CRADLE OF FILTH's DANI FILTH Speaks About New Album 'Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder'

MetalSucks recently spoke with CRADLE OF FILTH frontman Dani Filth about the band's upcoming album "Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder", due October 28 in the U.S. via Roadrunner Records. Filth spoke about the concept behind the new album — the French aristocrat Gilles de Rais — as well as the group's upcoming tour plans and first-ever book, "The Gospel of Filth", which is due around Easter of 2009. Excerpts from the interview follow below.

MetalSucks: Yeah we know a little of it [the new album]. It's about Gilles de Rais? We know the basics.

Dani Filth: Yeah, Gilles de Rais. Well, basically he was a French aristocrat war hero who fought alongside Joan of Arc. He became Grand Marshall of France in the 15th century. After Joan was burnt at the stake, he went back to his castle. He was the wealthiest person in Europe. He started venerating her death by staging a huge play which he took around various parts of France. Thousands of people went and it would be a three day event, and all the food and beer was paid for by him. So it was an enormous amount of money that he just blew, so because his enormous fortune wasn't lasting, he turned to alchemists. He was trying to find the philosopher's stone to turn base metal into gold in order to refill his coffers. He then slid into demonology and eventually murder and sexual excess. He pretty much ended up at the gates of hell. It's a pretty full-on story. The myth kind of turned into a dark fairytale. In the end the church actually forgave him. He was excommunicated, and the records from his trial were used to buffer out the tracks. Originally we used Tony Todd from "Candyman" [as the narrator for the album], but something went quite wrong there. He wasn't told exactly what the score was, so he came to the studio and said "I'm not doing this." Fortunately at the eleventh hour we were bailed out by a friend of Doug Bradley [The actor who plays "Pinhead" in the "Hellraiser" films. — Ed]. We setup a makeshift studio at my house before he was set to jet off to some comic convention.

MetalSucks: So why Gilles de Rais? You obviously did a lot of research.

Dani Filth: We came back from headlining the Viva La Bands Tour last year, and we had a lot of fire in our bellies. We had a bit of time before Christmas, about six weeks, and by the end of this we had the skeletons of about five or six tracks at which point I went "Oh shit, I really want to get a common thread in this record." The atmosphere of the music that we made was dramatic, symphonic, fast, and melodic, and it reminded me of our album ten years previous, "Cruelty and the Beast", which was about Hungarian blood countess Elizabeth Bathory. So when I was looking over the notes, I just tripped over the fact that Gilles de Rais kept coming up because you can't mention one without the other if you look back and study it. I remember I thought it would be a great thing at the time, but obviously I was more interested in Bathory. So we couldn't release two albums that were that similar at the time, but with ten years under our belts I looked back and the story is bigger, better and a lot darker. So over Christmas last year I got absorbed in it and did a lot of research. Fortunately the co-writer of "The Gospel of Filth", which is unpublished at the moment, is this historian and he's addressed Cambridge or Oxford or something and he was able to help me out with that.

MetalSucks: So what else? You guys are going to jet off to Paris.

Dani Filth: Yes, on Tuesday. "The Gospel of Filth" is with the publishers at the moment. There's a special edition coming out for the Barnes & Noble types at Easter. I mean it's been three and a half years since we started writing it. It's got a lot of collaborators as well. It's punctuated as well with things you cannot deny like Satanists and alchemy. We got Tim Burton, Marilyn Manson, Charlie Manson, hundreds of people contributed to it in one way or another. It's leather-bound, individually signed and it's got an extra chapter that I wrote that's about the bad behavior of the band.

To read the rest of the interview, visit www.metalsucks.net.