Creeper have been upping the ante consistently since their very first release – now ten years ago, if you can believe it. A decade of being a band looks good on them. Frontman Will Gould has grown from a long-haired horror-punk upstart into one of the scene’s greatest performers, with the power to transfix any audience, and transform any darkened room into the perfect stage into for his gleeful, indulgent melodrama. Creeper are in Sheffield’s hallowed Leadmill tonight, making their way around some of the UK’s more intimate, iconic venues.
It’s both a delightful throwback and a reminder of what Creeper have become. The theatric production of last winter’s grand tour, replete with extras and actors and blood-gorging sequences and beheadings and spectacle, has been dialled down. All we have to deliver the story tonight is the band’s performance, and as it turns out, the drama is in their bones. Even without the interludes and horror-film moments, Creeper still masterfully create the distinct brand of otherworldly atmosphere they’ve been building on latest opus ‘Sanguivore’. The setlist is a fairly even split between ‘Sanguivore’s swaggering, Jim Steinman-style magnitude, the sensual boldness of 2021’s ‘Sex, Death, and the Infinite Void’, and the hell-raising immediacy of deeper cuts from debut ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, and the audience’s appetite for each release proves equal.
The opening throes of the show are testament to Creeper’s range – their walk-out music comes in the form of the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Time Warp, and the sing-and-dance-along starts there. Actual opener ‘Cry To Heaven’, from ‘Sanguivore’, with its proudly howling chorus and unmistakeable hunger, kicks off the show for real, but first-album favourite ‘Poison Pens’ is nipping at its heels, with roars of “LOVE IS DEAD! HANG YOUR HEAD!” soundtracking the night’s first pits. They need a little coaxing into action, growing from a three-or-four person skirmish in the first verse into a writhing mass by the end. It’s a return to form from the Creeper crowds, who were more docile than usual on last year’s tour – or maybe just couldn’t bear to tear their eyes away from the stage, even to throw hands in a pit.
We’ve not abandoned sophistication altogether, though. A contingent in the crowd have brought flowers, which get passed up to the band at regular intervals, Gould having a proper Morrissey moment during ‘Lovers Led Astray’, and Hannah Hermione and Ian Miles going bared-teeth-rockstar with roses in their mouths during ‘Ghosts Over Calvary’, a Hannah-led classic rock anthem that laid the groundwork for Creeper’s Steinman shift.
Hints of the theatrical magnitude Creeper have risen to over the years shine, not least in their encore, which is ‘Further Than Forever’ in its full ten minute glory. But the brightest moments are the ones where we get a peek behind the curtain, behind the face-paint and characters. It is an intimate tour, after all, and the intimacy feels even more precious set against the hugeness of what Creeper have become. They close their main set with ‘I Choose To Live’, which they’re playing on this tour for the first time since 2018, and it’s as moving as it’s ever been. And Gould meets deafening chants of ‘VCR! VCR! VCR!’ interrupting the crowd singalong of the bridge of ‘Misery’ with a laugh, and tells us they’re getting the ominously titled ‘kill sign’ and have to wrap up at the end of the song, but the whole band beam as we close off ‘Misery’ in full voice – and we’re close enough to practically see them glowing.
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Words: Ims Taylor
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