Alchemy have become regular visitors to Bloodstock Open Air festival. While we were hard at work on the stall, our resident metal fiend Gavin Baddeley was swanning around enjoying himself. Here he explains why he reckons Bloodstock’s become an essential date in the metal calendar…

    He told me I had blood on my mouth. I looked at him confused yet quite amused at his observation. ‘Your lip is bleeding,’ he insisted. Grinning I licked my lips clean and tasted once again the blood that wasn’t mine. The last drop of my most recent sustenance.

Alchemy have attended very many open air rock concerts over the years going back to the 80’s, including the famous Donington “Monsters of Rock” events.

An ancient, Egyptian mystery? A late Mediaeval ‘science’? A secret Renaissance enigma? Yes, all of these, but in more recent history it’s cultural impact has directly affected more people than all of these combined – but this time from Alchemy England!

Wave-Gotik-Treffen is the world’s largest meeting (or “treffen”) of darkly inclined souls. The largest recorded attendance was in 2000 with over 25,000 people and this never drops down below 15,000.

We’re big horror fans here at Alchemy, so were concerned to hear that Dario Argento, director of such 70s cult classics as Deep Red, Suspiria and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has suffered a serious accident. In a scenario that sounds a little like something from one of his stylish chillers, Dario fell down a flight of stairs at his apartment in Rome. Happily, he’s now out of hospital, and being looked after by a private nurse at home. Everyone here at Alchemy wishes Italy’s maestro of menace a swift recovery!

http://www.gavinbaddeley.com/

Wake up before dawn, walk towards a nearby lake and wait there…Just wait would you? When dawn makes its presence, what would you see? A lake, you say? Just a lake? Are you sure? Well I’m afraid that’s not what people saw at that hour according to my grandma’s stories and Romanian folklore.

While the dusty realm of the library’s seldom seen as a hive of excitement, a recent discovery at the library at Harvard University’s Houghton Library has been causing something of a stir. For experts have recently confirmed that a volume in the library’s collection is bound in human skin.

When it comes to love, we don’t need Valentine’s day to make us feel special. Love is something that should be experienced every day, every moment and every second of our lives. Love is beautiful, but it is also deadly if not answered.

Recently returning from my first trip to Chicago for the 20th annual Goth Convergence, I’m filled with a rekindled enthusiasm for a scene that I fell in love with as a teen and reaffirmed how it is still as relevant to me and my life in adulthood.