I’m locked out of my flat with no shoes on and Ian Miles, guitarist from Creeper, is on the phone.
“You’re breaking up again, mate,” he says. “Do you want to try calling on Facebook?”
“Cracklexxyxyxyxcracklefuzzzzzz,” I reply, hanging up and sprinting to the door.
After breaking in all surreptitious-like (my partner opened the door) I call back on a phone that can do its job without complaining, having wasted 15 minutes of a half-hour interview. “It’s fine,” Miles says. “Signal’s a bitch.” He doesn’t have to be nice. He could be a snotty, arrogant prick towards me for pissing away part of his evening and that’d be understandable, because he’s a busy dude these days. He’s a founding member and core songwriter of a punk band who’re about to gatecrash the mainstream with their debut album, ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, and a conductor of an immersive, exciting world of mystery, elaborate constructs and gothic pageantry.
Make no mistake: Creeper are heading for the big time, as someone wearing a fedora and trench coat might say. They’re hot property. The shit. But Miles is really, truly happy to be here and a little surprised that it’s all worked as planned. Having honed his craft in acts around Southampton for years – most notably the melodic hardcore band Our Time Down Here alongside Creeper vocalist Will Gould – he’s used to sweaty clubs, low ceilings and zero career prospects.
But Creeper, formed just three years ago, have exceeded all expectations. Prior to ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’ they put out a trio of EPs, with the second finding them putting pen to paper with mega label Roadrunner Records. Their shows sell out. They’re on the radio. And their first LP will be embraced by a devoted, die-hard and rapidly expanding fanbase. There might have been a plan, but no-one expected it to work this well.
“It’s incredibly weird,” Miles agrees. “It feels alien. I know it’s happening, though. It’s like that episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia where they trick Dee into thinking she’s become a successful comedian. They stage this whole thing, fly her out to Hollywood, and it turns out it’s all a trick. I constantly feel like that – surely someone’s set up a fake Radio 1 station.”
The truth, though, is that Creeper – completed by Oliver Burdett on guitars, Sean Scott handling bass, Dan Bratton drumming and Hannah Greenwood on keys and vocals – have amassed a fanbase most bands would do illegal, immoral things to have. The fan-run Creeper Cult Facebook page just celebrated its first birthday and has over 2000 dedicated users who inspect and dissect everything Creeper-related, ranging from conspiracy theories to lyrical interpretations, fan art and tattoos. It’s a safe space and fans come to the page and help each other out. They arrange meet-ups, they buddy-up so nobody has to go to a show alone…it might sound a bit twee to the cynics out there, but this is an audience that’s heavily engaged with the band and other fans.
“There’s certain things we feel responsible for,” Miles says. “We get a lot of mail about people going through rough patches and they open up to us about stuff, which is sometimes a little beyond our comprehension…well, not our comprehension, but our expertise. So in that area, we tend to forward them to mental health charities and stuff like that. We’ve become something to these kids, y’know? I’m not just ‘Ian’ anymore. I’m somebody that people look up to, and I’m not just speaking about me. I’m speaking about everyone in the band, Will especially.”
Creeper have inspired something magical. They are, to borrow a cliché, more than a band. But the road to this point really started getting interesting last year when, following their performances at Reading and Leeds Festivals, they disappeared. They just vanished. And what came next was nothing short of extraordinary. Posters with the band members’ faces were circulated online, accompanied by a number. When you called it you heard an eerie, haunting message: “On the 2nd of October, we’ll die holding hands.” Creepy, indeed.
Treasure hunts, fake pages, secret paranormal groups and loads of other stuff soon emerged in the build up to the album announcement and release of its lead single, Suzanne, creating a campaign that can only really be rivalled by Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Year Zero’ promotional trail. But that was Nine Inch Nails. Creeper didn’t even have an album out at this point. “The music scene’s been so stagnant for years, and it’s been churning out the same – not naming any names – ‘lad rock’ crap for so long,” Miles says.
The themes and characters woven through the record’s narrative – James Scythe, the Stranger, Madeline, Suzanne, the Callous Heart gang – have inspired late-night sleuthing on the Creeper Cult page, where fans have set about deconstructing lyrics, videos and artwork to get to the bottom of things. That effort is reflected on ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, which is as meticulously constructed as the accompanying atmospherics. “Will and I always concentrate on the ebb and flow of the record,” Miles says. “We put together a skeleton of how we want the record to flow before we’ve even written any content.”
Everything has its own place. The songs are given their own lives. In January, the band held a funeral for three of them – The Secret Society, Into the Black and Novena – at the Boston Music Room in London, providing an order of service and a chance for the lucky fans in attendance to offer their condolences and sing along one last time. Miles reveals that these lifespans, the beating hearts between the notes, are the reason that Misery – from last year’s ‘The Stranger’ EP – was kept on life support in the form of a rerecording on ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’.
“Before this record, Misery was collectively our favourite song we’d ever written,” he explains. “We wanted it to live longer. Eventually, when we’re on our second album, people will just look back to the first one and the EPs will fall by the wayside. We wanted to extend the life of that song, because we really believe in it. We didn’t even re-record the vocals because we were so happy with the take.
“With the power of hindsight, we realised kids were clicking with [the song], and we’d somehow become the poster boys for sadness. That’s a buzzword at the moment, isn’t it? There’s loads of bands coming out and being ‘sad’. Sad Blood and blah blah blah. Bands playing on that aspect when it’s not always true of them. We wrote I Choose To Live to counteract that point – it’s an answer to Misery. A positive to that negative.”
This is conceptual, Bowie-level shit and that’s truly reflected in the quality of the music. At its heart ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’ is a classic pop punk record, but strands shoot out to points all over the musical spectrum. I Choose To Live is Broadway-ready, for example, while Crickets is a country song. Winona Forever is a doo-woppy, wiry number that makes very little sense on first listen. It’s all wonderfully discombobulating, but it’s the result of some judicious editing and smashing through some frustration with the help of a rollicking punk song called Room 309.
Signing a deal with a big label pushes bands into uncharted waters, whether they like it or not. They have to accept fresh pressure and scrutiny of their music and decision-making. For Creeper, some of that frustration followed the band into the studio, plaguing their writing process and threatening to derail the Halloweeny steam train Miles and co had spent the last few years oiling up.
“This is gonna be our debut album on a major label,” Miles reiterates. “We had a couple of weeks in preproduction, and spent a week trying to write a really good pop song…it just didn’t work. We were like, ‘We write songs all the time, it’ll be easy. We’ll just write a song that could be played on the radio.’ Our creativity dried up when we weren’t being honest, so we went away for a couple of days and Will was like, ‘Mate, let’s just do what we always do. Let’s write a fast, aggressive song to get into the swing of things, because that’s what we were brought up on.’ So I pumped out Room 309 and that just got the juices flowing. We tried to work to that pressure and constraints, but we just don’t work like that.”
As tough as the experience may have been at times, ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’ is now complete. It’s a milestone and Miles knows it. Once they’d overcome the initial hurdles they utilised everything in the band's arsenal. And that’s where Greenwood enters the fray and nearly steals the show with her vocal performance and sweeping violin-playing on Crickets. It’s beautiful. On a record that’s pretty much flat out, it’s also brave. It’s the album’s apex, the highlight of innumerable highlights and a sure live favourite. This is the pop song Creeper failed to write when they tried to force it. It opens up an entirely different avenue for the band to explore.
“When we wrote Crickets we were all so high on the spirit in the studio,” Miles says. “This is our moment, y’know? This is our debut album. If we don’t start [using Greenwood’s vocals] now, it’ll sound weird if we start doing it later on. She’s the best singer I’ve ever met. She’s the most technically talented person in the whole band. We just didn’t want to hold back.”
And anyone accusing Creeper of holding back needs to have a word with themselves. Again, sorry to sound like a broken fucking record, but the scope of this band is unreal. They’ve grown from a baby AFI into a multi-genre anomaly in three years, and they haven’t really put a foot wrong yet. They’re a band who’ve toured the toilet circuit since inception and succeeded not through luck, but through sheer bloody mindedness and talent. Yet still, despite this and the fact that Miles and Gould cut their teeth in Our Time Down Here, they’re still referred to as a ‘hype’ band. Detractors are few and far between, but they exist.
“When Will had Twitter, he posted about that because it really wound him up,” Miles says. “He called me, because when we have problems we always call each other. He was like, ‘Oh, god, I’m so angry!’ But there’s always going to be people who say stuff like that. There’s always a next tier of people who’ve never heard of you, no matter how big you think you are. The bigger you get, you win over more people, but then there’s a whole new audience who’ll refer to you as the ‘hype band’. There’s people who don’t know who Metallica are, who’ll research them and be like, ‘This Metallica seem to have a lot of hype around them.’”
The great thing about Creeper is something that shines through in Miles’ answers here: they know we need them. They know their shtick is something we’ve been starved of – when was goth/emo/whatever last cool? – and they deliver it in their own overblown, wonderfully intricate fashion. And while they have big aspirations – Miles says the dream is to play on Later… with Jools Holland – it’s not clouded their judgement. They’re not rock stars. Halfway through the chat, Miles asks for my name, seeing as he’d missed it during the shitfest at the start of the interview. This is the stuff we need. We need interesting musicians with something to say who aren’t dicks. With Creeper, we have six of them. As the talk wraps up, Miles delivers the killer blow: “Also, for the next album, we want to, um… er… actually, I probably can’t say that.”
Yeah, you probably can’t. Doesn’t matter. Surprise us.
Creeper Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sat March 25 2017 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy 2
Sun March 26 2017 - GLASGOW Glasgow Garage
Mon March 27 2017 - NEWCASTLE Newcastle University
Tue March 28 2017 - LEEDS Stylus
Thu March 30 2017 - LONDON Electric Ballroom
Fri March 31 2017 - SOUTHAMPTON 1865
Sat April 01 2017 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute
Sun April 02 2017 - CARDIFF Tramshed
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