Cradle of Filth
Resident FXBG Advance humorist, Drew Gallagher, tackles famous exits and the impact on heavy metal bands who collaborate with Ed Sheeran. Hint: It will be anything but “Perfect.”
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
Anyone who follows the politics of the world will remember that when the voters of England decided to leave the European Union in 2020, it revealed a few significant things about the voters who brought it to pass:
The voters did not fully understand the implications of a rather complicated issue that was whittled down to a cool name that they liked in Brexit;
The voters had an underlying desire to return to colonial rule which once featured the subjugation of citizens of other countries and not those same citizens becoming immigrants, so they could busk songs from the movie “Once” on the streets of London;
That the voters, in the political science vernacular, were idiots.
Brexit was certainly the biggest “exit” in England since John Lennon left the Beatles, but now there is an “exit” that threatens to eclipse Brexit and rival the dissolution of the Beatles in the annals of British music. It was announced recently that both guitarist Marek “Ashok” Šmerda and keyboardist Zoe Marie Federoff were quitting the black metal band Cradle of Filth. Smerda and Federoff are husband and wife which, as Shakespeare warned us about parting, meant they had to tell their former band how much they hated them in public statements. (Note to Readers: ‘black’ metal band seems to be a term used to describe a type of heavy metal music and not any racial component within the band. The band members do not appear to be ‘black’ in skin color, but they paint their faces and wear black long sleeve shirts and black pants, so it could refer to their attire but that is the outfit du jour for most heavy metal bands so ‘black’ metal would seem repetitive if it was in fact a distinction based upon wardrobe. For our purposes, I’m going with ‘black’ as a reflection of their overall soul-sucking sound.)
Now you might be asking yourself, why should I care about an obscure English heavy metal band that I have never heard of? I asked myself that very same question when the story turned up in my newsfeed, but it appears this estrangement involves Ed Sheeran who is a big deal in certain corners of the world. To demonstrate Sheeran’s popularity in YouTube terms, the Beatles’ “Let it Be” has roughly 70 million views. Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” has 4 billion views. “Past Tense,” a song I helped co-write for the band Salt Hill, has 40 views. (If you access “Past Tense” on Spotify or other streaming services I get residuals so here you go:
Cradle of Filth were starting their 2025 tour of South America when Zoe Marie Federoff shocked the rock world by announcing she was leaving the band after a three-year stint as a keyboardist and vocalist. In a show of marital fidelity, which one does not generally associate with black metal or any other metal except for bronze, Smerda joined his wife in leaving the band. The couple’s reasons for leaving the band were straight out of the rock-n-roll handbook citing a draconian management company, a diva founding member, and wages that were not commensurate with the lifestyle one would associate with playing in a band named for a dirty baby’s bed uncovered in a garage after a beloved grandmother had passed away. They also stated that the band’s one-song collaboration with Ed Sheeran, which has yet to be released, was an insult to their fans who, one can assume, are not among the 4 billion people who have watched the “Perfect” video on YouTube.
Founding band member, Dani Filth (alas, not his given name which would have been really convenient) responded to the statements of Federoff and Smerda and said that they were the source of the discord, and their heavy drinking as well as their very public marital squabbles were problematic. Just to recap, the founder of a band named Cradle of Filth told their fans that excessive drinking and relationship disharmony were not what the band was about. Understand that if you Google “Cradle of Filth t-shirt controversy” you will be directed to articles about a t-shirt design that if you wore it in a confessional booth would cause the priest to drop his bible a number of times even though he could not see said t-shirt. What is really funny about Filth’s public response to his former bandmates is that he steered clear of the Ed Sheeran controversy and could not bring himself to publicly defend his decision to collaborate with the incredibly mainstream and popular English singer songwriter.
Here at the FXBG humor column, I learned long ago that picking sides in any black metal band disputes that erupt during a tour of South America is a fool’s errand, but in the insurance world there is a concept known as “assumption of risk.” Essentially, it means that if you buy sushi from a gas station that is 300 miles from the nearest ocean then there is a strong possibility that your Sam’s Pump-N-Go California roll will be returning for an encore performance in the form of projectile vomiting or galloping diarrhea. The same concept should apply when joining Cradle of Filth as a musician. Since the band’s founding in 1991, they’ve had more drummers than Spinal Tap, and a total of 30 different musicians involved with the group, so ‘job security’ never appeared in the want ads in the back of Heavy Metal Magazine.
I have no doubt that many marriages have been strained by the Ed Sheeran problem, and I imagine there are researchers at Oxford working on a grant proposal to determine the percentage of marriages that failed after “Perfect” was chosen by a couple for their first dance, but there is also some culpability here on the part of Dani Filth. Sure, Cradle of Filth was his brainchild and who wouldn’t want to bask in the reflected glory and riches of Ed Sheeran, but fans of Cradle of Filth have come to expect non-Sheeran-like lyrics such as these from “Thirteen Autumns and a Widow”:
Through the maw of the woods, a black carriage was drawn
Flanked by barbed lightning that hissed of the storm
(Gilded in crests of Carpathian breed)
Bringing slaves to the sodomite for the new-born
On that eve when the Countess' own came deformed
A tragedy crept to the name Bathory
For Cradle of Filth, the world moves on as it has for more than three decades. They quickly called up a few session musicians to replace Federoff and Smerda on tour, and the two lovebirds now have ample free time to strengthen their marriage outside the confines of a touring bus and figure out if Federoff can sound like Enya if you simply add tin whistle. Fans, however, are left with a feeling of betrayal, wondering how they gave themselves so fully to a life of darkness and Satanic-themed tattoos only to find their rock gods at odds and the world not as perfect as Ed ‘F**kin’ Sheeran would have us believe.
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