As Creeper lift the cloak on the second instalment of Sanguivore, we meet head vampire William Von Ghould to feast on the excess and hedonism of a record that subverts everything you know about rock’n’roll. It’s bloody, it’s grandiose, and it’s very, very horny. Join them, won’t you?
“William Gould, are you trying to ask me if I want to be involved in a vampire threesome on Pablo Escobar’s private plane?”
Quite the voice note. Quite the thing to have to clarify as well. But Creeper’s head glampire had no choice but to reply to his friend and confirm, for the total avoidance of confusion, that, yes, this is exactly what it looks like: an all-girl vampire threesome. On Pablo Escobar’s private plane.
Welcome to Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death, an album that revels in the sin and spectacle of rock’n’roll’s most exciting excesses. If it sounds like a cheap VHS horror sequel, that’s the point. The second part of 2023’s original Sanguivore, it has to be bigger, harder, longer, more climactic, more everything. Especially since it follows the tale of “a fictional 1980s vampire rock’n’roll band being hunted by this murderous baddie”.
The opening throw, announcing the album at their show at KOKO in May via footage of the album’s titular, hooded muscle mommy villain gorily bursting Will’s eye on a spike was a good one. But how does one follow that with the video for Creeper’s latest single, Blood Magick? In the same way that the album follows its predecessor.
“We’ve gone over the top with the sexuality, the hedonism of it all. We tried to make it like a Rob Zombie film. We did a lot of stuff with spiders and snakes, and dancers as well, like Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn. It’s very… raunchy.”
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?
There’s a quote on The Mistress Of Death, from Creeper’s hero and the man who composed Meat Loaf’s flamboyant rock opera Bat Out Of Hell, Jim Steinman: “Sometimes, going all the way is just the start.”
It’s a perfect mission statement for an album that often sounds like it was poured into those leather pants and someone forgot to say ‘when’. Once again working with Sanguivore producer extraordinaire Tom Dalgety (Green Lung, Royal Blood, Ghost), everything is as big and pumped-up as possible. It’s hair metal. It’s musicals. It’s goth. It’s The League Of Gentlemen and wrestling and Divine. It’s everything cool and mischievous about this music fired out of a cannon.
If a song’s going to have a chorus, then it must be too big for any stadium to handle. If there’s a guitar solo, it needs to sound like there’s fireworks coming out of the neck. The goth elements make Sisters Of Mercy look about as shady as Ed Sheeran. If Will’s doing a deep voice, it’s the deepest voice. The Belinda Carlisle thing is so brilliant because it’s so brazen.
“It’s a record about excess. It's a record about decadence and flamboyance, I suppose, as well. And it made no sense when we're making a record where the things we are referencing are so silly and so over-the-top to be conservative with it. It's a really proud, silly record.”
He chuckles.
“It’s even being released on Halloween! How cool is that? As soon as we spotted it was on a Friday this year, we went: done!”
“It’s a really proud, silly record”
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.”
Even in civvies on a Wednesday afternoon, Will Gould has something about him of, if not Dark Lord, then certainly a Dark Prefect – Danzig shirt, black hair, copy of troublesome Chicago punks The Dwarves’ 1997 album …Are Young And Good Looking stacked up behind him. A charming raconteur with a schoolboy smile and eyes that frequently shine with romantic mischief as he talks about Creeper’s music and world, it’s easy to get pulled in by the gravity of his excitement as he discusses all this.
The world of Creeper is as important as the music. Just as Will says that, creatively, there’s more than just the six members of the band – Tom Dalgety, The Mistress Of Death, their various photographers and videographers and latex mask designers, Patricia Morrison from Sisters Of Mercy – everything around the music accentuates a bigger whole.
A bit part of that on The Mistress Of Death is just how randy everything is. Even for a band K! dubbed “hornier than a line of Viagra” after their thrusting performance at Download last year, there are parts that’ll make your mother blush. When Will calls it “raunchy”, it’s just that – a delightful sin, a bit of mischief. As with his beloved Rocky Horror, and fellow delightfully devilish touchstone, U.S. filmmaker and ‘King Of Trash’ John Waters, there’s an element to Creeper of providing somewhere to liberate these things.
“There’s a quote from Anton LaVey from The Church Of Satan,” Will smiles. “‘If I’m going to be a sinner, I’m going to be the biggest sinner on the block.’ I think that’s a big part of the vibe of this album.”
We tell him it’s got a cheeky, English, Austin Powers quality to it, and he laughs in agreement. When we compare it to drag, he responds, “I think it's very gay. It’s another way of skewering all the rock’n’roll tropes.
“The difference between Creeper and a regular band, I guess, is we're putting on an old-fashioned thing with an old set of ideals, where it's not pervy for the sake of exploitation. It's confident in its sexuality. It knows what it is, and it's a place where you can feel unashamed for feeling that way.”
“It’s confident in its sexuality. It’s a place where you can feel unashamed for feeling that way”
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.
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