SCREAMING DEAD “In a dream of yesterday, off the forest and the glade, I remember yesterday” They are the Creatures of the Night.The Legion of the Dead. Peek-A-Boo presents … Screaming Dead! To step away from the music for a moment, what are your all-time favorite Hammer films? Which ones would you definitely recommend watching? All of Christopher Lee as Dracula! …Too many others to mention! Doesn't really surprise me that you mention Christopher Lee. Superb actor! Was he in any way an inspiration for writing songs? Not really consciously but I guess he epitomised the look and coolness of the Vampire so there could have been an undercurrent subconscious process going on especially in 20th Century Vampire! Tony McCormack wrote the song originally but I certainly felt a connection to Christopher Lees interpretation of a Vampire when singing it. A blood red moon fills the sky. The perfect setting to have a conversation with one of those Night Creatures. Sitting in front ofme; singer Mr. SamMissile. Hello Sam! First of all, let me give you a big thank you for making time for us. Cheltenham, UK. It's somewhere around 1980. If I’m correct that's when and where it all started? Pretty much 1980. I had previously been in a Punk band in 1978 called The Waste. All the disaffected youth in the UK wanted to be in a band after the Sex Pistols exploded on the scene in 1976. But with Screaming Dead a new direction was taken from regular Punk so to speak. Especially by adding horror elements. Both in lyrics and in how you guys presented yourselves. Which made you rebellious on a totally different level. How did that all begin? Well we were and still are into horror. In the UK we had Hammer films which was a passage of rite for us all. Punk had become boringly political and predictable by 1980.The songs were just a natural progression of each band member’s interest into occult and horror based themes. The look was born out of a visit to Hughs parents house where we raided the wardrobe and found dinner jackets and cloaks! We preferred a glam look as opposed to a uniformed punk look. www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be - 28 - These days you have social media, YouTube and so on, but back then, was it easy to get your music out there? I’m thinking for example of the 1982 'Western Front' single which was released on the 'Catch 22' label, and a little later 'Valley Of The Dead' released on 'Skull Records'. Your own label by the way. It was all done by fanzines and word and mouth. If you were any good you got noticed. Gigs were always pretty rammed so if you played well the word spread quickly. Our first good break came when we appeared in a very prestigious fanzine called Rising Free and it showed us all in black leather with winkle pickers hanging around a graveyard. No one was doing that then and people went mad for it. It gave a link to the Western Front cassette and we were inundated with requests for it.We knew that a single would sell well so we borrowed money off Mals mum and a 1000 copies sold in a week. No Future then signed us and pressed a load more. It just took off from there but our image was a major factor. And with ‘No Future Records’ came ‘Night Creatures’, probably your most well-known and popular song? It is literally impossible for me to count how many times I have listened to 'Night Creatures'. Such a bloody awesome song. Never get tired of it! It's seen as our signature tune but I don't think it's our best by a long way. The EP was very groundbreaking in
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