We had the pleasure of interviewing CREEPER over Zoom video!
At the end of CREEPER’s sold-out headline show at the Roundhouse, vocalist William Von Ghould stepped out to thank the audience when a mysterious figure lept from the shadows and decapitated him in front of 3300 people. The lights went down and the big screen cut to a haunted house, where the band’s reluctant social media host, the vampire familiar Darcia, deadpanned, “It’s time for a new era… and I couldn’t be more excited.”
Every era in CREEPER’s strange tale closes in similarly flamboyant fashion: see also their apparent Bowie-style on-stage break-up at the end of the campaign for their debut album ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, which left some fans in floods of tears. But in CREEPER’s ever eerie world, death is just a stepping stone towards a joyous rebirth. And now one of the most unlikely success stories in British music rises from the ashes once more with their new album ‘SANGUIVORE’.
Taking a darker turn from their Top 5 record ‘Sex, Death & The Infinite Void’, ‘SANGUIVORE’ is a thrillingly theatrical new story that the band’s ever-growing army of devotees will devour themselves within. Riffing upon fearsome throwback vampire flicks such ‘Near Dark’, ‘The Lost Boys’ and ‘Interview With The Vampire’, its narrative focuses upon Mercy, a deceptively innocent yet savagely violent vampire, 19-years-old in conventional terms yet with a soul dating back some thousand years, and her relationship with Spook, an older man who falls under her control but doesn’t quite lose sight of their previous humanity.
The ‘SANGUIVORE’ concept and characters have lurked in the crevices of the band’s mind for some time. When it was time to turn those ideas into a full album, two elements were key to unlocking its potential. CREEPER’s co-founder and guitarist Ian Miles had suffered from severe mental health issues as work got underway on ‘Sex, Death…’ which naturally limited his input. But this time he was not only there from the very beginning, but a lack of a full-time second guitarist effectively doubled his workload. And he really stepped up, his creativity simmering throughout the record, from melodic classic rock solos to crunching metallic riffs, the latter of which forced Von Ghould to shape his vocal melodies in a very different style from before.
CREEPER’s ambitious narratives are rooted in a similarly authentic place. Or as Von Ghould summarises, “underneath all the showmanship and the bravado of it all, there's something quite true there.” ‘More Than Death’, for example, is the denouement of Mercy and Spook’s tale, but comes from the frontman’s own relationship. Friendship is also a recurring motif on the album, the beating heart behind the band, and especially the connection between Von Ghould and Miles. “It’s a very special relationship we’ve had. We've been touring since we were teenagers and now, we're almost old men and we're still doing it. If you told us when we first met that we were going to have any sort of success, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
That’s the unwritten philosophy of CREEPER. Embrace everything you want to do, no matter how outlandish, excessive or ambitious, and see where the journey takes you. And it’s a journey some twenty years in the making as the grandiose scale and ripping rock opera of ‘SANGUIVORE’ transports Von Ghould back to his childhood bedroom, listening to ‘Bat Out of Hell’ on repeat.
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