Creeper - Manchester Academy Gets A Bloody Good Lesson In The Theatre Of Horror

7 hours ago

7 min read

Manchester Academy - 10th October 2026

WORDS / IMAGES LUKE STOREY

Creeper - Manchester Academy Gets A Bloody Good Lesson In The Theatre Of Horror — Photo Credit Luke Storey

There are gigs you attend, and then there are gigs you get dragged into kicking and screaming, willingly surrendering your evening to the beautifully deranged imagination of a band who understand that rock ’n’ roll was never supposed to be polite. Creeper belong firmly in the latter category. On Saturday night, Manchester Academy became a gothic playground of blood, theatrics and gloriously overblown horror, and the Creeper Cult turned up dressed for the occasion.

Oxford Road was crawling with black clothes, vampire makeup and enough theatrical pallor to make the local undertakers wonder if business had suddenly picked up. This wasn't simply an audience waiting for a band. This was a congregation arriving for its evening service, and the sermon was going to involve murder, melodrama and a hell of a lot of noise.

StarBenders

First up were Atlanta, Georgia's StarBenders, a gothic glam-rock outfit who looked as though they'd wandered straight out of the same midnight fever dream as the people packed into the Academy. Their frontwoman had the whole gloomy, glamorous business nailed, even complimenting the crowd on how wonderfully dead everybody looked. Finally, a gig where looking half-deceased is considered good manners.

Her voice carried a wonderfully dark edge, and the band wasted little time getting the audience moving. Much of the material came from their latest album, The Beast Goes On, a fitting title for a band whose sound thrives somewhere between glitter, gloom and theatrical excess. They closed with the anthemic “Saturday”, an almost ridiculously appropriate choice for a Saturday night. Sometimes the universe gets the joke before you do.

StarBenders did their job and then some, warming the room without simply standing around waiting for the headliners to arrive.

Calva Louise

Calva Louise were next, and if StarBenders brought the gothic glamour, these lot arrived to kick the furniture over. Formed in London, with Venezuelan singer and guitarist Jess Allanic, a New Zealand drummer and a French bassist, they possess an international identity that makes their music every bit as unpredictable as their lineup.

Metalcore, punk and Venezuelan folkloric rhythms collide in a gloriously unruly racket, with lyrics switching between English and Spanish. I couldn't tell you what every Spanish lyric meant, but I could certainly feel what the music was doing. Sometimes understanding every word is overrated. A great riff doesn't require subtitles.

Allanic is a formidable frontwoman, moving between lead guitar, keyboards and vocals with an ease that makes the juggling act look almost unfair. One moment she's delivering a clean vocal, the next she's unleashing a scream that could strip the paint from the Academy walls. “W.T.F”, “Aimless” and the new single “La Promesa” were particular highlights, each demonstrating a band seemingly uninterested in staying inside anybody else's musical boundaries.

By the time they finished, the room was primed. The only question was how on earth Creeper intended to follow them.

Creeper: Welcome To The House Of Horrors

Before Creeper even appeared, a recorded announcement instructed the audience that if they spotted the Mistress of Death wandering around the venue, they should report her to security immediately. Naturally, this only made everybody more excited to meet her.

Then came the curtain.

A white sheet stretched across the stage, revealing the silhouette of a man explaining that tonight's performance would be rated U. No blood. No violence. Nothing that might upset the nice people at the British Board of Film Classification. The crowd responded with the sort of booing usually reserved for football referees and politicians.

Enter the Mistress of Death.

She proceeded to beat the unfortunate announcer senseless, with the rating escalating through PG-13, 15 and finally 18 as the poor bastard met his grisly end. It was ridiculous, theatrical and absolutely glorious. By the time the curtain dropped, the Academy had been transformed into a full-blown horror show, and the crowd was ready for its first victim.

Creeper emerged in their trademark costumes and macabre makeup, blood dripping from their mouths, opening with “Blood Magic (It's a Ritual)”. If ever a song was designed to announce the arrival of a band who treat a live performance as a full-scale theatrical production, this was it. The title alone should have been a clue.

Will Gould prowled the stage like a vampire who'd just discovered the wine cellar was fully stocked. He stalked, paced and commanded every inch of the place, while Ian Miles, Sean Scott and Lawrie Patterson took to the platforms at the front, pointing their guitars down towards the congregation below. There was no tentative warm-up, no gentle easing into the evening. Creeper came out swinging, and the audience responded as though somebody had just opened the gates of hell.

When “Paradise” arrived, Hannah Greenwood stepped away from her keyboards and moved to the front with a microphone. The response made it clear just how much affection the fans have for her. She didn't merely occupy the stage; she owned her moments on it, bringing another dimension to a performance already bursting at the seams.

And this is where Creeper become something more than a rock band with a penchant for eyeliner. At times, I genuinely forgot I was watching a metal show. Will sat back on his throne, drinking suspicious red liquids, while the Mistress of Death swung her axe at the band during “The Crimson Bride”. It was less a conventional gig and more a particularly unhealthy evening at the theatre, with the cast apparently determined to ensure nobody made it to the interval.

Then came darkness and silence.

The lights returned to reveal Spooky and Mercy, the vampire girls, wheeling a coffin onto the stage. Out emerged Hannah, armed with a flail, ready to launch into “Razor Light”. Subtlety had long since left the building, presumably in a hearse, and nobody was asking for it back.

What made the spectacle work was that the theatrics never overshadowed the music. Beneath the blood, props and elaborate horror-film staging was a band capable of delivering enormous, emotionally charged songs. The audience knew every word, whether it was the older material or the newer songs, and the noise coming back from the floor was relentless.

“Day Dreaming in the Dark”, “The Ballad of Spooky and Mercy” and “Teenage Sacrifice” all landed with the force you'd expect from a fanbase that has clearly invested more than a passing interest in this band's strange universe.

One of the night's biggest surprises was “Prey the Night”. The chorus hit like a runaway train, pulling the room into its orbit. Even if you arrived unfamiliar with the words, there was little chance of leaving without learning them. By the end, the crowd was singing along with the conviction of people who'd been rehearsing in front of their bathroom mirrors for weeks.

Then came “Cry to Heaven”, one of the band's great emotional centrepieces. For all the bloodshed and supernatural nonsense, Creeper understand the power of a genuinely enormous ballad. The audience sang it back with such force that you could imagine the dead sitting up in their graves to join in. It was one of those moments when the theatrics fell away just enough to let the song do the talking.

Of course, Creeper weren't about to let sentimentality spoil the evening's body count.

The Mistress of Death returned, accompanied by Spooky and Mercy, dragging a guillotine into position. Will was forced into the contraption, and his head was duly removed. She then paraded his severed head across the stage as though she'd just won a particularly unpleasant raffle.

There are frontmen who leave the stage in a cloud of smoke. Will Gould left in considerably less one-piece condition.

The lights went out. Silence fell. For approximately five seconds, Manchester Academy appeared to be a perfectly normal concert venue again. Then the crowd began chanting the band's name, demanding the inevitable resurrection.

Creeper returned for the encore, and there was Will, apparently having had his head screwed back on, blood now dripping from his neck. Death, it seems, is merely an inconvenience when you're the frontman of a band like this.

“Annabelle” followed, a fan favourite and a personal highlight for me. It's the sort of song that reminds you why Creeper have built such a devoted following: huge hooks, gothic melodrama and a chorus practically designed to be screamed back by hundreds of people in a darkened room.

The band also treated Manchester to tour-debut performances of “VCR” and “Down Below”, adding an element of unpredictability to the evening. There's something satisfying about knowing that a show might contain a moment that won't be repeated at the next stop. In an age when so much live entertainment can feel polished to the point of mechanical precision, those little surprises matter.

Before the final stretch, Gould took a moment to thank the audience, expressing how proud and grateful he was that everyone had come out not just to support Creeper, but live music itself. It was a welcome moment of sincerity amid the carnage, a reminder that beneath the characters, costumes and blood-soaked mythology are musicians who understand what it means to stand on a stage and have a room full of people believe in what you're doing.

Then came “Misery”, sending the night hurtling towards its conclusion with crowd surfers, belting voices and the sort of collective abandon that makes live music worth leaving the house for in the first place.

By the time the final notes rang out, Manchester Academy had been thoroughly initiated into Creeper's dark little world. The band had delivered the songs, the spectacle and the glorious absurdity in equal measure, leaving very little doubt that their idea of a good night out involves considerably more theatrical homicide than most people's.

With October already creeping towards Halloween, the timing couldn't have been better. This felt like the season arriving two weeks early, complete with its own soundtrack and a suspicious amount of fake blood.

Creeper understand something that plenty of bands seem to forget: a gig should be an experience. It should transport you somewhere else, make you laugh, make you sing, make you feel something and, if the occasion calls for it, leave you wondering whether the frontman's head is going to stay attached for the encore.

On Saturday night, Manchester didn't just watch Creeper perform. It joined their cult, drank the metaphorical blood and sang along to every last word.

And if the Mistress of Death happens to be wandering around Oxford Road looking for her next victim, I suggest you leave her alone. She's had a very busy evening.

https://youtu.be/P5K3Vq1TfWQ?si=otLb9m6VGEalMRy0

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