Creeper: The Ballad Of The Ghost Brigade

“I’ve foresaw the end a few times, I’ve stared the death of the band in the eyes a number of times, and we’ve managed to cheat it,” declares CREEPER vocalist Will Gould, light shining in on the inner sanctum of his converted church home. “It shouldn’t really exist, it doesn’t fit into a scene; we’re reckless with our band, we smash it all to pieces each time and rebuild it in a new image.”

Fear not CREEPER fans, for the newly-turned William Von Ghould believes “there’s gonna be one day when it catches up, like Tick-Tock The Crocodile, it’s always two steps behind us”, it’s too much “like a Romeo and Juliet story” for it to be over. “Juliet is the band, and I’m Romeo; it’s doomed and any moment it could all be over, but I’m so in love with doing it that I don’t care about the difficulties.”

That CREEPER constantly rip up their own rulebook, rewriting it record after record, should come as no surprise. It mirrors the turbulent lives of Will, bassist Sean Scott, drummer Jake Fogarty, guitarist Ian Miles, and keyboardist Hannah Greenwood and retells them in bombastic, theatrical ways. Creating 2020’s UK Top 5-invading Sex, Death & The Infinite Void “was awful really”, where “everything about the last record was really quite tragic for us, and quite sad.”

CREEPER’s heart was torn in two, as its songwriting duo Ian and Will found themselves on different sides of the pond. With Ian receiving treatment in a psychiatric ward after a bipolar disorder diagnosis, Will found himself wandering round Hollywood, trying to write an album and work out life’s meaning.

Having trudged through the trenches, CREEPER cheated death once again. Even Will’s untimely beheading at their 2022 show at The Roundhouse couldn’t stop them from creating third album Sanguivore. As Will reflects, it’s the only positive to come from that time. “Ian was able to be around for the duration of it, because he’s been through recovery, well he’s always going to be in recovery, but he’s come through the other side, so it’s got a happy ending, and it’s funny, because the happy ending has resulted in a really violent, dark record.”

Sanguivore is a vampiric rock opera performed by a bunch of new wave and goth rock kids hooked on supernatural horror films. It’s the soundtrack to a sinister dinner party hosted by Jim Steinman, and attended by MEAT LOAF, NICK CAVE, and THE SISTERS OF MERCY.

Whilst they “birthed this record out of our friendship and out of creativity”, Ian and Will’s lives were inextricably woven into the narrative. “I think the themes of rebirth and living past your expiration were really relevant to what was going on with CREEPER in general, and another chance at a different life, to live forever, to leave your mark on the world is something that was going on personally.”

This is CREEPER though, and nothing is as simple as singing about your feelings. On Sanguivore, they introduce us to Spook and Mercy, who’s platonic friendship is a first for the band. “It’s allowed us to not constantly have a love story between just a male and a female and that be the whole thing; their relationship is much more, there’s a brother and sister relationship, a mentor and student relationship,” Will explains enthusiastically, “Mercy’s a lot older than Spook, a lot more bloodthirsty, a lot more evil; it’s about Spook seeing the light and the dark of Mercy and persuading her, after turning him, and being the head of The Ghost Brigade, the most innocent looking one being the most vicious and terrifying, to give herself a light to try and mend her ways.”

Imagining “the entire thing like an audio book with songs, a soundtrack to a musical that doesn’t exist”, Sanguivore is bookended by bombastic, nine-minute opener Further Than Forever, and the time-honoured traditional closing ballad More Than Death.

Whilst Will felt the former “worked so well as an opener”, it was “this horrible situation where everyone thought it was too much, that people are gonna be so confused, and I thought ‘let them be confused’; we don’t want to talk down to our audience, we want them to be in the room and on our level with us, and I don’t want to talk to anyone like their stupid; if they’re not going to like this first one, the whole record is going to be confusing to them.”

Sanguivore isn’t so much confusing, as it is challenging. Much like watching wrestling, it dares you to suspend your disbelief. CREEPER records are known for left turns, but on this one, every song switches it up. It’s all part of “playing mental chess” with their fans, where for Will, “it’s becoming more and more a challenge to think of something creative, to outwit everybody; it becomes harder and harder to be a magician in an era where everyone knows the secrets to all the magic tricks.”

If CREEPER felt the pressure to outwit the audience once more, Sanguivore shows no signs of difficulty. It’s a masterful album that packs a punch, pulling all the strands of the band together. As much as its “very dark and terrifying, it’s a really bombastic thing”, where the band thought “it was really funny than when you got turned into a vampire, you became the campest vampire you possibly could.”

As much as Will’s referring to the album’s aesthetics, inspired by neo-Western horror Near Dark and supernatural comedy horror The Lost Boys, that bombastic campness is found in the lyrics, too.

Take Chapel Gates, a song inspired by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley losing her virginity on her mother’s headstone, that features the line “she’s getting laid, but not to rest”. It’s another nod to their influences Will admits, “the whole thing with this is that it borders on the ridiculous. All the great MEAT LOAF songs had jokes in them, they’re always funny, and even at their most dramatic, and the world’s collapsing around you, but there’s a joke at the last minute, like “can’t you see my faded Levis bursting apart” is about getting a fucking erection in a really pivotal moment of the song.”

In a way, CREEPER’s tongue-in-cheek takes are their way of countering their critics. “The biggest misconception for people who don’t really know CREEPER is that we’re in on the joke,” states Will. “It’s like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s so interactive and involves you being in on the joke as well; if you go there expecting to see Macbeth, you’re gonna be bummed out, There’s a kitschy humour to the whole thing that needs to be there.”

The humour, the narrative, and the theatrics come together to create CREEPER’s truest form on Sanguivore. Alone, they’re components, but mixed as one, they reveal the real purpose of the band. It goes back years, to when Will was “a very anxious kid”, and music became a coping mechanism. It taught him “such an invaluable lesson to learn the magic of pressing play and disappearing for a while.”

Ultimately, it’s those experiences that linger on in every song Will pens. It’s sewn into the heart of CREEPER, and bleeds out into Sanguivore. It gives the band a reason to soldier on, and to continue staring death in the face. “I like to think of CREEPER as the name of an author,” he admits. “CREEPER is Stephen King, and these records are all separate books; you can pull them out and disappear into them, and when you hear the songs, your brain builds the world in the same way as when you read a page of a novel, your brain does the work for you and reimagines every single piece around you.”

Sanguivore isn’t a standalone body of work. It’s part of a multiverse of tales, a collection of worlds that Will and co. hope lives beyond their own time. Now it’s out in the world, all they can hope is every listener gives the music of CREEPER a life of its own.

“For me, the crux of it all is that when we’re done, and God knows one day we have to be, the legacy of the records is that they still exist and you can still go investigate the mystery of James Scythe, you can still see what it’s like to live in this fictional American town when something paranormal happens, or you can dive into the world of Sanguivore and live vicariously through these undead, immortal beings and live your own bloodlust scenario. I hope they outlive me, and my input on them, and become someone else’s.”

Sanguivore is out now via Spinefarm Records.

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