Stuart Anstis (musician)

A fully realised concept album based on the legend of the "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Báthory, the album boasted the casting coup of Ingrid Pitt providing guest narration as the Countess; a role she first played in Hammer Film Productions' 1971 film Countess Dracula.

Cradle of Filth are an English extreme metal band formed in Suffolk in 1991.

The band's musical style evolved originally from black metal to a cleaner and more "produced" amalgam of gothic metal, symphonic metal and other metal genres.

Their lyrical themes and imagery are heavily influenced by Gothic literature, poetry, mythology and horror films.

The band consists of its founding member, vocalist Dani Filth, drummer Martin 'Marthus' Škaroupka, bassist Daniel Firth, guitarists Marek 'Ashok' Šmerda and Donny Burbage, and keyboardist Zoe Marie Federoff.

The band has broken free from its original niche by courting mainstream publicity.

This increased accessibility has brought coverage from the likes of Kerrang! and MTV, along with frequent main stage appearances at major festivals such as Ozzfest, Download and even the mainstream Sziget Festival.

They have sometimes been perceived as Satanic by casual observers, even though their outright lyrical references to Satanism are few and far between; their use of Satanic imagery has arguably always been more for shock value than any seriously held beliefs.

Cradle of Filth's first three years saw three demos (Invoking the Unclean, Orgiastic Pleasures Foul and Total Fucking Darkness) recorded amidst the sort of rapid line-up fluctuations that have continued ever since, with the band having more than thirty musicians in its history.

An album entitled Goetia was recorded prior to the third demo and set for release on Tombstone Records, but all tracks were wiped when Tombstone went out of business and the band could not afford to buy the recordings from the studio.

The band eventually signed to Cacophonous Records, and their debut album, The Principle of Evil Made Flesh, was Cacophonous's first release in 1994.

A step-up in terms of production from the rehearsal quality of most of their demos, the album was still nevertheless a sparse and embryonic version of what was to come, with lead singer Dani Filth's vocals in particular bearing little similarity to the style he was later to develop.

Acrimonious legal proceedings took up most of 1995, and the original version of the band's second album, Dusk... and Her Embrace was recorded by the Principle... lineup for Cacophonous but scrapped.

The band finally signed to Music for Nations in 1996 after only one more contractually obligated Cacophonous recording: the EP V Empire or Dark Faerytales in Phallustein, which, it has since been conceded, was hastily written as a Cacophonous escape-plan.

The increasingly theatrical stage shows of the 1997 European tour helped keep Cradle in the public eye, as did a burgeoning line of controversial merchandise, not least the notorious T-shirt depicting a masturbating nun on the front and the slogan "Jesus is a cunt" in large letters on the back.

The T-shirt is banned in New Zealand, a handful of fans have faced court appearances and fines for wearing the shirt in public, and some band members themselves attracted a certain amount of hostile attention when they wore similar "I Love Satan" shirts to the Vatican.

In 1998, Filth began his long-running "Dani's Inferno" column for Metal Hammer, and the band appeared in the BBC documentary series Living with the Enemy (on tour with a fan and his disapproving mother and sister) and released its third studio album, Cruelty and the Beast.

Alex Mosson, the Lord Provost of Glasgow from 1999 to 2003, called the shirts (and by implication the band) "sick and offensive".

The band released their fourth studio album in the Autumn of 2000.

Midian was based around the Clive Barker novel Cabal and its subsequent film adaptation Nightbreed.

Like Cruelty and the Beast, Midian featured a guest narrator, this time Doug Bradley, who starred in Nightbreed but remains best known for playing Pinhead in the Hellraiser series.

Bradley's line "Oh, no tears please" from the song "Her Ghost in the Fog" is a quote of Pinhead's from the first Hellraiser ("No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering..."), and Bradley would reappear on later albums Nymphetamine, Thornography and Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder.

The video for "Her Ghost in the Fog" received heavy rotation on MTV2 and other metal channels, and the track also found its way onto the soundtrack of the werewolf movie Ginger Snaps (it would also feature, much later, in the video game Brütal Legend).

The longest-ever interim period between full-length Cradle albums was nevertheless a busy time for the band.

Bitter Suites to Succubi was released on the band's own Abracadaver label, and was a mixture of four new songs, re-recordings of three songs from The Principle of Evil Made Flesh, two instrumental tracks and a cover of The Sisters of Mercy's "No Time to Cry".

Stylistically similar to Midian, the collection was, at the time, unique among Cradle releases in that it featured exactly the same band members as its predecessor.

Further stop-gap releases followed in the form of the "best of" package Lovecraft & Witch Hearts and the live album, Live Bait for the Dead.

The album led to Cradle's US debut, and Dani claimed it in 2003 as the Cradle album of which he was most proud, although he conceded dissatisfaction with its sound quality.

The following year the band continued primarily to tour, but did release the EP From the Cradle to Enslave, accompanied by the band's first music video, which formed the centrepiece of the DVD PanDaemonAeon.

Replete with graphic nudity and gore, the video was directed by Alex Chandon, who would go on to produce further Cradle promo clips and DVD documentaries, as well as the full-length feature film Cradle of Fear.

The band used the quote on the back cover of the 2005 DVD Peace Through Superior Firepower.

The album was well-received however, and as recently as June 2006 found its way into Metal Hammer ' s list of the top ten black metal albums of the last twenty years.

Cradle's relationship with Cacophonous soon soured, the band accusing the label of contractual and financial mismanagement.

Despite the circumstances of its release however, its handful of tracks are staples of the band's live sets to this day, and "Queen of Winter, Throned" was listed among twenty-five "essential extreme metal anthems" in a 2006 issue of Kerrang! magazine.

The EP also marked Sarah Jezebel Deva's debut with the band, replacing Andrea Meyer, Cradle's first female vocalist and self-styled "satanic advisor".

Deva appeared on every subsequent Cradle release and tour until 2010's Darkly, Darkly, Venus Aversa, but was never considered a full band member, since she also performed with The Kovenant, Therion and Mortiis, and fronted her own Angtoria project along with Cradle's former bass guitar player, Dave Pybus.

The re-worked and re-recorded Dusk... and Her Embrace followed the same year: a critically acclaimed breakthrough album that greatly expanded the band's fan-base throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

Cradle's inaugural album for Music for Nations set the tone for what was to follow.

The album's production values matched the band's ambition for the first time, whilst Filth's vocal gymnastics were at their most extreme.

Subsequently re-worked with new band members for Music For Nations (see below), the embryonic Cacophonous version was eventually released as Dusk... and Her Embrace: The Original Sin in July 2016.