CRADLE OF FILTH Members Discuss The Making Of 'Thornography'

Roadrunner Records' own Jason Kinnard sat down with Dani Filth and Paul Allender from CRADLE OF FILTH a few weeks ago to conduct an exclusive interview for RoadrunnerRecords.com. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Q: 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?

Dani: 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... three 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.

Q: In 2003, you headlined the Ozzfest second stage. Do you have any aspirations to do a summer touring festival again?

Dani: 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.

Q: How did you choose to cover "Temptation" [HEAVEN 17?

Dani: 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.

Q: On the new album you guys have three keyboardists?

Dani: 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 Deva 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.

Q: I heard you guys had some scary experiences in the studio?

Dani: 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 [Caggiano, producer]. 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."

Q: But you're not the only one that heard it, right?

Paul: 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.

Dani: I heard it maybe 5-6 times by the end of the sessions.

Paul: 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.

Q: You should have recorded that.

Dani: Yeah. (laughs)

Paul: Unbelievable, this fucking thing. And everybody's looking around like "Where is that coming from?"

Read the entire interview at this location.