Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth admits that he felt like “an accessory to murder” after former Emperor drummer Bård ‘Faust’ Eithun was jailed in 1994 for stabbing a man to death in 1992, as the drummer had previously confessed to the killing in a drunken conversation with the singer months before his arrest.
Eithun was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 1994 after being found guilty of the murder of Magne Andreassen in Lillehammer, Norway in August 1992. Eithun stabbed Andreassen 37 times in the town’s Olympic park, known locally as a gay cruising spot, after being solicited for sex, the drummer claimed. Eithun was released in 2003 after serving nine years of his sentence.
As Dani Filth relates to Metal Hammer’s Rich Hobson in the current issue of the magazine, while Cradle Of Filth and Emperor were in the middle of a short UK tour together in the summer of 1993, Eithun confessed to his role in the murder during a post-gig party in Liverpool: “I dismissed it as a load of crap”, the singer admits, only to later learn that the story was true.
“We played at the Royal Court in Liverpool then had a massive party,” Filth remembers. “Faust came up to me pissed out his head and told me about murdering a gay guy. I dismissed it as a load of crap but when it all came out I felt like an accessory to murder after the fact.”
“But if anyone had seen Emperor at that time, they’d never have taken them seriously,” Filth insists. “There’s, like, Samoth, Lord Of Silence, but he wasn’t Lord Of Silence that night – he was Lord Of Giggles And Laughter… Everybody was either high or taking Es, drinking – all fucked.”
While the Norwegian metal scene of the early ’90s would become blackened by links to murder, death by suicide and church burnings, Cradle Of Filth avoided such dark horrors. But as Filth recalls, the fall out from the controversies in Norway did lead to him being questioned by police in the UK, following an incident at the offices of a UK music magazine during which Satanic symbols were written on a door with black lipstick.
“I had to go to the headquarters of the crime division in Regent Street and they pulled out a massive dossier, slammed it on the desk and inside was loads of black metal fanzines,” the singer tells Rich Hobson. “They asked us, ‘Are you a Satanic band? Are you about to start a Satanic war like the bands in Europe?’ They had dossiers of other bands, so we told them it was a stupid act of rebellion and they let us go.”
“Fortunately we didn’t get sucked in and didn’t do anything stupid,” Filth continues. “We once went to a very famous church on a hill that had apparently been burned down by Satanists in the 70s. We went up with torches and had a woman naked on the altar with blood everywhere, and the villagers came up to us like they were literally there to burn witches.”
For more of Dani Filth’s entertaining confessions, pick up the new issue of Metal Hammer, which is on sale now. The issue features Bullet For My Valentine, Mastodon, Ozzy Osbourne, the greatest symphonic metal albums ever and more.
