The UK has a long and proud history of producing bands with the uncanny gift of articulating misery in sound. Few do it better than Paradise Lost.
They might be performing in London on the hottest day of the year but their heart of darkness beats only for the rot of autumn and the sub-zero bleakness of winter.
The Halifax gothic doom stalwarts are in town to support King Diamond. The King's arrival has the Roundhouse in a state of fever, panicked security abound. There is a lot of stage production. His eminence of the macabre does not travel light. PL guitarist Greg Mackintosh is staying out of the road, staying out of the heat.
All things considered, this would be a strange setting to savour some of the new tracks from Ascension, their magisterial 17th studio album, and a million miles away from the Arctic conditions of Wasteland Studios, in Sweden, where they tracked drums in the middle of a cold snap.
“It’s actually where Watain and Mayhem rehearse,” says Mackintosh. “It’s like an old church in the north of Sweden. It was January. There was snow up to here [holds hand to his chest]. It was really nice, quiet, you could go for nice walks. Freezing.”
As it turns out, Paradise Lost will keep those Ascension tracks on ice. A couple of months out from its release through Nuclear Blast, we won’t hear any of it tonight, not the crystalline morbidity of The Precipice, nor the punishing funereal grind of Tyrants Serenade, or the sleigh bells that Mackintosh sneaked onto the record without anyone else in the band noticing.
If the presence of sleigh bells makes Ascension a Christmas record, as Mackintosh has joked, then vocalist Nick Holmes might just have found his calling as a doom metal Ebenezer Scrooge.
There is a fine line of cheese... And hopefully we’ve always been on the right side of the line. Just
We do get the opportunity to savour the grandeur of Enchantment, the ur-death-doom anthem Pity The Sadness, the sombre majesty of Icon-era classic Embers Fire, and of course the chance to ask Mackintosh all about Ascension, how revisiting Icon 30 years on influenced the writing of it, how he thinks about melody.
It's also an occasion for us to learn how an overwound Iceman humbucker could give him the cocked wah sound he craves even before he touches either of the two (yes, two) Ibanez WD7 Weeping Demon wah pedals he uses as a filter, and why nailing Trouble's electric guitar tone is still the impossible dream.
When you rerecorded Icon, did you take some of that spirit into Ascension?
“Yeah, that did shape some of this record, just going back and thinking, ‘I don’t really play like that anymore.’ Or, ‘I don’t think about song structures like that anymore.’ And then it links into what you are doing [now].”
They have the grandeur.
“We used to call it, ‘Weep openly at the the sheer pomposity.’ It is both good and bad. There is a fine line of cheese, you know what I mean? And hopefully we’ve always been on the right side of the line. Just. [Laughs].”
It was a mental time for that period in heavy music. Everything just exploded at the same time, and our time exploded at the same time as Sepultura and it was an amazing tour
Icon was such a pivotal moment for the band, out on tour with Sepultura. Everything was happening.
“It was a mental time. It was a mental time for that period in heavy music. Everything just exploded at the same time, and our time exploded at the same time as Sepultura and it was an amazing tour. And I think Pantera exploded at the same time, so everything was going on. But I don’t really have happy memories of that time because you were just away from home so much that you start to lose your mind.
“We went on tour in America with Morbid Angel and Kreator, which became a real political struggle between them two bands, and we just wanted to escape it.
“We came off the back of that, which was a mindfuck, straight into record Icon, straight out of Icon onto the Chaos A.D. tour, and just went on and on, and then went straight into the studio to record Draconian Times. And we carried. I think it was four years with maybe three weeks off.”
Creatively fulfilling but that workload would leave you burst.
“Oh we all came back not wanting to do it again, basically, and that involved us shooting off into a different direction [on 1997 follow-up One Second] because we were so tired of hearing heavy metal all the time. You get sick to death of it. We were sick to death of ourselves. Everything.”
What guitars are we hearing on Ascension?
“It’s a company I have been using now for four or five years, Hapas Guitars, out of Berlin. It’s like a small workshop, maybe eight people, and I just got in touch because I really liked the look and the way they built the guitars.
“So I went to the workshop and I got them to make me a couple, and since then it has spiralled into this thing where we are now designing a signature model, and on this record, I designed two pickups that is basically the sound of the record. They’re based on old Ibanez pickups from 1982, overwound.”
From an Ibanez Destroyer or something like that?
I used two Weeping Demons in a row.... and I was manipulating them as I played. It’s not wah-y, it’s finding sweet spots as you play
“From an Iceman. And with a tone pot as well, you can link the tone pot, because on those old Ibanezes, if you flick the tone pot off, not only did it cut the high-end it gave it a bump about 500hZ which gave it this almost cocked-wah sound on the rhythm [pickup].
“On this record, you can hear it, especially on the intros to a couple of songs. The tone pot is not rolled off, I’m playing rhythms, then I roll it off for single notes and harmony guitars and it gives this really rounded sound.”
Your leads always sound like there is a filter on it already, that cocked-wah vibe…
“Well, I went even further with this. It’s not everyone’s taste but I love it so much. I used two Weeping Demons in a row as well as this, and I was manipulating them as I played. It’s not wah-y, it’s finding sweet spots as you play, and with the Weeping Demon you can blend in how much you use, which is why I use them, and you can choose the frequency as well.”
So these pickups are based right off those old Iceman pickups?
“They look just like a regular humbucker but we spent I think about six months in development because the guy who makes their pickups was having trouble.
“He was going back and trying to figure out what I meant about this pickup and what I was after, and he said it was kind of an accident where he was wiring it one day and it went duunn! ‘That’s the Paradise Lost sound!’”
What else did you use?
“Seven-strings… Baritones! I play baritones just because it stays in tune better, and I am kind of used to the wider frets with baritones now. Amp-wise, this is a weird one. In our rehearsal room for the last 30 or more years – since we started – we’ve had a Marshall head that my friend, who used to be our first roadie, just left in the room in 1982, a JCM800 2203.”
“I took it home with me, and was just trying that out and had it through this oversized cab that Blackstar gave me when they first started, so I put them together and miked it up, and I have this weird little boxy room for my amps in the studio. It’s kind of like this [dressing] room.
“I think the shape and smallness of the room helped get this sound. I miked the back of it as well, and I got this sound that everybody tries to get rid of but I want, boxy, donk, ‘80s.”
Two microphones on the speaker cabinet. Did you add anything to the signal afterwards?
“Mic at the back, mic at the front, and I was taking a DI at the same time, and I felt that there was a little bit of crunchiness missing so I had an Orange Rockerverb through a Fuzz And Burn pedal that I have from Minotaur Sonic Terrors, and I just added that in as a crunch. It’s practically all EQ’d out apart from the crunchy element.”
That’s the option you have with the DI.
“I am kind of a commit-to-tape guy because I come from that era but it is stupid not to take a DI, and afterwards, you can say, ‘Actually, it’s missing a bit of this.’”
It’s a safety net that doesn’t feel like a safety net, whereas with some digital approaches, it feels like no take matters.
“I think that is the problem. You go round in circles.”
What about other effects in the signal chain?
“I use EQ pedals before and after the amp, always these days. It’s the Boss one, the 7-band one, and it’s like that before the amp, mid-bump, and then after it is kind of the opposite, but not quite as much.”
So you are kind of using it almost as a sort of presence control for the mids?
“The reason I have it afterwards as well is because I have done so many things to make it go bump and then when you’ve got two or three guitars doing that same thing it can get too much in that frequency so you can EQ it out.”
When you are tracking guitars, do you have anyone in the control room offering feedback? Is Nick in there offering his sweet nothings?
“No, no! I just do it on my own. Over the years, the last few years, I’ve become more regimented in just getting up and working from a certain time to a certain time. But prior to that I was always a night person. That was because I stopped drinking four years ago.”
Can we talk about the writing process? Because you have spoken about writing from melodies rather than riffs. Would you write these melodies on guitar or keys?
“It’s vocal. I’ll either say to our singer maybe try that as a vocal line, and he’ll say, ‘That will sound better as a guitar line’ so we will try it on guitar. It is always with a mic, because it is the quickest way to get things down. Then I might try some chords on a piano at home with it, and then I might try it as a guitar part – if it warrants that, if it works.”
![Paradise Lost photographed in close-up [L-R]: Greg Mackintosh, Steve Edmondson, Nick Holmes, Aaron Aedy](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/cRDufdbPzEUeLAr5tC5Fcj-1200-80.jpg.webp)
That makes a lot of sense because you use your guitar as a second vocal line, because it is very much in dialogue with Nick.
“Well that’s the idea. When the vocal ends you have got to fill that space, so you think, ‘Okay, where does that lead off? And do you bring that back round to lead back into the next vocal?’ Because the new single [Silence Like the Grave], there’s something what I call a B-section in there, and it’s like a riff that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the song.
“It is kind of a bridge but is juxtaposed to the rest of the song. Sometimes those work, and sometimes they don’t, and I didn’t think it was going to work in that song.
“And then I did a lead that comes straight out of a note that Nick sung into the verse, and so it carries that B-section over into verse. It’s all about filling dead space, and interest, and having no filler bits.”
Your guitar is like this threat throughout the whole song, tying it all together.
“That’s the idea.”
Some of your guitar parts could all be keys parts.
“That’s where it all came from. I was a huge Dead Can Dance fan in the ‘80s, at the time I was learning guitar. I was dead into guitar players as well but I was also really into some orchestral stuff, and through Dead Can Dance, it was all these church-type organ harmonies, and choral harmonies, and I just thought that would sound great on guitar.”
You’re kind of like underground metal’s Johnny Marr. Do you see that, at least in the sensibility. You do things totally differently.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just what the part demands. I mean, Johnny Marr, I love the Smiths. It’s tasteful stuff. It has got to be tasteful. It has got to add something to a song, and lead somewhere.”
Did Marr ever hear your cover of How Soon Is Now?
“I have no idea. No idea. Sometimes you get feedback from bands you cover, like we did a Sisters [Of Mercy] cover. He liked it; [Andrew] Eldritch liked it. But we didn’t hear anything from Johnny Marr.”
Nick’s range has really expanded. Has it made it easier for you to write because of that? I don’t want to say it was limited…
“It was!”
I just recorded with an old knackered acoustic guitar, a mic that I sing in to do the melodies, and laid it on the table, and that’s what’s on the album
It was and is great. But it has evolved…
“Yeah, it gives us more scope to cover more ground. On this new record, even though it is more guitar-oriented, there are still songs that are very harmony-heavy and have pop sensibilities to them. And it is good to do that, because Nick has maybe three or four different styles of vocal that he deploys, and we’ll see what works over what and the song will develop in that way.”
Lay A Wreath Around The World has got this really cool acoustic guitar.
“I was thinking I do a lot of staccato stuff on lead guitars so I’ll do it on acoustic guitar, and it sounds a little bit Spanish, but then I want to incorporate them in the verses.
“In my head it sounded more like Radiohead, in a verse, where they would strum an acoustic and then it would go heavy, and then they'd strum and acoustic. But I had an old knackered acoustic guitar, and a mic that I sing in to do the melodies, and put it on the table, and that’s what’s on the album.”
As simple as that?
“It was as simple as that. I did it for the demos and couldn’t get a sound that we liked better going through loads of great equipment, so we were like, ‘Oh, we’re keeping that.’ Sometimes it works like that!”
You just have to go through the process. You produced it yourself. Why?
“Well, just because we found that even the people whom we said were producers over the last however many years it has really been us just saying ‘do this, do that’ so it was kind of a glorified engineer in a way. Not saying that they didn’t have input.
“Gomez [Jaime Gomez Arellano] definitely did things for us, steered us in the direction we wouldn’t have gone, but we really just don’t need telling anymore and if we want to achieve something we know how to achieve it. I know enough now. I have my own studio, purpose-built, and I have produced other bands – so why not?”
Who would you like to produce? If you could produce anyone.
“It’s sound maybe a bit stupid – they haven’t done anything for 30 years – but I think Sisters [Of Mercy] should do another record and I should do it and I think it would be great. But [Eldritch] is too grumpy. He makes us look happy! We toured with him. He’s a nice guy. But he’s as miserable as they come.”
If I do a cover I like to change the tempo, the time signature, the tuning, everything. I treat it more like a remix if you know what I mean. I rebuild it
Properly miserable.
“Oh, he goes in thrift stores even though he is rich. He’s very, like, down. He’s just one of them people. He’s harmless.”
It would be interesting sonically…
“I just know what should come next.”
What have you taken from Sisters of Mercy in terms of sound? Are there any grace notes we can hear on this record.
“No, the only thing I could say is a little bit of my guitar style is lifted from Gary Marx, the very early Sisters goth sound.”
It’s more the sensibility… You’re looking for the mood.
“It is. Definitely. My playing style and my musical tastes all stem from the clubs I used to go in in Leeds in the ‘80s, because there were no dedicated clubs. You didn’t go to a metal club, or a goth club. It was all the same place, and everyone would be in their corners, so there would be goths, punks, metallers, and then a goth track would come on and the goths would get up… And this all seeps in. And you just [soak it up].
“You weren’t allowed to like it at the time. I was a punk in the ‘80s. I had a mohican. And then I turned more goth, and it all crossed over and it was okay.”
That was the typical Gen X experience, in a physical space. It’s an education.
“And jukeboxes! I mean, every cover we have ever done, I’m just going down the list of this compilation tape of a jukebox in a pub in Halifax, I’m literally going down it; [Bronksi Beat's] Smalltown Boy, How Soon Is Now?, Walk Away by Sisters…”
How Soon Is Now? is a strange cover because it does fit with the Paradise Lost aesthetic.
“Kind of, yeah! I didn’t know that it would work but… We’ve done Dead Can Dance. We’ve done an Everything But The Girl cover [Missing]. We’ve done lots of wide-ranging covers, but hopefully you do them because you can change them and do something quite different.
“If I do a cover I like to change the tempo, the time signature, the tuning, everything. I treat it more like a remix if you know what I mean. I rebuild it.”
When you mentioned the Iceman pickups I immediately thought of Tom G Warrior. Is that where the idea came from?
“Initially I thought it was but I looked into the pickup and then I found out that a couple of Trouble’s guys used to put those pickups in things, like, in a Les Paul, he would actually put in one of those pickups, and then I used to try it.
“I had one in my Hamer, back in the day, one of the original Ibanez pickups, and it was only when we were doing this record where I was like, ‘How did we get that sound? How did we come up with that?’”
Trouble have a lot to answer for. That's where Metallica got their Kill ‘Em All tone, or so the story goes.
“Yeah! They just supported us in America, and it was a dream of mine to play with them… We were side of stage every night, salivating, and looking at their pedalboards. I knew most of their tricks but one I didn’t know – which I don’t use, it’s purely their thing – they have one of those big chorus pedals [most probably the Electro-Harmonix PolyChorus], they both have them on their pedalboard and they have them on the entire time.”
Just to thicken?
“Yeah, but it sounds chorus-y, and the sound guy complains about them all the time because it makes them feedback like mad but when they are playing it is pure magic.”
That’s crazy, because you always feel you lose some of the attack with chorus pedals.
“You do, and you think they go too thin but somehow it doesn’t with them.”
It’s a very small margin where you can set them up and it sounds like your doubling.
“Exactly. I came back from that and I have been trying chorus pedals and it doesn’t work. I think a lot of it is in the playing style as well. You always try to mimic people but you can’t. It’s their style.”
- Paradise Lost tour the UK in October. See Paradise Lost for dates and ticket details.
- Ascension is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
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