Cradle of Filth: A Cruel Re-Mistress

For over a century, the London Palladium has been known for its variety. From shows such as Sunday Night at the London Palladium to the Royal Variety Performance and its long-standing affinity with Bruce Forsyth, it is a place of grandeur and prestige. So when CRADLE OF FILTH decided to play the venue on their recent tour celebrating third album Cruelty and the Beast, a record they performed in its entirety that night, it seemed more than a little bit out of the norm. For vocalist and founding member Dani Filth though, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be refused.

“We chose it because of its elegance and its notoriety as being the most famous of all the places a band could play,” he says. “It’s a very decadent thing to do and I was surprised that other bands have and were playing there like OPETH and THE DAMNED. It certainly wasn’t a thing we did for the money, because in order to play there you don’t get paid even a third that you would at other venues; but to say that you’ve done it was a very attractive proposition. It was also good for the fans as well, to have this special one off show in such historic surroundings and I think that fitted the whole inner concept of the show and the record perfectly. It felt really special, and in fact the whole day was as well.”

Aside from one further show in Belgium, the Palladium concert was the culmination of a tour that should have coincided with the ‘ReMistressed’ edition of Cruelty and the Beast being released prior to any of the shows taking place. However, legal issues pushed this back for nearly a year and, whilst Dani doesn’t want to dwell on it, he’s now able to talk about it more freely. “Essentially, half the band were cool with the album being remastered, however the rest held us up with the most ridiculous claims; I’m not giving any names but it was a fucking trial by fire. In the end, one person held the procedure up more than anyone else by asking things like ‘Can my name be mentioned before anyone else’s?’, ‘Can I have my own personal mix that only I can rearrange because this new one is so bad?’ – demand after demand after demand and it was getting more and more pathetic. In the end, our label managed to get it sorted and rather fortuitously too, because we’ve been touring the record with no release!”

It’s fair to say that the album had been long overdue a remastering, with the original production a source of criticism since its release back in 1998. Well, we say ‘remastered’, but Dani thinks differently. “We haven’t remastered it – this is the misconception. You can’t remaster drums to sound like that. We took the original tapes, everything had to be transferred from them into digital format and it was remixed over the course of six weeks; we had to pull the whole thing apart and put it back together again. It was incredibly hard work because we had two agendas with it really – one to make a bigger, modern sounding record and at the same time not lose any of the integrity of the atmosphere of the original album. There’s a whole reason that it sounded the way that it did in the first place, anyway, but yes, it was an incredibly hard procedure.”

Oh? A reason it sounded like that in first place? Pray tell, Dani! “We were quite well aware of the sound in the first place; two of us actually hired a car and went back up to the studio incognito to avoid one of the members who’d had a bit of a dictatorship over the sound of the record and, because of, that’s how it sounded at the time. If you’ve got tinny, shitty drums you can’t build a huge foundation around that – you can’t have a very heavy bass or very heavy guitars. So from the off we were fighting a losing battle because the drummer wanted everything to sound very sharp and that’s the way it turned out.”

For all the problems surrounding Cruelty and the Beast both then and now, Dani is still very proud of it. “I absolutely hold it in high regard, and I was a little paranoid about going out and playing the tracks because I remember it being an exceptionally hard album to sing even then, so with 21 years between then and now I was wondering if I could even do it, but the more you do things the easier it becomes and the Palladium show where we threw everything at the stage show bar the kitchen sink was just incredible.”

Cruelty And The Beast is out now via Music For Nations.

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