CRADLE OF FILTH Frontman Talks Making Of 'Hammer Of The Witches'

Australia's The Rockpit recently conducted an interview with vocalist Dani "Filth" Davey of British extreme metallers CRADLE OF FILTH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Rockpit: The main discussion today is the new CRADLE OF FILTH album, "Hammer Of The Witches". I had a preview of the album that your label sent us and it's sounding really good. You must be happy with how the songs turned out.

Dani: Yeah, very happy! We worked incredibly hard on the album with the new lineup. We were in the studio, if you took Christmas out of the equation, for about four months. Working on the album for a year, doing press now for about five-six weeks, and I can only go by what the journalists have said, but they all seem to fucking love it, which is great, since they are the only people that have heard it thus far. Nuclear Blast have been a bit stingy with sending it out, with all this thing about leaking with downloading, threatening people with suing if they release it, which has got people in fear in the U.K., just listening to the bloody thing. [Laughs] I'm totally in agreeance with them — I think music downloading is killing music — but there's a certain way to go about it. But, anyway, the point is we are in a good place, very happy, and, like I said, we're in the midst of doing press now, because the album is finished, and things are starting to roll again after been tantamount to Christmas for months. We're also just starting to book worldwide tours, so Europe is coming together, South America is coming together, [we] go as far as America in January and then we're looking at Australia and Asia after that, so pretty exciting times.

The Rockpit: [The album] sounds like old-school CRADLE OF FILTH. Would you agree with that?

Dani: Well, in a modern context, yeah. I think it's helped going back to a six-piece. Before, our previous guitarist always wanted to do [everything] himself. We were kind of forced into getting two new guitarists, because [when] we did a co-headline tour with BEHEMOTH last year, Paul [Allender] couldn't do it because of personal issues, so that was out of the equation. And then we found out our other guitarist, James McIlroy, who had been suffering from a severe neck injury, had to go and get major surgery, so he was pretty much out for a year or so. So we had to find two new guitarists who just worked out perfectly, because we were playing tracks like "Haunted Shores", "Funeral In Carpathia", "Beneath The Howling Stars", so a lot of the old twin-guitar-harmony-type fast melodic stuff. I guess they had a springboard from which to start writing from. Also both guitarists, who are amazing guitarists, were also big fans of the band, they had the direct idealogy already about how they wanted to start writing, and, like I say, all of us contributed to the writing effort, and yeah, it's what we came up with. It's what we shat out in the end!

The Rockpit: How has it affected the band? Like you mentioned before, these guys are fans of the band already. Obviously they had an impact in a positive way.

Dani: Yeah, definitely. They had a very good idea about... Between us, we speak a lot, obviously, we spend a lot of time together, and we kinda knew where we wanted to go. The main instigator is obviously Martin ["Marthus" Skaroupka, drums) and Daniel [Firth], the bass player. Daniel writes a lot of guitar parts, Martin writes a lot of orchestral parts, and did so on the album, so that helped steer the ship a little bit. We also wrote so much stuff. We went into the studio with our producer Scott Atkins. He kind of wanted us to concentrate on quality over quantity. There were three songs we dropped in the studio, one of which I actually thought was going to be my favorite track called "Achingly Beautiful", so it kinda proves it's a democracy, because I had to really let that go. Even the two bonus tracks, they were as good as the bulk of the album, because we hadn't decided on the running order until about a week prior to the actual mastering, so there's no loss of quality, only that they are bonus tracks, so we'll spend less time on them. Some may even prefer those tracks; [it's] just a matter of preference. Some had to be bonus for a special edition and some didn't, but over and above all of that, we actually dropped three tracks, so the writing was pretty prolific regardless. Hopefully to bolster a large cycle of touring, those three tracks may join up with a cover by us of "Alice In Hell" by ANNIHILATOR which will form the basis of an EP. That's the premise, but it involves twisting around the company's arm, if the album does well.

Read the entire interview at The Rockpit.