With a foreboding organ and ominous strings, this is a gothic telling of the vampire tale of Nosferatu. "If you're going to sing about Dracula, it has to have that gothic, velvet-top-hats, women-in-huge-ballgowns feel. I think that image and that atmosphere comes across well with the song," Biff Byford said in an interview.
"The song begins in waltz time (3/4), which is why it's subtitled 'The Vampires Waltz'. In a lot of the Dracula films down the years, there have been scenes where people are waltzing, usually in Victorian times or Georgian times, dancing in a ballroom, and you can't see the vampire in the mirrors. And, in the middle of the song, it goes into a sort of spacey feel, and I sing: 'Beneath the abbey vaults, We danced the vampire's waltz'. I wanted to call it something other than just 'Nosferatu,' so people get an idea of where I'm coming from with the song."
The word "Nosferatu" is a synonym for "vampire" first mentioned by Emily Gerard a 19th-century author best known for the influence of her collections of Transylvanian folklore. It was later popularized by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula. Biff Byford told Overdrive about "Nosferatu": "It's a great story, isn't it? It was written in Yorkshire in a place called Whitby. It was a small fishing village on the East Coast. It was very popular - still is very popular with the Victorians, and Bram Stoker wrote the novel there, 'Dracula', 'Nosferatu', yeah? It sort of inspired me. I used to live there. Twice a year they have a gothic fair there, a gothic festival, and it's all around the Bram Stoker thing. And also a friend of mine, a film director asked me to write a song about vampires, basically, and that's the song that we wrote, Nosferatu."
With a foreboding organ and ominous strings, this is a gothic telling of the vampire tale of Nosferatu. "If you're going to sing about Dracula, it has to have that gothic, velvet-top-hats, women-in-huge-ballgowns feel. I think that image and that atmosphere comes across well with the song," Biff Byford said in an interview. "The song begins in waltz time (3/4), which is why it's subtitled 'The Vampires Waltz'. In a lot of the Dracula films down the years, there have been scenes where people are waltzing, usually in Victorian times or Georgian times, dancing in a ballroom, and you can't see the vampire in the mirrors. And, in the middle of the song, it goes into a sort of spacey feel, and I sing: 'Beneath the abbey vaults, We danced the vampire's waltz'. I wanted to call it something other than just 'Nosferatu,' so people get an idea of where I'm coming from with the song."
The word "Nosferatu" is a synonym for "vampire" first mentioned by Emily Gerard a 19th-century author best known for the influence of her collections of Transylvanian folklore. It was later popularized by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula. Biff Byford told Overdrive about "Nosferatu": "It's a great story, isn't it? It was written in Yorkshire in a place called Whitby. It was a small fishing village on the East Coast. It was very popular - still is very popular with the Victorians, and Bram Stoker wrote the novel there, 'Dracula', 'Nosferatu', yeah? It sort of inspired me. I used to live there. Twice a year they have a gothic fair there, a gothic festival, and it's all around the Bram Stoker thing. And also a friend of mine, a film director asked me to write a song about vampires, basically, and that's the song that we wrote, Nosferatu."