When you talk about classic albums shaping genres Cruelty and the Beast by Cradle Of Filth sits proudly and menacingly at the top of the tree for extreme music.
In 1998 Cruelty and the Beast was released and showcased the band’s hybrid of brutality and macabre romanticism, crafting a concept album based on the life of Hungarian Countess and mass murderer Elizabeth Bathory who tortured and murdered hundreds of young women in the 16th and 17th centuries. The album was both bombastic and grandiose, inflected with gothic touches, yet unquestionably rooted in black metal.
This September the band bring the album live to Australian fans in what will be a great run of shows. We talk to frontman Dani Filth about the tour and that album 20 years on.
Chatting to Dani Filth I asked what made Cradle of Filth decide to perform the “Cruelty and The Beast” album in full on tour this year and he told me “It was supposed to be last year because last year marked the 20th anniversary and to celebrate that we mixed and remastered the original album from the original tapes. [It] took quite a while because we literally had to pull it apart and build it back up again, it sounds fantastic!”
He continues to tell me, “We did a bunch of presses…cool press actually, I actually got interviewed by an 8yr old child for some of it, which is very bizarre – but it worked, it really worked. And there was a lyric video. All the album and artwork had been done and we’d found artwork from the original sessions which the artist brought to the table which was fantastic but then we found out someone hadn’t cleared it with some of the past members and that wherein lies the problem because two of the ex-members are being complete assholes about it, so it’s been held up in legal land, so to speak. That was the actual catalyst for that, as it was going to be released and the tour was going to be part of it. Subsequently it doesn’t matter as we’ve played for about four months this year and we’ve done a bunch of Cruelty shows in Europe and in Russia…with or without the cd they went down well and we thought, well, we wanted to get back to Australia coz we’ve done literally every other country this year and there’s more to come. So, we’ll just bring the Cruelty set list coz obviously we play Cruelty for the first act then as an encore we do a bunch of fan favourites and lesser known tracks like ‘Saffrons Curse’ for example.”
The Cruelty and The Beast album is a concept album about Elizabeth Bathory, I asked Dani when he learned about her and what made him take interest in her.
“A long time ago when I was a kid there was various books on vampires and werewolves and that and she was an archetypal figure that really fascinated me and I thought it’d be a little more cinematic in our delivery and do a fully-fledged…well it started off as one track and it sort of blossomed into more than that and I thought fuck it we’ll do a whole album based on Elizabeth Bathory. At that point a few bands had mentioned her name but not many. She wasn’t the household name like she is now. We managed to secure the talents of Ingrid Pitt who was a Hammer horror actress who portrayed the countess in the film ‘Countess Dracula’ and well as various others like ‘Vampire Lovers’ and ‘The Wicker Man’. She plays the part of The Countess as she grows older in the story. That was good having her talents bringing that to the table, it kind of worked, it was our first fore into undertaking a concept record and we’ve done at least three or for more since then. It was an album that catapulted the band into higher echelons of the metal community, it was a deal breaker.”
“One of the reasons we wanted to bring the album out again was because we felt the original suffered a slightly poor mix and by repairing that we were able to portray it as you will expect to hear it nowadays and I think because of the difference, the massive difference between what it was and what it is now, I don’t think you get that on any of the other albums, so it was all working.”
I asked Dani if he had a favourite city of Australia from past experiences and he was diplomatic and said they were all good but with my ‘hint hint, I’m from Perth’ he added, “Perth was the last show, it was great, we had a day off before and we got a nice hotel. A bit weird, some guy was trying to throw himself off a balcony; we had to call the police. We went out for a really nice end of tour meal which was nice because prior to Australia we been throughout Asia, we’d been in Japan, we’ve been in South America, we’ve been in America, so Perth was a good day. Then we went to see Bon Scotts’s grave” in Fremantle.”
When I asked if there was anywhere else Dani wanted to go when they came to Australia he told me, “We haven’t played Adelaide for ages so we are playing that, we are looking forward to it. Also, it’s not to do with Australia, but we are going to New Zealand which is a first for the band.” So that will be exciting for both the band and the fans.”
Dani’s favourite and least favourite things about coming to Australia are more interesting than I anticipated. Koalas are his favourite, which is a common answer and no shock there. I asked if he had cuddled many and he laughed and said, “Just a couple, a couple in my time” and laughed again, so there you have it, Dani is a Koala fan! But the interesting part was his least favourite experience, I was expecting the usual long flights and tedious airways but no what I found out had me laughing.
“What’d I get bitten by, I got bitten by a dingo, no I didn’t get bitten by a dingo what the hell am I talking about, it was something else, it was a possum, I got bitten by a possum and I had to have a rabies shot. Even cute things in your country tend to want to kill you. It’s ironic coz if you bring an apple into your country everyone runs away screaming like ‘Ahhh! It’s going to kill our ecosystem!” But everything in your ecosystem just wants to kill you.”
Who can argue that, Australia the land of the cute – and deadly. Maybe we should have warned you, don’t touch the wildlife, its wild.
Moving away from that and back to the album I found out Dani’s favourite song , “From Cruelty and the Beast I’d say ‘Bathory Aria’ because it is thirteen minutes long, so that when I’m asked that question by people playing on the radio I get my money’s worth, and also it’s kind of like a combination of the main story, there’s another track after that but that’s like an epilogue so yeah it’s where the story shifts and it goes through lots of different atmospheres. It’s actually essentially three songs in one, its split into three acts. Yeah, even if people ask me about songs from the whole back catalogue ‘Bathory Aria’ would probably be one of the ones I’d pick anyway, regardless of album.”
And the song he finds most fun to play live is ‘Desire in Violent Overture’ as “It’s extremely fast and its part of the set of people tend to go quite mad over”. Whereas his favourite lyrics are from the “first track which is the second track I wrote. It’s a story, well they’re all stories within each other but I’m particular fond of that one, it’s called ‘Thirteen Autumns and a Widow’.”
With my time talking to Dani drawing to an end we closed up with me asking anything else he wanted to add and he told me, “We’ve done six stand-alone shows in Europe, we did Russia, summer festivals in Europe, there’s been a few where we’ve done the cruelty album in its entirety throughout and they’ve all been great the response has been amazing it kind of feels unique for us at least coz it’s not something we’ve ever done before and I think that it fits for the 20th, well now 21st anniversary quite well.”
Twenty first celebrations are often bigger than twentieths anyway so it’s all worked out with great responses across the world and Australia is looking forward to Cradle’s return in September to experience the beauty and brutality of Cruelty and The Beast in full, live.
TOUR DATES:
Tuesday 3 September – Capitol, Perth 18+
Wednesday 4 September – The Gov, Adelaide 18+
Friday 6 September – 170 Russell, Melbourne 18+
Saturday 7 September – The Valley Drive In, Brisbane 18+
Sunday 8 September – Metro Theatre, Sydney 18+
Tuesday 10 September – The Basement, Canberra 18+
Thursday 12 September – The Studio, Auckland 18+
Tickets From: http://destroyalllines.lnk.to/cradle
