Ezekiel RodofiliIt has been a little over a year since Paradise Lost‘s Ascension was released, and it’s been longer since they were last in Australia. They’re about to return to our shores, and so I spoke with vocalist Nick Holmes about the newish album.
Paradise Lost’s upcoming tour dates are viewable here.
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Ez: Paradise Lost have been around since ’88, ’89?
Nick: The end of ’88, yeah.
Ez: At this point, how do you keep finding the fire?
Nick: We’ve never not done it. The band turned professional around ’93, so we had a run of doing it in transit vans and sleeping at a mates’. Then we turned professional in early 90s, so we’ve been lucky enough to maintain that ever since. We’ve been fortunate enough to get good management early on, and also very lucky that we’ve created quite a strong fanbase in the mid-90s, which we’ve managed to bring with us, I think.
So we’ve been very lucky, very fortunate in many aspects. Right place at the right time.
Ez: Do you think you’ve had enough success to keep doing what you’re doing, but not so much to lose a certain hunger, or lose sight of your art?
Nick: I guess so, yeah. It’s not like you get to the point where there’s no reason to do it anymore. You still wanna do your best album. You still think you’ve got a better album inside. Once you think that “Okay, my best album was ten years ago”… That’s for the people to decide *laughs* We still think our best album is still out there.
We’re very hard-coded to it. We’ve done it for so many years now that the change would kind of kill us all, I think. As much as we might complain about certain things that might happen, like missing flights or things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, I think if we didn’t do it, it’d be a very strange world.
Plus, along with everything else, we do have a lot of fun with it.
Ez: And how do you think that, as you’ve aged in the band, your expression of meaning in lyrics has changed?
Nick: It hasn’t changed that much, really. I guess when you get older, you think a lot more about what you say before you say it, and you think about consequence. I guess it’s part and parcel with being young, where you don’t really think about consequence much when you’re in your late teens, early twenties, but that’s pretty much all I think about now. It makes you very weary about doing anything in case this happens or that happens, but years ago I just didn’t care about any of those things. So I guess that comes with aging.
It might have some reflection on lyrics. I don’t know, but from my perspective, I just like to write interesting verses that don’t necessarily correlate with… I think art should be completely free. I don’t think there should be any restrictions to it, even though within heavy metal there are certain tropes that are expected, and I sort of enjoy those tropes but at the same time I like to… if people don’t know what I’m talking about, I quite like that. I get fun out of that.
Ez: Is your lyric writing literature and experience-influenced?
Nick: Not really, no. If I’m thinking of song subjects, I may start reading up on a certain thing a little bit to get the thing going, but I usually turn off that pretty quickly, and if anything starts to make too much sense… there are songs that are about specific subjects and they stick within that. At the same time, we’ve got a song called “Sirens” which is kind of along the lines of someone going through dementia, but then when you talk about it interviews, you kind of get bogged down in that, and I kind of don’t want to go on and on about it.
Me and my friends, we’re at an age where we’re experiencing this on some level. We have parents that get to that age, so I hear a lot of it and it’s a dreadful thing, so it’s rubbed off on a song. But when you stick to a specific thing, you have to talk sometimes. I just want to put it down but I don’t want to talk about it anymore, so I like to mix things up so it’s not as specific and I don’t get pinned down too much on one thing.
Ez: I figured that you’d be a fan of things like the namesake poem.
Nick: I don’t really have that attention span. Part of my brain’s just all “This sounds fantastic”, but then there’s nothing keeping me hanging on and I kind of look for excuses to turn away. I’ve done it all my life; I have a terrible attention span, but once I do get my teeth into something I don’t let go of it. Things I liked as a teenager, I still love them passionately. The films I liked as a teenager, I’m still mad on them. I never let go of these things, but with certain literature, there’s nothing I’ve really gotten my teeth into.
The name Paradise Lost came from the book Paradise Lost which was in my house growing up. My friends wouldn’t own that book; they were never into anything like that. I think it belonged to my grandparents prior to that. I think it ended up in my house when they died.
I flicked through what it was about and I thought “Oh my god, this is quite heavy stuff. We should call a death metal band after this” *laughs* I think we were called corpse grinder before that, so it was quite a jump to Paradise Lost *laughs*
Ez: Well one of those is significantly less in your face and worked well in the band’s favour.
Nick: I don’t think we’d have been around that long with that name, you know.
Ez: Or maybe you would have and you’d be saying the opposite about Paradise Lost.
Nick: Maybe. Maybe you’re right *laughts*
Ez: Talking about the newish album, Ascension, were there any challenges going into the writing of it? My understanding is that it had… maybe not a lengthy gestation, but it was over a good period of time.
Nick: We had two years of the pandemic and lockdown, so then we had another three years to write an album. We usually write in three-year stints. We release an album, then we tour for maybe two years, then we spend a year writing. It was pretty much the same but with another two years for the period with lockdown, although we still managed to do another album, Greg and myself, called IX (under the name Host) which was a side sort of thing that we did.
It actually worked quite well, and it was nice to have more of a gap ’cause after seventeen albums, it’s nice to have more space and time away in between to get where you want to go and have some retrospect on things as opposed to just touring and straight into another album.
In this instance, I think more than five years would be too much. I think eight years or ten years is a bit excessive. I don’t think that’s a positive way of working. It’s the same as having too little time, so five years was kind of a sweet spot. I don’t think we’ll have the luxury of that next time. It certainly did help.
Ez: With the writing cycle, is it generally by necessity, or by choice?
Nick: We do tour extensively. Once the ball rolls, we don’t really stop for a while. We’re kind of in the middle of it now with the festival season. But then you have a few months where you’re like “Okay, maybe we should start thinking about doing an album”. It’s quite an organic process. It’s not like there’s a line in the sand.
Ez: But I imagine, in a way, at least for yourself, you’re thinking about ideas, even when you’re on the road.
Nick: Absolutely. I’m always thinking and I’ll just write out notes. As soon as I hear something I like, I think “That’s a great word” or “That’s a great sentence”, and I will grab my phone and write it down. A lot of the time it’s when I’m out, drinking with friends, and I’m kinda pissed or something and I have to kinda try and remember what it was and I will not remember it all, so I need to make sure I write it down.
There was one but I can’t remember what it was now, but there something on a day I was out. It was a great word, I don’t think I’d heard it before so I looked it up and put it in my little thing. So I’ve always got the feelers out for song titles and lyrics.
Ez: Do you remember what that word was?
Nick: I’ll have a look. It might not be as good now as I remember.
Penitent.
Ez: What does it mean?
Nick: I can’t remember *laughs* But then the word “Blight”, I love.
There’s some words I took out when we wrote the last album because when I sang them they sounded too clunky. You do have to tailor the lyrics to work with the melody. You can be as clever as you want with words; if they don’t flow right, then no one cares.
When you sing it a few times, you know if it’s too clunky or not. So I’ve changed a couple of words here and there. There’s always words that people use all the time and that’s why I love songs; they’re so easy to write ’cause all the words flow nicely. They’re not too spiky, as I call them. They just flow nice and smoothly.
Ez: “Blight” feels very much like a word that you would use in Paradise Lost ’cause it fits the very dramatic and emotive nature.
Nick: Yeah, but I don’t think I’ve used it in any song. With Bloodbath lyrics you can go even further. You can get all the extreme gore, the real nasty words in there that mean horrendous things *laughs* which is almost at the other end of the scale, but yeah; I don’t think I’ve used “Blight”.
I had to look up penitent, it was annoying me. It’s feeling sorrow, showing remorse, which is absolutely perfect. Look out for that song title *laughs*. Keep it secret, don’t tell anybody!
Ez: Where do you think a word like “Blight” would fit? I mean, I know everyone uses words based on what feels right, but do you reckon that would be at the end of a line or a verse, or somewhere in the middle?
Nick: I don’t know. You could regard a plague as a blight. I like that, something like a scourge. A lot of video games I love use a lot of that language. The Dark Souls games use a lot of that sort of language, and I love that aspect of them. Such a dark thing. Those games, they’re so great to play. I don’t necessarily get into the lore, but I just love how it’s so dramatic and over the top.
Ez: Given what you’ve said about your attention span, why do you think you’ve been able to devote so much to Paradise Lost?
Nick: Because that ticks the boxes. Once you get into something and it clicks into place, it’s just hooking you in. I think if I was a kid now, I’d be a nightmare. It’d be nothing.
But I guess with anything that captures me, I tend to stick with it. Music’s been something from an early age; I’ve stuck with it since I was a kid and it’s still there.
Ez: Do you think it’s possible that, because whilst it does offer variables, it does have a core set of constants that allow a sense of anchoring to go from?
Nick: Yeah, that’s something else. It has a certain element of stability, it’s something I’m happy with, I’m with people I like, I can make a living from it, all those things. It’s weighing up the pros and cons, and the pros seriously outweigh the cons.
When getting older, for me personally, I’m really happy with where I am. We’re making exactly the kind of music we’ve wanted to make, which isn’t a million miles from where we started the band, really. Nearly forty years as a band and we still feel quite happy to be in this place.
Ez: To me, Ascension feels like a progression but perhaps a little bit less rockist than Obsidion, which feels like more of an anthemic album.
Nick: We re-recorded one of our albums, Icon. When we did, we had to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. I had to re-sing everything as close as I could do to the original vocals, so that reminded us a lot of how we wrote songs back then, the kind of youthful element. We used to sit in a rehearsal space and jam stuff out.
It was quite the therapy to go through re-recording that album ’cause that really helped shape Ascension. There’s some songs on this that are kind of reminiscent of that album as well. They’re a little bit more grown up, and obviously production’s a lot bigger now. That definitely steered many elements of the new album for sure, but without that, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been drastically different.
Ez: I imagine the other members do more of the music writing and you focus more on the lyrics.
Nick: Greg writes pretty much all the music, but it’ll start off with a riff or two riffs, and then we do a lot of file sharing. I’ll maybe come up with a melody line, then we add a bit more. Then you’re trying to arrange it to see how it works and flows. If you’re lucky you can get it reasonably fast. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it takes months and months for things to work.
Sometimes you have a really good part and you get precious with it and want to use it, but it just isn’t working somehow, so then you have to be non-precious. You have to try and not be precious about anything in the writing process, because a lot of the time it ends on the cutting room floor.
We’ve got probably five albums’ worth of songs that we’ve just never used. Bits and pieces here and there, so you’ve just gotta keep your options open and you can’t be precious, particularly in the early stages of writing.
Ez: Do you think that the luxury of added time made that a bit easier to do this time around?
Nick: I think it did a little bit. It’s good to sit on songs and come back to them after a few weeks. When you first listen to something… if you haven’t played it for a long time, it feels like another band you’re listening to, you’ve forgotten everything about it, and that’s the best time to listen to music. If it grabs you straight away on the first listen, you know it’s probably right. If it feels clunky or weird, then it’ll make you go “Hang on”.
I can spend hours on a song and be convinced it’s brilliant, and then I could send it to Greg and he could say “Well it’s crap”. I could then play it back in the morning and say “He’s right. It is crap”. But you kind of get channeled in and something that isn’t very good, you don’t realise it until somebody tells you.
If I think something’s really good, I’ll send it early just in case, ’cause I don’t want to go down the road with it if Greg’s gonna say it’s crap. Most of the time we’re on the same wavelength, but you don’t always agree on everything. We wouldn’t be human beings if we agreed on everything. But yeah, it’s best not to go too far down the road if you think something’s good.
Ez: You also don’t want to hear people going “Oh, that’s crap” and then you go “Well, that’s what it is now, we don’t have any time”
Nick: Yeah. Obviously it’s subjective, but you kind of get the gist if something’s gonna work, and we’ve done enough albums to know our strengths and our weaknesses, I think.
Ez: In that case then, did the additional time also lead to more second guessing?
Nick: I can’t remember, actually. I don’t know, it was sort of weird. It’s like rolling a snowball down a hill. Sometimes it takes forever to get it going. When we started writing we did three songs and we got rid of them all. We didn’t like them. We thought “They’re not working, they’re not strong enough”. We then did the Icon re-recording, and then we managed to get the snowball rolling. Once its going, songs come one after the other, but it’s getting it going. That’s always difficult, and certain things that happen in life sometimes help you out. Re-recording Icon was a bit of a boost in that respect.
Ez: I imagine that whilst the work was pretty gradual, most of it happened pretty quickly and it was like “Oh, we have an album”.
Nick: Certain songs I know took forever to write. There’s songs we started off first and then became the last to get finished purely because they were shelved for seven or eight months. But if something isn’t working it doesn’t mean it’s bad; it’s a case of you haven’t got to where you want to get with it. You might find the solution further down the line, but like I said previously, you shouldn’t take anything off the table at first ’cause it could work later on.
Ez: In terms of emotional content, the title Ascension suggests a certain spirituality, but it can mean quite a lot of different things. Does it have an emotional connotation, and if so, what would it be suggesting?
Nick: People get out what they want. For me, I’m always listening to music and I’m always taking in lyrics. I’ve always liked lyrics, but they’ve really needed… I’ve never needed a story in a song. Sometimes when you’re a kid it’s good to have a story. Iron Maiden had stories and I liked that as a teenager, but I don’t necessarily need that now as an adult. The lyrics enhance the music and they really add to that mind’s eye escapist kind of view. So for me, the lyrics compliment the music and vice versa.
But people will take things out what they want and they can read into what they want. Songs about specific subjects are okay. I kind of dally with it here and there, but not massively. It’s just generally, life itself. I kind of do metaphors for certain situations and make them so vague that no one can tell what I’m talking about anymore.
Ez: Well, last question: If Ascension was a shape, what shape would it be?
Nick: Star.
Ez: *laughs*
Nick: I was gonna say a five-pointed star, but then you’ve gotta do the middle bits as well *laughs* so I’ll say star. I don’t wanna say a square. It sounds a bit negative.