New York, NY (Roadrunner Records) - Roadrunner's own Jason Kinnard sat down with Dani and Paul from Cradle of Filth a few weeks ago to conduct this exclusive interview for RR.com. The band's new album, Thornography, hits stores this Tuesday, October 17th, so here's your chance to read up on all things COF before going out to get it.
Jason: What do you guys like to do in New York when you're...
Dani: Chillin'?
J: Yeah... drink?
D: Actually, no... not at all. Shopping, looking for bargains. I don't know what to buy now, I should get something for my daughter. I was thinking FAO Schwartz, something weird, New York-y.
J: On Thornography, you worked with Rob Caggiano (formerly of Anthrax). Had you worked with him in the past?
D: Yeah, he worked on the last two records. He produced Nymphetamine, and helped mix the one before that (Damnation and a Day).
J: I heard he had some health problems.
D: Yeah... I think that's what pushed him into being in the studio a bit more.
J: The "meat Millenium Falcon"?
D: Yeah, that's right (laughs).
Paul: In Mexico, he ate a sheep's head, or goat's head, or something.
J: So the last time you guys were in the US was in 2004 (on the Headbanger's Ball Tour). What are your plans for the next couple months?
D: We've got some stuff in Europe to do... some press. We're gonna do a video for "Temptation," finish up some more tracks which didn't make the album... same producer, same mixer (Andy Sneap). We've got some other things to do, usual band stuff. Then we start touring... 3 dates in Turkey, then over to L.A. to a signing for Hot Topic on Halloween, and then we start the European tour a few weeks later, which should take us up to Christmas. We do Europe first, test out the stage show, and then ship it over here... we should be in America by the second or third week of January.
J: Do you prefer touring in the US or Europe?
D: I prefer touring in the US... but I like Europe for the culture. And the buses are useless in America. The one we had in Europe on the last tour... it was like a hotel.
P: It was amazing.
J: Any favorite cities?
D: Amsterdam. Prague... I love Prague, though we haven't been there in ages. New York, obviously. London, Sydney. The Big Four: LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York... you're always guaranteed a good show.
J: In 2003, you headlined the Ozzfest second stage. Do you have any aspirations to do a summer touring festival again?
D: That's the plan for next year. We'd like to get back on the Ozzfest, because the year that we did it we had such a good laugh. Not just us, but the Ozzfest crew, the rest of the bands, it was great fun. And because of that... obviously, it won't have as much magic as the first time, but I think we'd like to do it again.
J: Do you guys have any favorite bands to tour with, or bands that you haven't toured with yet that you would like to?
D: Favorite bands to tour with... Moonspell, Type O Negative, Killswitch Engage. People we'd like to tour with... we'd like to tour with Maiden, Slayer would be good as well, although we've toured with Slayer before.
P: We played with Maiden one time in Italy. A couple bands got together, and we somehow landed the direct support spot. That was really cool. But we've never toured with them. We'd like to tour with Judas Priest, now that they have Rob Halford back.
J: So on the new album, Thornography, it seems like you are headed in a more melodic direction. Would you say that's an accurate description?
D: Yeah, in places, but in other places not.
P: It's definitely a progression from the last album.
J: You've got "Rise of the Pentagram," your first instrumental track on this album.
P: Yeah, that's certainly a bit different. We'd never done an instrumental before, and thought "What's the point of doing an instrumental that people are just going to expect?" So we made it completely fucking different.
D: The whole record is very different. But it's Cradle of Filth. I mean, people have always called us sellouts, and now we've got Ville Vallo [from HIM] on a track, and we also take the gay icon song "Temptation" [by Heaven 17] and make it into something heavy.
J: How did you choose to cover "Temptation?"
D: Because we've covered Maiden in the past, covered Slayer... if we're going to cover metal we might as well do one of our own songs. If we're gonna do a Maiden song in our style, it's literally going to sound just like us. So... we thought we'd do something so far removed... if we did "Thriller" by Michael Jackson it would still sound really gay because of the nature of the lyrics and the notes, but "Temptation" turned out really heavy.
J: And how did you hook up with Ville [on "The Byronic Man"]
D: We're mutual friends through Bam [Margera], and I met him on a few occasions. I respect his music, and we needed some singing to portray a character from the song. We thought he had the Byronic nature, his whole life is akin to Lord Byron's, and it would have been gay for me to do it, so he was the first person that came to mind, and he's well known enough to bring the character to life... girls fancy him, he's very famous.
J: But you did do those clean vocals on the "Underworld 2" soundtrack. Do you do any more clean vocals on the new album?
D: Yes, but I wouldn't call them clean. James Hetfield-y, Alice Cooper type of stuff.
J: One of the big changes from Damnation and a Day to Nymphetamine was that you got rid of the huge orchestral arrangements (played by The Budapest Film Choir). Was there a reason for that?
D: We had that album [Damnation] in mind at a time when everybody thought we were selling out. We got the opportunity to realize what we wanted to do, but it was going to be a one-off, it wasn't going to be on every record. It was just what we wanted to try at that time. The next album is never going to be the same.
P: It'd be boring.
J: On the new album you guys have three keyboardists?
D: Yeah.. I mean, they don't all play at once. We realized when we sacked our other keyboardist that we didn't actually need to have one as much. I mean, we have a touring keyboardist named Rosie, and she's great. She came a little late into the recording process, but I think she'll be on the next record.
But we've worked with these other people in the past... one guy actually wrote all the arrangements for the orchestra, and the third one is this guy Chris Rehn who is in a band with Sarah Jezebel Diva called Angtoria. Oh, actually, make it four of em... cause there is also an American who does all of our electronics and makes these crazy fucking loops.
J: I heard you guys had some scary experiences in the studio?
D: I wouldn't call them scary, they were downright weird. Maybe it scared me a little bit. Sometimes there was the sound of a child's wind-up toy. And in my head I convinced myself that it was the producer screwing with me, because he and I lived in this house, this huge creepy Georgian house... it was great. But I had just gone to bed one night, and I was trying to go to sleep, and it started. And I leapt up, not in shock, but more because I wanted to catch Rob. So I got up, ran into his room in the nude, and he was listening to music on his headphones and using his computer. And he came down for an hour, we completely stripped the room looking for this sound. I said "We're not going anywhere, we're going to find what you hid in my room."
J: But you're not the only one that heard it, right?
P: No. I got my studio setup in my room, just so I can change stuff around. And I'm sitting there working, and I heard this noise start coming from the bathroom. And I was like "What the fuck?" There was nothing there. But at first, I would hear like one note every once in a while, and then maybe a couple notes if I'm lucky. And then towards the end, we were all sitting down to dinner and this fucking noise went right around the whole table.
D: I heard it maybe 5-6 times by the end of the sessions.
P: The very last night, I was packing all my stuff up, and we heard it out in the hallway. It was going absolutely fucking mental. It was going fast, slow, with harmonies being played, everything.
J: You should have recorded that.
D: Yeah. (laughs)
P: Unbelievable, this fucking thing. And everybody's looking around like "Where is that coming from?"
J: So, Paul, you were the primary songwriter for this album?
P: Yeah, I arranged a lot of it. I'll sit down and come up with a riff, and I don't stop there. I come up with another riff, and then I think it'd be cool if we go into a part like this. And then the next thing you know, I've got a whole song structure. Then that goes on CD and I just give it to everyone to rehearse and give me feedback.
J: This seems to be one of the first times that a Cradle record has featured guitar solos. You've stepped it up as a lead guitarist.
Paul: This was one of the first times I've had time to practice, usually I'm doing artwork or interviews or this or that...
J: So you don't sit around watching Yngwie instructional videos, doing picking exercises and scales all day?
P: I'd rather sit there and play a slow melodic riff with harmonies. I get more out of that than just trying to be as fast as possible.
J: Are you classically trained?
P: No, I got into Iron Maiden and learned guitar (laughs).
J: The second guitarist on this album is different than the last one?
P: Correct. Charles was filling in for Dave (Pybus) on bass, and when Dave returned, Charles moved to guitar. He actually attended the London Institute of Guitar.
J: Paul, I noticed that you also do the COF website and graphics.
P: Yeah, we're working on a new site at the moment, it's very clean cut. It's got some nice movies and logos... all black and red, it's awesome. Simplicity is great.
J: And there's a new artist for this cover?
D: Yeah, Sam Araya. We usually get a different artist for every album, though we used John Coulthart for the last two, he's kind of like our resident artist.
J: There was a little controversy with the art, right?
D: Apparently... it's only a few variants on it, really, it's pretty much the same thing. There was a corpse on the ground, some stuff in the background, some insinuations they didn't like... and I think the woman's legs were naked. The changes were very minor.
J: Any other projects you're working on?
D: I've got a book that's in the works, "Gospel of Filth." That's still being worked on, it's a quite lengthy process, obviously. We've got a live record, which we've put on hiatus for a little bit. It's ready to go, we just need to decide when and where, we've got to tweak a couple overhead mics.
J: Dani, you were sick for a while?
D: Yeah, for about 4 months I had to go on this weird homeopathic diet.
J: While you were in the studio?
D: For some of it, yeah. We had to take another six weeks out, but we had other things to do, and it was good to step back from it. Compared to our others, it was a lot quicker than our other albums. We had a British tour for about two and a half weeks, and we had to rehearse for that. We took four weeks off for Christmas, the six weeks I was just telling you about, and the sporadic summer festivals (11 of them). So in total, we probably only spent about 3 months recording. And towards the end, I really started to enjoy it. Once I started getting better, everything seemed more relaxed... we knew it was shaping up, and we didn't feel like we had to rush to get it completed.
J: Was it hard to adjust your diet and stop drinking?
D: Yeah, it was terrible, but it had to be done.
J: And you got married recently?
D: Yeah, it didn't come as a big surprise though. We had been together for 14 years. That was on Halloween as well.
J: What were the lineup changes from the last album to this one?
P: Dave [Pybus] left the band for a little bit, so we needed a bass. Charles, who is the guitar player at the moment, came and played bass for a little bit. Then, Martin and James left, Dave came back, and Charles moved to guitar... if you can follow that.
J: Dani, what was it like working on Roadrunner United ["Dawn of a Golden Age"]?
D: It was good fun. It was just a little strange. Dave, our bass player, was flown over to America for his session, but because of the nature of our schedule, I had to do mine in a little studio after the track had already been recorded, so I missed out on that participation aspect. I missed the party, because that was the day I flew out to India. It was good; I just felt a little alienated. But the song was great, it was with Justin Hagberg [3 Inches of Blood] and Matt Heafy [Trivium] on guitar, Sean Malone [of Cynic] on bass, and Mike Smith [Suffocation] on drums.
J: You guys 3 Inches of Blood fans?
P: Yeah, the singing is fucking brilliant. It reminds me of Judas Priest, I love it.
J: And Dani, you were recently tracking some final vocals in upstate New York?
D: Yeah, it's right by the Alfred Hitchcock estate. It's huge, 900 acres. We're in the middle of the woods, which is great.
J: Thanks, guys. I look forward to the new album.
D: Thanks.
P: Cheers.
