Creeper Tickets

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 leapt 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.

Somehow the music is wilder than the narrative. Opening with the sprawling Jim Steinman goth-opera epic ‘Further Than Forever’, CREEPER power through the swaggering, darkwave sleaze of ‘Cry To Heaven’, the supercharged horror-punk of ‘Sacred Blasphemy’ and ‘The Ballad of Spooky & Mercy’, which could easily be snuck into the tracklist of Nick Cave’s ‘Murder Ballads’ without anyone batting an eyelid. And that’s just within the album’s first half. By the time it closes with the evil croon of ‘More Than Death’, you’ll have heard elements of pagan-folk, late ‘70s punk and the kind of gloomy synth textures you might expect from prime Gary Numan. It’s all larger-than-life, darker-than-death, and the best album CREEPER have ever recorded.

“It seems that the world's getting excessively darker by the moment out there,” says Von Ghould, a man with a boyishly infectious enthusiasm for everything that he does, “and I think we need escapism and fantasy and fun more than we ever have.”