Ask Dani Filth whether he plans to accompany his daughter to see his Suffolk-neighbour Ed Sheeran at the pop singer’s forthcoming hometown mega-shows, and the reply is very Dani Filth. A chuckle, a sarcastic grin, and a tongue-in-cheek answer: “No, I’d probably kill him.”
There’s something wonderfully reassuring about this. Twenty-eight years since a teenaged Daniel Davey started Cradle Of Filth in the villages of his home county, the man has lost none of his dark humour, or sense of what a black metal singer is supposed to represent. Despite this, his band’s name is probably the genre’s best known, and their success and stylish flair found them on the Kerrang! cover multiple times, as well as mainstream TV shows like Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
As the one constant in the band, it’s Dani who’s always steered the good ship Cradle, injecting a gothic, romantic edge into the band, not to mention a uniquely British sense of humour alongside the Hammer Horror-style macabre, becoming an icon in his own right. Even their infamous ‘Jesus Is A C**t’ line of shirts was born of a sense of humour, different from the stony-faced, blasphemous image many of their peers favoured.
Not that it’s been an easy road. Dani has regularly found himself in a position of being ‘The Man You Love To Hate’, often thanks to controversial statements in the press (again, usually starting out as him taking the piss). One departing ex-bandmate unceremoniously called him “a nasty little midget”, while the more elite factions of black metal have bitten their thumbs at Cradle for daring to dream of success, and actually achieving it.
Today the man still finds himself receiving the adulation of a new generation, not least Bring Me The Horizon, with whom he performed in full corpsepaint at All Points East in May 2019. And Dani remains a man who can still surprise…
How did you get into metal? Growing up in Suffolk in the ’80s can’t have been much of a hotbed of heaviness.
“Actually, you’re wrong! I mean, it wasn’t a hotbed of metal, but it was a flowerbed. The Ipswich Gaumont, now the Regent, put Ipswich on the map. The first show I ever saw was there – Ozzy Osbourne on the Ultimate Sin tour. I saw Twisted Sister there, Ratt, Saxon, Motörhead, Bon Jovi. There used to be amazing grindcore festivals in Ipswich around then as well, where it would literally be all the bands you could name on one bill – Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, Deviated Instinct. It was amazing. I remember trying to get a copy of Hell Awaits by Slayer, and my dad had to order a copy from Debenhams, of all places. It took four months to come, and it had a chip out of it, so it had to be re-ordered. In the end it took about a year to get it – through Debenhams!”