CRADLE OF FILTH Bassist Talks About Songwriting Process For New Album

Unrated magazine recently conducted an interview with CRADLE OF FILTH bassist Dave Pybus. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.

On the forthcoming CRADLE OF FILTH album, "Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder":

Pybus: "It's gone very well, it's pretty stress-free compared to past records where we'd been in there for months and gone over time and budget. Martin's [Skaroupka] very aggressive — our new drummer — and he's only 25 so he's really pushed the album on the aggression side of it; he's a real asset to the band right now."

"It's just basically Dani [Filth, vocals] and Paul [Allender, guitar] writing the music, the lyrics, everything. We've all had ideas, but 99 percent of it is kind of Paul's baby now. And in that way he's probably stressed out, but there aren't five people around him all stressed out. We're trying to stick to deadline and budge, and for the first time in a long time trying to deliver on time. It's very stressful. It's about 95 percent done when we get to the studio — there's no way we're going to pay 600 pounds a day when we're still scratching our heads wondering what should come next. But to be honest, it's never finished until it's finished. Things can get changed last minute, you can drop a lead guitar part, you can add sing-over parts. It's recorded right up until the mastering. Even though it's like skeletons there it's still getting flushed out every day. We're not closed-minded; you have to be sort of flexible."

On whether he has gotten used to the criticism the band receives for its evil and extreme image:

Pybus: "It depends what they're saying. You either get angry towards it or you find it funny, it depends what kind of mood you're in I guess. We're not a very good band to go around getting offended when we've got the 'Jesus Is a Cunt' shirt — there are laws against that now; there are certain things you can definitely not get away with. If we went to the merchandise company and said 'This is the t-shirt that we're going to sell,' I'm not sure if they would just refuse it, but it was done years ago when we didn't have anyone telling us what to do. I wasn't in the band back then but I remember it coming out and causing a bit of a fuss."

On whether there are ever any times when even the bandmembers wonder if they're going just a bit too far:

Pybus: "Yeah, we do. We are our own biggest critics so we sort of check with each other what's cool and what's not. There are some terrible ideas; and I don't mean terrible as in bad, but terrible in that we'd never get away with it. So we don't push it too far, but obviously the fans want us to be as edgy as possible. If we do a video that's got lots of blood in it, it's going to get banned and get no airplay. So we're probably going to go back a little bit and sort of do what we want in that respect. Management and the label obviously want us to capitalize on every aspect but if you've got a video that's been turned down it's not going to get played. But this is going back to before YouTube was really so big. You can even earn royalties off YouTube now if you get X amount of plays. So you can do a video that's as extreme as you want again because you don't have to rely on whomever — you don't have to kiss as many asses. It got rid of the middleman, and I think that's good in one respect, but there is a lot of shit out there. But if you have the official video that wasn't showing on a channel you can put it on your webpage and with MySpace you can make everyone aware of it. MySpace is a good awareness tool, it's not much more."

Read the entire interview from Unrated magazine.