Music And Nations Era
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.[6] A concept album of sorts based generally on vampirism and specifically (though loosely) on the writing of Sheridan Le Fanu, 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 Dani’s vocal gymnastics were at their most extreme.
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[attribution needed] t-shirt depicting a masturbating nun on the front and the slogan “Jesus is a cunt” in large letters on the back. 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.[7] Alex Mosson, the Lord Provost of Glasgow from 1999-2003, called the shirts (and by implication the band) “sick and offensive”. The band obviously approved, using the quote on the back cover of the 2005 DVD Peace Through Superior Firepower.
The infamous “Vestal Masturbation” t-shirt design.
In 1998, Dani 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)[8] and released its third full-length album Cruelty and the Beast. A fully-realised concept album based on the legend of the “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory, the album boasted the casting coup of Ingrid Pitt providing guest narration as the Countess: a role she first played in Hammer’s 1971 film Countess Dracula. The album led to Cradle’s U.S debut,[9] and Dani claimed it in 2003 as the Cradle album of which he was most proud, although he conceded dissatisfaction with its sound quality.[10]
The following year the band continued primarily to tour, but did release its first music video, PanDaemonAeon, and an accompanying EP, From the Cradle to Enslave, featuring the music from the production. 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 released their fourth full-length studio album on Hallowe’en, 2000. Midian was based around the Clive Barker novel Cabal and its subsequent film adaptation Nightbreed.[11] 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 films. 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…”)[12] and Bradley would reappear on later albums Nymphetamine and Thornography. 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. Midian created a rift in fan opinion which has only increased with time: whilst taking the band to new heights of commercial popularity, it also provoked cries of “sell-out” from die-hard fans of the early albums.
