Creeper: “We’re turning rock’n’roll on its head”

• Get your exclusive signed Creeper album bundle, T-shirt and zine

And so, to Pablo Escobar’s plane, and sapphic vampirism. Declaring that the clip should celebrate the glory of rock’n’roll flamboyance and excess to a degree where it’s actually funny, in a limousine or a private jet “like proper ’80s rock stars”, was a no-brainer. But then the video’s director, Harry Steel, hit perfection: not only did he know where they could get some wings for the day, but it belonged to the legendary Colombian coke kingpin. Even better, inside, it looked like it did too.

“It has no air conditioning on it, and it’s a little bit mouldy and a little bit fucked-up, but it's beautiful inside. It’s got golden furnishings, really opulent stuff.”

So luxurious was El Patrón’s transport that it contained no fewer than three beds – proper, actual duvets and pillows and mattresses beds. Will and his girlfriend Charlotte even slept in there. Obviously, they thought, there needs to be some rumpo on one of these – what’s the point of having three beds on your plane otherwise?

And here lies the soul of Sanguivore II: what’s beyond excess? What’s the camper, funnier, most titillating, fun, most ridiculous way of doing this? And, asked the band – Will, guitarists Ian Miles and Lawrie Patterson, bassist Sean Scott, keyboardist/singer Hannah Greenwood and drummer Jake Fogarty – “How do we turn these rock star tropes on their head and make them even more wild?” Instead of having a toot in the toilet, Ian does a vial of blood. How, they thought, to do the same for the mile-high club?

“Instead of the guys sleeping with these girls on a plane, like the usual rock star thing, it's Hannah,” answers Will. “She asked to do that. She came to us and asked, ‘How do you feel about me doing this?’ Of course! It completely makes sense with the narrative. So that’s when we ended up sending this message going, ‘Hey dude, Hannah wants to film this orgy with you and Charlotte on this plane…’”

This all happens to a banging slice of hair metal that deliberately draws from the blueprints that legendary songwriter Desmond Child used for Bon Jovi’s You Give Love A Bad Name and Alice Cooper’s Poison, as well as Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth, and knowingly takes a bite out of Nightwish at their most four-four. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And brilliant.

“We’re pastiching rock’n’roll, and some of the evilness of rock’n’roll in a funny way, but it’s also all a positive thing, in a bizarre, world-of-Creeper way. It’s turning rock’n’roll on its head.”

Is that a stake in your pocket? Or are you just pleased to see Creeper back?

This isn’t the only bit of unplanned Creeper-ness about Sanguivore II. It wasn’t originally meant to happen at all. Or, at least, not like this. The original idea for Creeper was to have three chapters, all with sharp turns between them – the punky debut, the flamboyant, David Bowie-ish second album Sex, Death & The Infinite Void (complete with a bogus, publicly-announced ‘split’ in naked homage to Bowie killing off Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973), and the heavier ‘vampire’ album, Sanguivore.

“I hadn’t thought this far ahead,” Will grins today. But he’d also come to realise something that could be the answer for where to go next. Sanguivore had done better than anyone might have hoped, finishing up with a spectacular night doing a double header at Wembley with Black Veil Brides last Halloween. But within it, Will reckons they’d unlocked an area of Creeper’s world that had so much more to offer. It had grown without their hand being involved anyway.

“The last Kerrang! cover we did, we weren't wearing the make-up at all in that shoot. We had sunglasses on in a graveyard, but the make-up was something that the fans did. They started coming to the shows in it. When we started touring, we thought, ‘We really should be doing this as well.’ So the idea of being this larger-than-life rock band that didn't really exist, that had already started to happen onstage without this record.

“When we came to think about the album, I said, ‘Why don't we try to make the best version of that? What's the biggest, largest thing we can do?’ My favourite tropes in rock’n’roll are things like Ziggy Stardust and [The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – the fake rock star. We’d kind of become that without us realising.”

And so the plot was hatched, where they’d have to outwit and outrun The Mistress Of Death – another character sucked into Creeper’s fantastical world, portrayed by champion bodybuilder and Chyna cosplayer Sarah Page. Because when you’ve gone this far, what’s the point in settling for anything less?

“That’s exactly it,” Will nods. “It seems ridiculous, because it is – that’s what I wanted. That’s one of the things that's missing sometimes in rock music these days, where it's all taken a bit too seriously. We don't want any part of this to be seen as if we're taking this too seriously. Because if you suddenly start taking yourself too seriously in this world where you're a vampire, suddenly it gets really dumb, really quickly.”

It's such a fine line between clever and stupid. Creeper have always backed up their flamboyance by understanding the wit behind most rock’n’roll, and writing music good enough and with enough character to pull it off. The further they’ve gone, the more their creativity’s matched it.

“I always say Creeper’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” offers Will. “We've been gearing there for a while, and we’ve found the more we've leant into that sort of stuff, the more comfortable we've felt. It's a world of vampires and darkness and violence and sex and all this stuff that spills out all over the stage, but it's always existed. I don't think we're unique in any sense of that, but we’re doing things that maybe people haven’t seen in a while.”

The Sanguivore world has opened Will up as a songwriter as well. Last time, there was Black Heaven, a keyboard-driven slice of sleazy ’80s gutter-glitter pop in the vein of The Human League, a tack they’d never taken before.

“I said to Tom Dalgety, ‘Shit, I can write stuff like this all day long, and we haven't got a great deal of music like that in the Creeper repertoire.’ This time around, we wrote The Black House, almost as a sequel. And that's just one corner of this new musical landscape we found ourselves in, but we can still explore, and that's still further to go. And all of these really big rock songs like Blood Magick – which is obviously such a love letter to so many brilliant songs and brilliant records – that’s now in our wheelhouse. It’s just one element we've managed to flesh out.”

Has going further than decency created a rod for your back, though?

“It's a difficult thing,” he admits, “but for the most part I think we've always tried to ignore all those sensible voices and just try and do exactly what we wanted. That's why it's still been fun. I think that's why – at least, I hope – we continue to make interesting records.

“Even though this one's our first sequel, it still feels like an expansion on the sound, rather than some complete duplicate of the one that came before it. There’s this ever-growing and changing group of people now, too. It's not just the six of us again – there's people outside of it. They’re people that that have been working with us for years, all of our friends and creative people, all finding something more exciting to do and a way to evolve it and to make it into something more. That's amazing.”

As a kid, Will attended Catholic school, where such impulses are put in a straitjacket, buckled down lest they escape and, Lord forbid, a person grows into themselves.

“A lot of that feeling of being ashamed of your sexuality and things like that were big parts of my life when I was younger. Now it's completely cool to dress however you want, be whoever you want to be. That freedom that comes along with our messaging is a freedom that's always existed in rock’n’roll music, and it's always been very, very important.”

On his much-loved Rocky Horror, Will recalls it throwing something into focus for him the first time he stumbled across it.

“I keep mentioning in Rocky Horror, but it was so important to me when I was growing up. I remember someone had recorded it off the TV and written ‘Rocky Horror’ on the VHS cassette. I put it on, thinking it was a horror film, and just having my mind blown, thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is me. This is so much of who I am.’

“It's lovely seeing this similar sort of affection happening with our audience. Especially if they're coming from difficult places to somewhere like a Creeper show. It's always really lovely, and I always really appreciate that. It's such a privilege to be that place for them, because I know that putting that VHS cassette on for me was important in the same way.”

Like Rocky Horror, there’s a sense of event to Creeper now. You get dressed up because, even as a fan, you become part of the show. It’s becoming – again, without instruction from the band, just by being a place where people can let it all hang out – a culture of its own.

“Dressing up, being yourself, the androgyny of it all, regardless of how you identify, is a really big part of Creeper. And I think it's cool, especially now in this vampire era. People are getting more and more flamboyant with it. People are really coming dressed up to these shows. And you see some incredible looks these days, all sorts of cool stuff. It's good fun.”

With all this happening, and things truly starting to turn into a dark carnival, far from the thought of wrapping up (“I was amazed anyone stuck around, we could have lost them all after the first album”) Creeper have only just started properly down this new dark path.

“There’s still more to do, so much more to cover. It's exciting to be at the precipice of all this. Sanguivore should have wrapped up the trilogy, but this era's really stuck with us, and I'm really grateful, because we all feel this is the most accomplished we've sounded and the most comfortable we've sounded on this record.”

The question of a third instalment is met with, “God, it’s too early to think about that! Aren’t second sequels always shit?!” but they’ve also found themselves properly. A second appointment at Wembley awaits – again, Halloween, this time with horror experts Ice Nine Kills. Will promises it will be their biggest spooktacular yet, another way of opening up their weird, vampiric, lusty world.

Once again, Will’s got a quote for it all.

“Lux Interior, from The Cramps, said that the difference between rock music and rock’n’roll is that rock’n’roll is much more exciting. I always feel that we fit that bit.”

Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death is released October 31.

Get your exclusive signed album bundle, T-shirt, and zine now.

Read this next:

• Creeper’s Will Gould: The 10 songs that changed my life
• Creeper’s William Von Ghould: “I think it’s the most incredible thing, to be an outsider”
  
• Creeper: “It’s harder to take left turns the more you do it… this had to be darker and more grandiose”