Cradle of Filth – Blood and Porridge

The past few weeks have been extremely busy because I’ve been moving house – not the easiest of things to do if, like me, you live in Singapore. So, here’s something light and frivolous.

It’s said that you become more conservative as you grow older. That’s because, people reason, of the material and financial possessions you acquire over the years – property, cars, shares – which make you increasingly suspicious of lefty governments inclined to levy high taxes on you and generally interfere with your accrued wealth.

Maybe that explains why I’ve singularly failed to shift rightwards in my politics as I’ve become wrinkly and decrepit. These days I’m a cranky old left-wing git, whereas formerly I was a cranky young left-wing git. It’s due to the fact that I haven’t amassed property, cars, shares, etc. Actually, from the look of my finances, it’s likely I’ll be spending my dotage stacking supermarket shelves.

One thing that brought this lack of acquisitions home to me recently was my discovery that, after moving into a new apartment, I could comfortably fit my entire collection of clothing into half a wardrobe. Well, half a wardrobe plus a shelf for storing a couple of folded trousers and one drawer in which I stash all my socks, underwear and accessories (basically a beanie hat, a sporran, and ‘anti-leech socks’ worn while trekking in the Asian mountains). My incredible shrinking wardrobe now contains a few work-shirts, a work-jacket, a sweater that’s never used because I live in sultry Singapore, a kilt and a bunch of mostly old and mostly black T-shirts. And that’s it.

Anyway, hanging those T-shirts in their new wardrobe in their new home inspired me to take a walk down Memory Lane…

Firstly, here’s one with your actual Godzilla on it. That’s the city-stomping, take-no-shit-from-anyone Japanese Gojira, not the wimpy Hollywood version who appears in buddy movies with King Kong. By the standards of my wardrobe, this item is an example of ultra-modernity, since my partner bought it for me last year.

Meanwhile, this was a Christmas present given to me by my partner’s mum. She heard I was a fan of County Suffolk’s greatest symphonic-black-gothic metal band Cradle of Filth and kindly procured this T-shirt for me featuring Nigel Wingrove’s cover artwork from their 1996 album Dusk and Her Embrace. It’s probably just as well, though, that her mum didn’t purchase for me the most famous T-shirt that Cradle of Filth have brought out.

She was also nice enough to buy me a T-shirt emblazoned with the iconic cover design for the 1984 compilation Bad Music for Bad People by that mighty psychobilly band The Cramps. In this case, the artist responsible was Steve Blickenstaff and he perfectly captured the band’s trashy punk-horror aesthetic.

Meanwhile, here’s a T-shirt bearing the name of evergreen (or ever-black) goth band The Cure. If I remember rightly, a friend bought this for me as a memento of the Marseille gig the band did during their 2008 European tour. I was thinking of attending the gig myself but, because of the expense and effort involved in getting to Marseille, wimped out. It’s now 2024 and I still haven’t seen Robert Smith and co. perform live, so I really wish I’d got off my bum and gone for it in 2008. Especially as it sounded like an awesome gig – they managed to play a dozen songs during the encores alone.

Around the same period, sometime in 2008 or 2009, I picked up this T-shirt in the famous market in central Norwich. Showing a ghoulishly-green deceased person and the tagline, ‘When there’s no more room in HELL, the dead will walk the EARTH’, it’s the poster from the seminal 1979 zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero. (The remake, which Zack Snyder directed in 2004, is great during its first half-hour but after that gets a bit ‘meh’.)

And this is the inevitable AC/DC T-shirt, which I bought a few months ago in our local branch of that hardcore, uncompromising, heavy-metal hangout, Cotton On. I live in the tropics and it’s an indispensable part of my beachwear, along with a pair of black jeans and pair of Doc Martens. Come to think of it, an AC/DC T-shirt, black jeans and Doc Martens also constitute my streetwear, sportswear, casualwear, workwear, partywear and eveningwear.

No wonder I received this ZZ Top T-shirt – again from my partner’s mum, who really does spoil me. I’m clearly a Sharp Dressed Man.

© Halperin Productions

Does the sun seem to be shining a little less brightly, or a little more darkly, today? Does the air seem unusually clammy, redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the bleak December’ rather than the cusp-of-summer May? Do the people walking past on the street seem to be sporting a tad more kohl eyeliner than normal? Are you staring at your TV, unsure if the pudgy, chaotic, tousle-haired figure you see on the screen is indeed Boris Johnson and not Robert Smith?

If the answer is ‘yes’… Well, this is probably because today, May 22^nd, is World Goth Day. According to Wikipedia, the idea of having a day dedicated to the planet’s blackest-clad subculture ‘originated in the United Kingdom in 2009 initially as Goth Day, a smaller scale celebration… inspired from the broadcasting of a special set of shows on BBC Radio 6.’

So, to mark the occasion, here’s a playlist of my dozen favourite Goth tunes, with YouTube links. (My apologies for any ultra-irritating YouTube advertisements that might pop up at the beginning.)

© Cleopatra

First up is the Goth-dancefloor fixture Adrenaline by Liverpudlian band Rosetta Stone. Actually, when I think of all the Goth nights I attended in my youth in places like Edinburgh, Norwich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this is the only tune I remember the DJs playing. Yes, I know they must have played other stuff, but this is the one song that accompanies my memories of those events. (Maybe they did play Adrenaline all night long, in a Gothic variation on that Father Ted episode where Ted and Dougal organise a charity disco and then realise they only have one record, the Specials’ Ghost Town.)

I’ve heard many authorities declare that Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the greatest Goth song of all time. But by way of something different, I’ll offer this tune instead, which is a cheeky riposte to the venerable Bauhaus anthem: Bela Lugosi’s Back by the fabulously titled Lesbian Bed Death. I love how they’ve peppered the song’s video with footage from that hypnotically weird and dream-like movie White Zombie, which had Lugosi as its villain back in 1932.

© Polydor

I’m a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I thought on this playlist I’d include something from the formidable SIouxsie Sioux’s other band the Creatures, which she formed with fellow Banshee and one-time husband Peter ‘Budgie’ Clarke. I’ve had a fondness for the Creatures ever since seeing them perform a storming set at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in 1999. This is called Pluto Drive and listening to it always lets a few tingles loose on my spine.

© The Mission

A band I saw in Edinburgh during the same period, though this time at the city’s Liquid Rooms, was the Mission. Now it was customary that when the Mission played their most famous number, the Led Zeppelin-esque Tower of Strength, their die-hard fans – who were known as ‘the Eskimos’ – would climb on top of each other and create a human tower in the middle of the auditorium. Well, not so much a tower as a pyramid, with lots of Eskimos on the floor forming its base, and smaller numbers of them forming the higher levels that tapered up to its apex. This was easy to do during the Mission’s heyday in the 1980s, when those Eskimos were mostly lean, lithe and light teenagers. However, by the late 1990s, the Eskimos had got not only a wee bit older but also a wee bit heavier… And I watched the building of that human Tower of Strength with some trepidation. Predictably, the whole thing soon wobbled and toppled over. But at least no Eskimos were hurt.

Anyway, here’s the song Belief from the Mission’s 1990 album Carved in Sand. I don’t know why this song isn’t better known, as I always thought it was an epic, relentless thing epitomising the band at their bombastic best. (Though some unkind critics would probably reword that as ‘at their bombastic worst’.)

Similarly, I don’t know why this next tune, Number One by the German outfit Clan of Xymox, isn’t better known either. It soars in an impeccably synth-y way.

I’d like to think that if, besides being tested for the ethnic groups you came from, your DNA could be tested for the musical sub-cultures you belonged to, my DNA would show a strong ‘Goth’ component. However, also being a fan of heavy metal, I’d hope that it showed a big ‘metalhead’ component too. Thus, my next two choices lie in that fascinating area where the two genres, Goth and heavy metal, overlap. First, here’s the wonderfully sepulchral – thanks to the band’s vocalist, the late Peter Steele – Everyone I Love is Dead by Type O Negative.

And here’s the finest goth-metal band to ever hail from Country Suffolk, East Anglia: Cradle of Filth. Their song A Gothic Romance: Red Roses for the Devil’s Whore follows a tried-and-trusted Cradle of Filth formula, starting with a civilised, classical-music opening, but rapidly descending into howling, pounding, guitar-mangling chaos. As ever, the croaking / shrieking vocals of Suffolk icon Dani Filth are at the forefront.

Now it’s time for another Goth dancefloor-stomper. It’s hard to resist Doctor Online by industrial Norwegian outfit Zeromancer, a song I assume was inspired by the infamous, euthanasia-supporting Doctor Jack Kevorkian, aka ‘Doctor Death’.

Canadian band the Birthday Massacre are smartly named. The word ‘birthday’ suggests glowing candles, ornately decorated birthday cakes and, generally, the magical happiness that people associate with childhood memories of their Big Day; while the word ‘massacre’ suggests, well, blood, darkness and death. That juxtaposition sums up Goth perfectly. And here’s their song Happy Birthday, whose vibe nicely blends that sense of child-like wonder with sinister premonitions that something bad is going to happen.

Returning to Bauhaus for a moment, I find this solo effort by their celebrated frontman Peter Murphy, Cuts You Up, poignant and rather lovely.

The young band Savages – okay, that’s young by my standards: they formed in 2011 – are described in their Wikipedia entry as a ‘post-punk, noise rock, alternative rock’ outfit. That description sneakily avoids using the ‘G’ word… But come on. I defy anyone to listen to their song Husbands and not think of Siouxsie and the Banshees at their imperious best.

Finally, how else could I finish this post but with a link to the greatest Goth anthem ever, the Sisters of Mercy’s majestic, thunderously operatic This Corrosion? Be warned – this is the 11-minute remix. By the end of those 11 minutes, after you’ve been bludgeoned into submission by singer Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison’s caterwauling vocals, by producer Jim Steinman’s celestial choirs and Wagnerian guitar-squalls, and by that never-ending chorus of “Hey, now / Hey, now now…”, you will be begging the Sisters for mercy.

Tag: Cradle of Filth

The incredible shrinking wardrobe

Happy World Goth Day 2022