
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 41