Paradise Lost: As Clear As Obsidian
Halifax’s quietly enigmatic PARADISE LOST emerged in the late eighties, amidst the overcast melancholy of the north of England. Foremost among the ‘Peaceville Three’, PARADISE LOST quickly gained notoriety for bringing gothic nuance to the nascent death/doom metal style, before turning their hand to alternative rock and dark wave at the turn of the millennium.
More recently they have been re-imagining and refining their original gothic metal style, going from strength to strength with a series of excellent albums Tragic Idol, The Plague Within and Medusa. Never wanting to do the same thing twice, their new album Obsidian sees the band mellowing into a gothic rock and metal fusion, featuring Gregor Mackintosh’s sublime clean leads and Nick Holmes full vocal range. Distorted Sound spoke to the vocalist ahead of Obsidian’s release to discuss artwork, themes and what ‘gothic’ means to them.
Gracing the cover is Adrian Baxter’s exquisite artwork, which employs carefully chosen iconography to ensure Obsidian couldn’t be mistaken for anyone but PARADISE LOST’s work. “It’s a bit like a tarot card, I think,” muses Holmes, “or the back of a post set of playing cards.” The teeth, nails, twin hearts, skulls and obsidian itself; the ensemble is evocative of religious and spiritual superstition as well as life’s inevitable decline towards death, momento mori. Meanwhile the album’s centrepiece, a Yorkshire rose, adds a charming local touch as Holmes observes. “He put that in because he’s from Huddersfield. and we’re all from Halifax.” Enthusing, Holmes continues, “we thought it was fantastic. We’ve never used it before, and I can’t believe we’ve never used it. Why have we never used this before in anything? In 30 years?!”
The assorted imagery of the artwork belies the band’s approach to writing and recording Obsidian. “Medusa was a specific album. It’s definitely a doom/death album, because that’s what we set out to do and we didn’t want to wander too far from that,” explains Holmes. “But we deliberately wanted to vary this album. How we were going to vary it, we didn’t know.” At the heart of PARADISE LOST’s music is the creative and collaborative partnership between Holmes and lead guitarist Gregor Mackintosh. “We just started writing – Greg usually sends me riffs to put vocals to. At that point I just sing whatever, gruff, clean, whatever, just parts, and then he writes new stuff to go around them, and so on.” As prolific as the band have been over the last three decades, writing music for PARADISE LOST has never become formulaic, as Holmes explains. “None of them are easy, I can tell you now! I think if its easy there’s something wrong. It’s like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw. With a writing process like that, it’s impossible to have any kind of grand scheme. It’s just a case of seeing what happens.” Chuckling, he adds, “it takes about nine months for us to do an album. We don’t work quickly at all.”
As variegated an album as Obsidian is, it remains a distinctively PARADISE LOST artefact from start to finish. The band are widely held to be the progenitors of the gothic metal style, and to this day they continue to find the beauty in sadness and anger. “The gothic we think of is the late-seventies and early-eighties bands that were coming through, SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES and THE SISTERS OF MERCY,” recalls Holmes. “Gothic metal now means something totally different. EVANESENCE, that sort of thing, The hot topic generation. That’s their version of gothic metal, but we coined the phrase in the early nineties and called our second album Gothic because we mixed the gothic style with death and doom metal. It’s like Black Metal. VENOM coined it, but it now means something else entirely.”
While many gothic metal bands look to literature and folklore for inspiration, PARADISE LOST have no need to recourse to fantasy when life itself possesses enough misery to keep them occupied. “Ending Days is about going through life, and then perhaps falling out with people for petty reasons, and then before you know it, thirty years have passed and the person you fell out with is lying in a hospital bed dying, and you have to go and see them again. This recently happened to someone I know very well. Making peace when it’s too late.” While you would hesitate to call Obsidian a concept album, the album’s themes centre around Holmes’ reflections on the passage of life. “Fall From Grace, that’s about things going wrong, and you don’t realise things have gone wrong. You maintain your life like everything’s fine, but it’s not,” laments Holmes. “The cracks are there and everyone sees them but you. Some people, and humans in general, think they’re invincible. Darker Thoughts is about taking the wrong path in life, and how easy it is to take the wrong path. Since my children became adults, I think about that more and more. Stepping out into the wide world. It’s easy to make mistakes.”
Looking to the year ahead, and the 25th anniversary of their breakthrough album Draconian Times, Holmes commented, “it seems like every year is an anniversary! I don’t know. I’m sure management will think of something for us to do! We’re meant to be playing three shows. Well, pending. Bloodstock? We’ll see what happens there. We were going to play Draconian Times at Bloodstock this year, so let’s pretend that’s going to happen. There’s that, and then two more. We’ll just play the full album, like we did a few years ago. The last ones we did were brilliant. People came out of the woodwork who hadn’t seen the band live since Draconian Times. Like, what have you been doing?!” Wryly, Holmes adds, “hopefully we can get out on tour. Wash your hands. That seems to be the message at the moment!”
What’s the collaborative process between you and Gregor like these days?
Nick: Sometimes I’ll have an idea and can be 99% sure Greg will like it. Then, there’s times when I’m not at all sure. When you work on stuff intensely all day, starting at nine and finishing at seven, by that time your brain is fried, and you can’t tell good from bad anymore. Often, I’ll listen back to stuff in the morning and think it’s dogshit. You need breaks, some distance. One good thing about how we work is that there are whole days in which we can see if we still like things. The jamming process when you’re working together can be good, and we’ll drink to celebrate a good day. Sometimes we come back and think it’s rubbish. You have to listen to parts in every conceivable mood.
How do you find yourself developing the lyrics alongside the music?
Nick: Ghost is a very simple song, it’s not very deep, and there are hardly any lyrics in it, but there’s the line “FOR JESUS CHRIST” that gets repeated over and over again. Greg came up with that line. He sent that, and I thought OK I like that line, and there’s no other words that would work. So, we wrote the whole song around it. Sometimes I find myself writing the melody, writing bullshit nonsense words. Whatever fits. But then, you’ve got to get the syllables right. So, with the real words they’ve got to sound as good as the bullshit words. That can be really tough sometimes.
With growling you can get away with more. Longer syllables and so on. When I write gruff singing I bounce off the riffs. The riffs are the sea, and I’m like a boat bouncing on the top! I roll the words around the riff with the death metal stuff. With the clean stuff, sometimes it’s easier, but it’d be good if you could come up with the lyrics as you sing them. Rhyming? Sometimes they have to rhyme, it wouldn’t work if they don’t, and I don’t necessarily like it. There’s day when you can be creative and days when you can’t get anything done at all.
We ponder over them for a long time. None of them are easy to write. I have my own dictionary. There are only certain words I’ll pull out, for example. I wouldn’t mention a spatula in a song! There’s definitely a PARADISE LOST dictionary! Ronnie James Dio always mentioned rainbows. And it didn’t matter how many times he said it, it still worked!
Which tracks from the album are you looking forward to performing live?
Nick: Everything we write now we have playing it live in mind. The first song, we’re not sure. it’s ok to sing, but acoustic guitar played live on a stage at a festival? We’ll have to figure that out. It’s insane to write albums you can’t play live now. We’ve done that in the past, but now I think if you write albums just for listening at home and not playing live, you’re not going to be around long as a musician! For us, this is four or five songs added to the current setlist.
Over the last ten or fifteen years, playing live has definitely become what has kept us going as a professional band. I do sometimes think stuff’s not going to work live, and that’s shit. We’re not going to change a song just to play it live. With the last few albums we’ve not crossed that path. But we’ve done a lot of stuff that doesn’t work live. We could use backing tracks, it depends, they’re convenient depending on the size of venue, but with everything on a backing track it’s a bit shit. So, we limit that as much as we can. At the same time, I don’t want to have twenty-five people stood on the stage like an EARTH, WIND & FIRE concert! It’s all about getting the balance right.
As such an established band, is it liberating to write and record material with the feeling that you’ve got nothing to prove?
Nick: You always feel like you’ve got something to prove. If you don’t, then there’s no point in doing anything anymore. Each album is a challenge. It’s always nerve-wracking seeing what people think. Someone’s always complaining. You can never win everything. I think some people like trolling just to make themselves the centre of attention, more than anything. People who put out an album and say they don’t care what people say – I don’t get that. Of course you care what people say. If you’ve worked hard on something, you really ought to. At the same time, you’ve got to have a thick skin. People will give you shit all the time. I’ve been around for so long, and people know what the band is about. It’s quite nice, I feel comfortable doing this at our age. I don’t want to do anything else. The band runs parallel with our personal lives and has done for most of our lives. There’s plenty of room for both.
So do you ever feel constrained by what PARADISE LOST has done in the past? Especially those classic nineties albums?
Nick: When you get into a band it’s usually the first three albums that really stick with you. If you discovered PARADISE LOST when you were eighteen, you’ll probably like those albums. I’m the same with METALLICA, I only like the first three. Not interested in anything they’ve done in twenty-five years. Same with SLAYER. Whatever you get into, those are going to be the soundtrack to your teenage years, and it’s no exception with PARADISE LOST. A lot of people that like Draconian Times are four or five year younger than we are, same with us and SLAYER.
Obsidian is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
Like PARADISE LOST on Facebook.