CRADLE OF FILTH Frontman: 'We Have A Love-Hate Relationship With A Lot Of People'

Amanda Chamberlain of In Utah This Week recently conducted an interview with CRADLE OF FILTH frontman Dani Filth. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

In Utah This Week: Do you spend most of your time in your hometown of Suffolk, or in India, where you also have a home?

Dani: In my hometown, where my main house is. The India thing is only for about a month each year, really.

In Utah This Week: Has being married changed any aspects of your career in any way?

Dani: Not really, because me and my wife have been together since we were 17. We were only married a couple of years ago. Really, it hasn't changed anything at all.

In Utah This Week: Your daughter, is she growing up to be quite the metalhead?

Dani: Yeah, but she's really into dance at the moment, and theater, so she has to listen to all kinds of things to dance. [Laughs] She's almost nine; almost to secondary school.

In Utah This Week: She's quite older now than when she flashed devil horns on a COF DVD as a toddler! But speaking of your DVDs, it's obvious you all like to wreak havoc on tour. What is the most amusing prank you've pulled?

Dani: We went back to the hotel from a venue in Greece, where we played with JUDAS PRIEST and MEGADETH, and the crew was busy breaking down our equipment into two buses. We had a couple of drinks when we got back to the hotel and thought it would be a brilliant idea to fill the lift [elevator] up with fire [extinguisher] spray. We didn't realize that it pressurizes inside the lift. So when the lift doors opened, and it got to the bottom in time for the crew to open it, it just went everywhere. Our guitarist was in the room next to me, and I retraced steps back into his room and left the fire [extinguisher] in there to make it look like he'd done it. Then I went to bed and thought, "Ha ha, this is the most fiendish plot ever!" In the morning, I found out that someone had been arrested for it; someone staying in the room next to me on the other side, not the guitar player. But we're not so bad anymore. We're practically saints now compared to that kind of stuff.

In Utah This Week: In public, are you approached often by fans?

Dani: I went to have a tattoo by Paul Booth a few weeks ago in New York with my family and it was weird because I got recognized in the weirdest places. Hemorrhoid cream is really good for clearing up tattoos, so I was standing in a store with loads of hemorrhoid cream in my hands and two fans came up to me. It happens at home as well, whenever we go to a club or something.

In Utah This Week: Have you ever had a stalker?

Dani: Not as in a person who has been turning up at my house, but we get people following us around on tour.

In Utah This Week: Do you agree or disagree that since CRADLE OF FILTH has gained mass popularity in the metal scene, some metal fans are turned off by your more mainstream appeal?

Dani: We have a love-hate relationship with a lot of people. They either love us or they hate us. Yeah, we can never do anything right to a certain degree with a certain amount of people. But I think we kind of self-deprecate ourselves, like if we're told to do one thing, we always do the other. That's why with each album, we always veer in strange directions. We've got a special edition of "Thornography" called "Heart of Dark Catharsis" coming out in February and it has seven, all-new tracks on it that didn't make the record; a couple are covers. We called it "Heart of Dark Catharsis" so we never have to explain to anyone what the content of the special edition actually is. But it's another sort of shift in another direction. It's old-school and very fast, but with an emphasis on catchiness.

Read the entire interview at this location.