CATHEDRAL TRIVIA
Trivia
The band's show at ON AIR EAST in Tokyo on 13 April 1997 was filmed and released in Japan in 1998 by Earache and Toy's Factory as the video Our God Has Landed (Live in Tokyo), with songs including "Utopian Blaster", "Hopkins (The Witchfinder General)" and "Ride". In 1999 Earache reissued the Tokyo show with the band's promo videos added, as Our God Has Landed (AD 1990 - 1999).
Cathedral's last show in Japan was at Shibuya CLUB QUATTRO on 20 April 2011. When a Tokyo magazine spoke to Dorrian in the immediate aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake, he was still unsure whether to bring the band at all, but on the night the hall was packed. He dedicated "Ebony Tears" to the band's contacts in Japan, among them Church of Misery, a Japanese band on his own Rise Above label, and before the last song he announced himself as the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins.
Dorrian is a keen fan of Japanese pop culture. Before the 2011 show he told a Tokyo magazine that he cared less for modern anime than for early Ultraman and Spectreman, the shows of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he named S.O.B., Lip Cream, Outo, Swankys and GISM as Japanese grindcore and punk bands of the 1980s whose aggression went far beyond most European or American bands.
According to the band's official biography, Cathedral began at the end of 1989 at a Carcass gig in Cardiff, where Mark "Griff" Griffiths was working as a roadie in charge of projecting gore behind the band. Over more than a few beers, he and Lee Dorrian talked about Trouble, Saint Vitus and their other heroes and agreed to form a band in that vein. They woke the next morning with bad hangovers and one question: with death metal close to its peak and few musicians sharing their love of slowness, who else was going to play in it?
It was a fanzine that led to Garry Jennings. Mark Griffiths edited Under The Oak, a fanzine given over entirely to doom metal, and almost a year earlier had sold a copy to Jennings at a Candlemass show. Jennings, then in the thrash band Acid Reign, was devoted enough to doom to have played, sung and produced a doom-thrash demo, Sorrow's Epitaph, under the name Morbid Doom, and he had already been introduced to Lee Dorrian by Dan Lilker of Nuclear Assault. In the words of the band's official biography, he became target number one.
While it was being recorded, the second album, The Ethereal Mirror, went by the working title Decadence, and the band's official biography adds that one magazine advertised it as Journey into Jade. In Japan the album came out in June 1993 under the title Decadence.
The 1994 EP Statik Majik ran to about forty minutes, half of them taken up by a single track, "The Voyage of the Homeless Sapien", which ends with Dorrian ad-libbing over a flushing toilet. Columbia tried to drop it in favour of "Fountain of Innocence", even issuing a cassette called Innocence Requiem without the band's knowledge, but the band fought it all the way. The American version, Cosmic Requiem, kept the long track but came with a different cover and one song swapped, and the official biography marks this as the moment the honeymoon with Columbia began to fade.
Two members down after Adam Lehan and Mark Ramsey Wharton left, Cathedral were offered the support slot on a European Black Sabbath tour and played it with Victor Griffin and Joe Hasselvander of Pentagram filling in. Griffin went home early after a show in Budapest, and on the first night the band played with a single guitar, Tony Iommi came over and told them they sounded a lot better. The official biography reckons that is probably why Cathedral stayed a four-piece from then on.
The guitar solos on "Utopian Blaster", from the 1995 album The Carnival Bizarre, are played by Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi. In 2011, with the end in sight, Dorrian said that Iommi playing on one of their albums meant more to the band than any commercial success, and in 2013 it was the first thing he named when asked for the high points of Cathedral's career.
Supernatural Birth Machine, in 1996, was recorded at Parkgate Studios in Hastings exactly a year after The Carnival Bizarre, with a single week between the end of a tour and the studio. Dorrian was writing lyrics minutes before recording them; in 2013 he said that he had not rehearsed a single song on the album even once and that most were first takes. Expected to come up with a whole album's lyrics in a week, he even tried to quit.
"Requiem for the Voiceless", from The Guessing Game in 2010, is a song about animal rights, introduced on the band's official site as perhaps the most vehement, enraged Cathedral song yet. Dorrian said he used to write songs like that in Napalm Death, but Cathedral leaned so far towards escapism that there never seemed to be a right moment for one; on this album they decided they had nothing to lose and went for it, musically and lyrically.
Lee Dorrian's label, Rise Above Records, was started in 1988 while he was still Napalm Death's singer. It was set up under the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and the first aim was simply to put out a few very limited hardcore punk 7-inches. Cathedral's first demo, In Memorium, a self-financed cassette, came out through the label in October 1990.
The last thing Cathedral ever recorded is "Society's Pact With Satan", a thirty-minute piece taped at the end of the Last Spire sessions in 2012. For some reason it was never mixed and everyone involved forgot about it, until the producer Jaime Gomez Arellano came across it while going through his old studio recordings and the band agreed it should come out. Rise Above released it in 2025, and the Japanese edition followed in May 2026 with the Japanese word for despair added to its title.
The band took its name from the ruins of the cathedral in Lee Dorrian's home city of Coventry, destroyed in a German air raid in 1940. Talking to a Tokyo magazine in 2011, Dorrian said he had always thought it would be great to form a band that sounded the way that cathedral looked, and both the name and the musical idea came from it.
In the early days the members lived far apart, Dorrian in Coventry, Jennings in Harrogate and Griffiths in Liverpool, so songs took shape through cassettes of riffs sent back and forth. Dorrian also remembers that their early rehearsal room was next door to Black Sabbath's, and that instead of rehearsing they would sometimes put their ears to the wall to hear what Sabbath were doing.
The second guitarist, Adam Lehan, joined the day before the band recorded their first demo. Jennings had met him at a record fair in Leeds, and both of them had been in Acid Reign, at different times. The band wanted the twin-guitar harmonies of early Trouble, and, as Dorrian puts it, luckily Lehan was into doom metal, Candlemass above all.
After the first demo, Cathedral did not find a label straight away. As Dorrian tells it, Peaceville wanted them and Roadrunner showed interest before going quiet, and it was only when CMJ reviewed the demo that they became something of a hot topic. Once Earache moved to sign them, Roadrunner began sending a fax every day, but the band went with Earache Records and Dig Pearson, who had worked with Dorrian in Napalm Death.
Dorrian's link with Mike Smail, who drummed on Forest of Equilibrium, goes back to Christmas 1988, when Smail turned up at the flat of Dorrian's mother in Coventry: Napalm Death's Mick Harris had invited him to audition without telling Dorrian, and Smail ended up staying. When Cathedral found themselves without a drummer in early 1991, Dorrian wrote to Smail in Pittsburgh, and that July the band recorded the album with him at Workshop Studios in Redditch.
Finding Dave Patchett was luck. Dorrian wanted to get away from the gore covers of the day, and one day in Coventry's city centre he noticed Patchett's paintings in the window of a gallery showing local artists. He wrote in the guest book that he was in a Coventry band looking for someone to design their album cover and left his address; the next day a note from Patchett came through the door, and it turned out the painter lived in the next tower block to his.
Dorrian has told the story of the title in two ways. In a 2005 interview he said that Griffiths suggested Equilibrium and that he added the forest, because that was where his ideas for the cover were heading. In 2021 he recalled instead that he already had the song title "Equilibrium", and that its lyrics gave him the idea for the cover: a world of two opposite halves crossed by a neutral, sexless figure, with a forest behind.
In 1992 Cathedral crossed the Atlantic for the first time, on the Campaign for Musical Destruction tour of North America with Napalm Death, Carcass and Brutal Truth. Adam Lehan remembers being told, in a little pub in London, that unless they signed with Columbia there was no way they could afford the trip. For two months they shared a van with Brutal Truth, and since nobody in Cathedral could drive, Brutal Truth did the driving.
On "Funeral of Dreams", from The Guessing Game, the guest singer is Alison O'Donnell of Mellow Candle, an Irish folk rock band of the 1970s. Nineteen years earlier, Mellow Candle had been among the little-known bands named in the booklet of the original pressing of Forest of Equilibrium.
Cathedral's last music video, "Tower of Silence", drew on classic cult British film institutions such as Amicus and Hammer House of Horror and was shot during the British winter of 2012 at Gunnersbury Park Tower in London, directed by Paraffin City Productions. Rosalie Cunningham of Purson appears in it, and in the closing scenes she lays a black orchid on the tombstone of each member of the band.
In May 2011 it was announced that Cathedral would leave the stage for good after a show at the Forum in Kentish Town, London, on 3 December, with Grand Magus, Comus and Gentleman's Pistols on the bill. Comus had been one of the names in the booklet of the first pressing of Forest of Equilibrium twenty years earlier, part of the obscure early-1970s progressive rock the band were digging into at the time, and Dorrian recalls that Griffiths was into bands like them. Even so, in 2013 Dorrian also named Australia and Brazil among the band's last tours.
Asked in 2013 why Cathedral ended, Lee Dorrian said that keeping the band going had always been a fight, and that they did not want to fight any more. In his account it was something they had thought about for many years: there had been barren years and outstanding ones, but they were no longer as into being in the band as they had been. Because the end was announced well in advance, Dorrian said, it was not a break-up after a row, and they had time to enjoy it.