Cradle Of Filth The Rue Morgue Records Interview

There is very little that extreme metal artists Cradle of Filth haven’t done over their career – but according to front man Dani Filth there was one thing he felt they needed to do – make their first live album in twenty years.

Filth gets his wish with Trouble And Their Double Lives which was recorded between 2014 and 2019 at different performances in the USA, Europe, Australia and beyond during their “Cryptoriana World Tour” and dates following. The album also serves as a time-capsule of blisteringly intense live energy, and an astounding testament to the band’s renowned latest era and Filth couldn’t be happier.

“It was pretty circumstantial to be honest,” says Filth with a laugh as we sit down to talk about the album. “We hadn’t planned on doing a live album, but the pandemic had left us with a spare amount of time. We had our last record, Existence Is Futile, delayed by a year. It was literally finished in 2020 and then it wasn’t released for over a year – so by the time it came out I was actually sick to death of the songs.”

“This period also saw us transitioning from our last record label Nuclear Blast to our current one – Napalm,” he says continuing. “During that year our live engineer suggested it. He had recorded loads of concerts from our world tour which had lasted for four years, and he said why don’t you give them to your studio engineer get him to fix them up and then release a live record. And we thought that wasn’t such a bad idea.”

From there though the idea grew to what we have today – a live beast with some new tracks thrown in as well. But Filth admits it was a bit of journey to get that result as well.

“We kind of had a shopping list worth of songs that we wanted to include,” he explains. “Given that our last live album was twenty years ago we didn’t want to include any of the tracks that were on that, and we wanted to include some fan favourite tracks as well. We also wanted to include a good mix of songs from across our back catalog – we didn’t just want to focus on one era or one album or anything like that and then there was a bunch of songs that we just wanted to do as well. We did put a lot of love into it but essentially it wasn’t exactly planned.”

As we delve more into the album Filth admits that there was one track that certainly wanted included. “Bathory Ariahad to be included,” he says with a laugh. “It is so selfish because it is such a long song – it takes up the space of two maybe three songs – but it had to be there because it is my favourite Cradle song.”

Of course, I couldn’t let that piece of information just slide by and I had to ask why out of all of their tracks is that his favourite. “I’m not sure to be honest,” he says after a pause. “I think it represents Cradle Of Filth pretty well. It is a long song, so it covers a lot of bases musical wise. It is a bit of a journey. It starts very forlorn and majestic, and it is very goth and doomy and then it migrates through transitional periods of new wave British heavy metal and through to black metal – it just has a little bit of everything about it. Of course, it also has the beautiful Ingrid Pitt – the Hungarian actress who played Countess Dracula on the track so year it holds a special place in my heart for sure.”

When you look at the track listing for Trouble And Their Doubles Lives and you will see that the album contains two new tracks – She is A Fire and Demon Prince Regent – and Filth was only too happy to tell me how they were created.

“They were written towards the new album,” he says. “But because of the substantial delay due to Covid we lost two musicians in the band and then we made the decision that we weren’t going to release the new album with a new line-up but with two of the songs having our previous line-up so we saw the live album, bearing in mind that we knew that it was going to be a double album, as a chance to put them down. We knew they weren’t laboriously long songs so we decided to put one song on each side as a bit of a gateway into the new Cradle Of Filth and what we are doing now. Yeah, they were for the new album but they have found a home on the live record.”

To finish off the interview Filth had a special message for all of the Cradle fans out there. “I just want to say a big thank you to everyone,” he says. “Thank you for your continued support and we are really hoping to get across to Australasia next year – and those plans are afoot but because it is more than a year ahead I can’t pinpoint anything with an exact when and where but those conversations are happening with our booking agent – and the live album is out and we have our collaboration with Ed Sheerin, which is just one song a charity single, coming out in August or September and we will have our new album coming out roughly this time next year. Next year will be a busy a year but we hope to see you on the live front and thank you for your continued support because without you there would be no Cradle Of Filth and we would just be in our bedrooms singing in our underpants or wanking.”

Trouble and Their Doubles Lives is out now.