CATHEDRAL Frontman: 'We Want To Give The Fans Something A Bit Special Each Time'

Mark Carras of Rock My Monkey recently conducted an interview with CATHEDRAL frontman Lee Dorrian. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock My Monkey: Whose idea was the apple-scented disk on the digipak?

Lee Dorrian: "(laughs) It wasn't my idea. I don't know whose idea that was. It's pretty cool, though. I mean, it doesn't smell like an apple. It smells like bloody carpet cleaner, or something. It's like celery carpet cleaner, or something. It's quite weird. But it wasn't my idea. But I think it's a cool little gimmick, I suppose."

Rock My Monkey: What do you as an artist — when you create an album, or when you created this album, what do you as an artist hope that fans get out of the album?

Lee Dorrian: "Well, essentially I hope the fans, the people that listen to us already and know our music know that it's not an album we've done lightly. It's an album we've tried to pay as much attention to detail as possible. Because we appreciate the people that buy our records. We want to give them something a bit special each time. For us to do that, you know, like I said, it takes a lot of thinking. Hopefully the people that like our music anyway will just think it's like a very varied representation of what we've done over the years. Like a combination of all of our styles, really, in one album. There's elements of progressive rock, there's elements of doom, there's elements of straight-chord heavy metal. There's elements of all the things that we're known for. We just wanted it to be a nice contrasting album which kind of flowed smoothly. Hopefully there's a bit something for everyone on there."

Rock My Monkey: Does the title of the album, "The Garden of Unearthly Delights", does that have a specific meaning? Or is it one of those esoteric things where you want the fans to get their own meaning out of it?

Lee Dorrian: "It's kind of loosely based on the Garden of Eden, I suppose, combined with a Hieronymous Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Our artist Dave is a big fan of Hieronymous Bosch. And the album was initially called 'Seeds of Decay', which is quite straight forward, slightly, in comparison. And 'Seeds of Decay' was literally about the seeds that were planted, the origins of mankind, when everything once looked so promising and so beautiful, and the earth was green, and Adam and Eve lived in harmony with nature. All these beautiful things were faceless in the future, but fast forward how ever many thousands of years to now. And it's hardly like a peaceful-there's not people walking around naked through God's garden. It's people walking around like, soldiers walking around through the streets, through buildings of concrete instead of trees. It's just about the whole fast-forwardness of where we started to where we are now. The things that have corrupted us, whatever it be. War, selfishness, sin, whatever. Whatever your interpretation of all that is. I'm in no way religious at all, really. I just like to point out some of the hypocrisy maybe sometimes."

Rock My Monkey: This album is so much more heavy and angry than your last one. What inspired the more aggressive approach?

Lee Dorrian: "I think the last one was a bit too us playing safe. I think it's a good album, and good songs. But I think the production was a little bit too slick on it. Because the album we did before that, 'Endtyme', and that was like a deliberate kind of step back to our more primitive origins. So, I think after all this time we just wanted to go for it a bit more on this album. We didn't want to mess around, fart around, with fancy ideas. We just wanted to go straight for the gut with this one."

Check out the entire interview — in text and MP3 (audio) format — at this location.