Creeper are back, with a new album, a new Sanguivore chapter, a new muscly baddie, and a banging new single, HEADSTONES. William Von Ghould helps you get your teeth into it all…
Last week, Creeper brought the curtain down on their Sanguivore era with a killer show at London’s KOKO, and a takeover of most of Camden, complete with hearse. Those who remember the last time they did something like this – at the same venue as the finale of Sex, Death & The Infinite Void – will recall the shock when they exited the stage having announced it was all over, à la David Bowie killing off Ziggy Stardust.
Happily, this time around they did the opposite, and revealed that rather than being over, Sanguivore was getting a sequel. On top of that, there was a new player in the Creeperverse: the terrifying, ripped executioner muscle-mommy, the Mistress Of Death.
Now, they’ve just dropped the first track from it, HEADSTONES. It finds the band laying out the stall for Sanguivore II with duelling Iron Maiden guitars and a load of lyrics about horny ghouls having a ruddy good time, introducing the theme of a vampire rock band having it large in the 1980s.
“It follows a vampire rock band on a tour soaked in violence and excess,” explains singer William Von Ghould. “It sets the stage for what’s to come in the album’s narrative, exploring the dark perils of rock’n’roll, sins of the flesh, and pure evil. This is the band at its most over-the-top and unashamedly dramatic. But as our hero Jim Steinman once said, ‘Sometimes going all the way is just the start…’”
It's time to go big or go home. Speaking exclusively to K!, the singer elaborates on what’s to come, the album’s themes, and how their peripheral gang of misfits now includes a bodybuilder…
So, you’re doing Sanguivore II. How come?
“You don't see a great deal of sequels in music. We've done three records before this, and each one took an abrupt right turn after we finished it and went into a different thing. We always knew what we were going to do up to the last one, the vampire record, and I think everyone was expecting us to burn it all down and start again, because that's what we've always done. So, the biggest swerve we could do was to do a sequel.
“It’s funny – we got the vibe that people really weren't ready for this era of the band to go away, and for once, we were giving people good news at the end of the show. Not like last time we played KOKO and did our big homage to David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust where they thought it was all over! It was nice to actually hear people happy, and to give people what they want for once, which is not like us.”
It's a hell of an opening throw…
“The funny thing is, it's the fastest song on the record. My tendency is to do ballads. There was one record we were making, I can't remember which one it was, but I’d written, like, 10 ballads. It’s a trap I always fall into. This time around, we thought, ‘Let's challenge ourselves and make it so every song could be a single.’ We've always had fast songs in the past, but we've been trying to not cover the same ground. There’s a big bunch of ideas I wanted to do, and we just combined them together. I wanted to do a Motörhead thing, because we’ve never done that before. I always wanted to have a chorus like We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister, or KISS, ‘I wanna rock’n’roll all niiiight’ where it's a big gang chorus that’s fun to sing.
“I love the idea of having a gospel-sounding singer in the back of it, like on Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones. Tom [Dalgety, producer] had a friend called Chantelle who came in, and I realised that these textured vocals in these choruses sounded like something maybe we haven't heard recently in hard rock. So we started putting that through all the songs. It pops up all over the record.
“There's a second guitarist now as well, and Ian [Miles, guitar] was like, ‘I really want to start doing solos off of each other. We’ve never done that before.’ So we suddenly had all these different components that we've never got to play with before. There’s lots of brilliant guitar work on this record. It's really, really impressive. It's really cool to watch them do it. I mean, it's over my head. I can't play guitar, so I don’t know the first thing about how to do it, but it's great!
What’s it about?
“This record takes place in the 1980s. It's about a vampire rock band on tour, and there’s someone coming to get them. That's who the Mistress Of Death is. The song itself is about sin and the excess and violence of this vampire rock’n’roll band. It introduces these characters really well. It doesn't introduce the Mistress Of Death quite yet, in the Dan Harmon story circle we’re at square one, before things have taken place, showing the world as it is.
“The idea for the video was to show the characters, and say, ‘This is what it looks like when the band plays.’ So we did this huge thing with pyro and all sorts of stuff. It's a really, really big budget rock’n’roll video. That’s what the song’s about as well: it’s the band talking about being in a band. It's kind of the anthem for the record. It starts off on that high point, and it tells you who this these characters are. It gave us a really fun opportunity to have a movie monster chase us around and be a vampire rock band offstage. It's a really good introduction to the record and how outrageously over the top all of it is.”
Tell us about the Mistress Of Death…
“I can't give too much away, because it's an ongoing thing. I gotta keep kayfabe. But the idea was that we would take Sanguivore to a different part of the universe. As you can see, they’ve got this executioner’s mask we made for them, which draws on loads of heavy metal tropes, all mashed together. The person playing her is this incredible woman called Sarah, who I met at a wrestling convention in Manchester – she was a Chyna impersonator. I had this vision in my mind of what the Mistress Of Death should look like, and I walked in and saw her and just went, ‘Holy shit! That's her! That’s the Mistress Of Death!’ She's training for a bodybuilding exhibition out in Italy, and she's shredded at the moment. And in that weird way that everyone involved in Creeper has some kind of connection to this world, she was a scare actor for a bit as well, in a horror maze.
“So, yeah, now we have a pro-wrestler in our weird gang of misfits. We've got this crew of freaky individuals going around making these things together. It’s become this cast of characters, this unbelievable mesh of people, and it’s so much more than a band and songs. That was always our intention from the offset.”
And you’ve got a new horror head of yourself!
“Yeah. It’s the same guy who did my last head, a guy called Clive who used to run Fear Fest, and now works out of an old prison in Gloucester. We needed a new head for the stunt at the end of this film where I lost my eye. He made this replica of my head, with this gross thing that makes my eyeball explode. It’s really cool and really disgusting.”
How did you approach the record, being as it was a sequel rather than a totally different step from the last one?
“Sequels are always ‘more explosive, faster, more intense, louder!’ This sequel is sleazier and sexier. And we’re pastiche-ing some of the tropes of rock music that we love, which is really fun. Everyone who's been involved in it thinks it’s the best thing that the group has made, and we're really proud of that. At this point in our career, that's all we can really hope for. Tom Dalgety told me that he listened to it in his car, and it made him cry!
“When we were coming to write this record, one of the suggestions was that we made it an all-killer record, like Painkiller by Judas Priest, where it’s bang after bang after bang. We love the last record, but it goes on tangents here and there, which is fun, but we wanted to get to a place where we had a bunch of hard rock songs we could just bust through live.
“The Satanic Panic is a theme of a lot of these stuff across the record. There's a really cool song called The Black House, which is about [Church Of Satan founder] Anton LaVey and Jayne Mansfield. There’s a lot of rock’n’roll lore that we play around with. Obviously the Jim Steinman stuff is a really big deal to us, and he’s still a massive influence. But I suppose on the last one, we were doing a lot of Lost Boys tropes, with the vampire thing, which Jim Steinman has done for years and years.”
This was made at the end of a really massive era for Creeper. Did doing things like playing Wembley find their way into the creative process?
“I think it made us realise what this band can be. I’d imagined three records for Creeper. We always think really far in advance. I wanted our second album to be our swerve record, then do the dark one. I thought we always wanted to end it on the vampire record. I've been going on about the vampire record for a lot longer than people would realise, and I didn't have an idea for the record that came after. I didn't know what happened – I didn't know whether the band would break up at that point. I never saw the band being around as long as it has been. That's really a tribute to our to our audience, and the fandom being so incredible. Every time we do anything, the feverish support we have is crazy. I think what happened with Sanguivore made us feel like, ‘Oh, snap, we've kind of finally found our little world here.’ There's so many avenues we can go down, there's so much more to explore with these sounds that it made a second one a really appetising idea.”
Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death will be released later this year. Creeper play Bloodstock on August 9, and head out on tour with Ice Nine Kills this December – get your tickets now.
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