Cradle of Filth star talks about THAT T-shirt
VICKI ANDERSON talks to Dani Filth of British extreme metal band Cradle of Filth about rock’s most controversial T-shirt and his plans to bring the band to Christchurch.
On February 17, a woman marched into the T-Shirts Unfolding show, held as part of the Spectrum Festival at Canterbury Museum, and angrily sprayed black paint over a perspex case.
The subject of her displeasure was a controversial T-shirt produced by British extreme-metal band Cradle of Filth.
The 22-year-old T-shirt was ruled objectionable in 2008 by the Office of Film and Literature Classification and deemed ‘‘injurious to the public good’’. Among the hundreds of collectable shirts on display at Canterbury Museum it had its own R18 booth.
On the front of the black shirt, there is a picture of a sexualised nun. On the back, in large white letters, the slogan ‘‘Jesus is a c...’’.
The T-shirt shocked Christchurch. But the exhibition also came as a shock to its creator, Dani Filth, founding member, lyricist and lead screamer of Cradle of Filth.
‘‘Oh my gosh yes,’’ Filth says, on the phone from his home in Suffolk.
‘‘I still find it very confusing, strange and weird that they decided to put it in an exhibition in a museum in New Zealand. We had no idea,’’ he says.
‘‘Other people have done similar things, of course. It’s been worn at fashion shoots. It and some of our videos were shown in what is now the O2 Arena as part of a linguistic programme, an exhibition about the power of language or something of that ilk.’’ Filth is now 41 years old. The T-shirt was made when he was just 19.
‘‘The premise behind the shirt, remember we were young, it was more of an anarchic thing more than anything else. Jesus is there because we were looking for a mythological character to sum up the apathy . . . that anarchic statement. The religious side of it was obviously there to stir up a bit of controversy at the time but when those shirts were first introduced we were just a small band starting out.’’
He pauses for a moment before uttering the word ‘‘silly’’.
Releasing their debut album in 1994, Cradle of Filth have been casting a macabre shadow across the British metal scene for nearly a quarter of a century and are considered to have had a huge impact on the evolution of the genre.
The wearing of the so-called ‘‘Jesus’’ T-shirt has resulted in numerous arrests and prosecutions around the world in the past 20 years.
Filth speculates with a resigned sigh that there will be more in the future.
‘‘I live in Suffolk, known as a witch county, which is probably why I turned out to be such a weirdo,’’ he says drily. ‘‘It’s reared its head quite a few times.
‘‘A few years ago there was a stupid online thing to find something to attract people to Suffolk, the Olympics were on at the time. Somebody put my name forward, fans rallied around it. I won it, but they instead gave the prize to a redundant 18th century swimming pool. It was bizarre. Because of that someone dragged up the Jesus shirt and that got aired again then.’’
The T-shirt has also had repercussions in his own family.
His grandmother was, Filth says, ‘‘very Christian’’, but she was also a proud Cradle of Filth fan.
‘‘When my grandma was alive, she had rose-blinkered spectacles when it came anything to do with me, her grandson. She told all her friends about Cradle of Filth – ‘they’re supposed to be satanic’, she’d say and laugh.
‘‘But the Jesus shirt became like a blank spot where it didn’t exist for her. It was ignored.’’
The band has recently released a new album titled Hammer Of The Witches, which Filth says ‘‘takes inspiration from the Malleus Maleficarum’’, a medieval document that details the persecution of those in league with the devil. Song titles include Displeasuring the Goddess, Right Wing Of the Garden Triptych and Enshrined in Crematoria.
With typically mischievous aplomb, the album’s title gleefully flips the historical script, turning the tables on the gruesome witch hunts of 16th and 17th century Europe and exacting some hardearned vengeance on behalf of all of those who suffered persecution at the hands of religious zealots during that turbulent period in history.
‘‘My stories are like dark fairytales,’’ Filth comments. ‘‘The title is from a medieval treatise on the punishment of witchcraft. I knew the
English translation was hammer of witches, with the hammer being a weapon used by organised religion against other beliefs.’’
The band are embarking on a world tour for the album, playing dates in Europe, United States and Canada until early next year.
After that there are plans to tour New Zealand and Australia.
‘‘We have never toured New Zealand before so we’ve made it a prerogative, the dates aren’t finalised but we are working on that,’’ Filth says.
‘‘Christchurch? Definitely we would want to play there.’’
The T-shirts they will sell while on tour here will not be controversial: ‘‘Oh no, just the album artwork.
‘‘It seems strange that 20 odd years on it keeps resurfacing in such a manner,’’ Filth says of that T-shirt. ‘‘I think it will always be a bit of a bugbear for the band but at the end of the day it’s something that happened.
‘‘When I get to the pearly gates I’ll have to explain my way out of it.’’ What will you say, Mr Filth? ‘‘You know what, it worked out okay for you – we kept your name
alive.’’