Disillusioned with much of modern music and its presentation, Creeper up the drama and the slap and take things over-the-top with their new goth-rock vampire opera album.
Will Gould, aka William Von Ghould, aka the singer with goth-punk bloodsuckers Creeper, is getting lost in alcohol and the mythology of rock’n’roll. It’s 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and we’re sitting in a bar called Disorder in his adopted home city of Manchester. He picked the bar because it’s named after the opening song on Joy Division‘s Unknown Pleasures album, although you can throw a dart in Manchester and hit a bar that’s named after a Joy Division song. We’re three pints deep – or is it four? – into a drinking session that will continue for a few more hours and several more pints, and he’s in full swing.
“Where has all the character in music gone?” he’s saying, with a passion that’s only partly fuelled by alcohol. “Jesus Christ, there’s only so many times you can see someone wandering on stage in the clothes they were wearing to Tesco that morning. People talk about how brilliant it was that grunge wiped out hair metal. Listen, hair metal was way more fun.”
It should be noted that Gould is currently clad hair-to-toe in black. His hair is the colour of a funeral hearse, his eyebrows are artfully shaped into a low, vampiric ‘V’, and his midnight tan has been given a touch of life by the make-up he applied just before he left the 18th century former church he lives in. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him wandering around Tesco dressed exactly like this.
He’s a living billboard for Creeper’s third album, Sanguivore (a carnivore consumes meat, a sanguivore consumes blood). It’s a fantastically feverish 1980s goth-rock vampire opera with puncture marks on its neck and drama in its heart. Guitars chime, piano chords crash, synths pulse and choirs exult. The reference points come thick, fast and knowing: Floodland-era Sisters Of Mercy, Phantasmagoria-era Damned, White Wedding-era Billy Idol, Mother-era Danzig, cult late-80s fang flick Near Dark and its florid early-90s counterpart Interview With A Vampire. Oh, and Jim Steinman. Especially Jim Steinman.
“He created something that was even larger than the music he wrote, he created worlds to live in,” says Gould, who fell in love with Bat Out Of Hell after plucking it from his parents’ record collection as a kid. He reels off the names: “Meat Loaf, Bat Out Of Hell, Bad For Good, Bonnie Tyler, Pandora’s Box…” (he’s possibly the only person to have mentioned the latter, Steinman’s one-off all-female group, in the past 30 years).
Sure, it might all sound like the ultimate in ‘I ❤︎ The Alternative 80s’ cosplay, but Gould knows this and has imbued Sanguivore with a ridicule-proof heroism that Steinman himself would be proud of. Plus it feels like
