Paradise Lost Interview

It’s very difficult to tell. I think withour fans they kind of expect us to do something different. So we never really felt that we needed to start from scratch and change the name. Every album for us has been slightly different and I think the difference between Host and One Second is not that great. I think the difference between Draconian Times and One Second is greater. I mean Draconian was an out and out rock record, that was our attempt at doing a rock album. With One Second we never wanted to be the type of band that did the same thing. I mean, there’s so many bands, without knocking them, like Iron Maiden and they’ll do the same album every year. And I mean they’re happy to do that, and their fans are happy for them to do that, but we want more out of that. We want to push ourselves and try and do things a little different. And most of our fans expect us to do that. As far as the response, we’ve been in touch with a lot of the fans on the Internet site, people can get in touch with us, and it’s been about 70% positive.

Yeah, but I mean I think for us, Germany especially was the first place that got the album and what we’re doing. And that’s the thing I like about European audiences, they’re not trend oriented. They’re very much they’ll get into your music and they’ll stick with it and they allow you to change. Not like with England. Flavour of the month here every so often will change and you have lots of "this is the new band" and they get put on the front cover of every magazine, and then it’s like two months down the road theres a new band. It just seems so false the way it changes. Whereas with Europeans, when they’re into it they’re into it, whether you’re hip or not, they don’t care.

The thing is, I’ve never really taken that much notice of what Kerrang! says to be honest with you. Because talking with a lot of people about the way, I used to read Kerrang! a lot when I was younger, but I think the way that magazine is put together now is so different from when I used to read it. I think nowadays it’s very much geared towards spotty 13year old kids who are just getting into metal. You’ve got a lot now of these classic rock magazines, like RockSound who are not biased towards this new generation. They’ll have some of the new stuff, they’ll have the older classic bands. They’ll give you the full spectrum of bands. They don’t just think, "oh we’ll forget about them". I mean, bands like Iron Maiden, they were always in Kerrang! And Judas Priest, all these great British metal, and now Kerrang! are slagging them all off. And they’re still the same bands. So I just find it so fickle that magazine, it’s like a comic really. It’s nice if you want to see what tour dates are on, but I think it’s just written by failed musicians who are a little bit bitter myself.

I don’t think rock is dead, I just think there’s so many different versions of it. I mean, what is rock? Is it just heavy distorted guitars. People just say "oh rock". I mean, once fusion bands started coming in and people started piecing slightly different styles of music together, I think that’s when it wasn’t so cut and dried as "that’s rock, that’s pop, that’s punk." It didn’t work like that anymore, because you couldn’t put them in that category, cos they’re are rocky, but they’ve got maybe a funk edge to them. And it started crossing over so much. I think it’s just frustrating that people try to pigeonhole you. I think people seem to have to think "oh, what type of band is this?". They don’t just think is it good? Do they write good songs or bad songs. It’s always a case of "where can we put them?" They have to find a category for you. And I think "well why do people feel they need to put you in a category?"

Oh definitely. And it’s healthy for music because you can’t just keep regurgitating the same old stuff year after year. There’s your rock, there’s that, there’s that. Eventually you’ve got to start merging stuff together.

Well they do. You are going to get people who are into certain styles and trends, and think, well if you put that in with them and say that’s techno, then the people who are into techno will just go out and buy it. Whereas if you just put it into the wrong category then the techno fan probably won’t have gone out and bought it. So I suppose it’s easy in that respect, but I think when you’re the other side of the fence and sort of doing music yourself, then you tend to view things slightly differently. I’ll go on word of mouth more than anything. Friends of mine have said "oh I’ve heard this great new album" and I’ll ask what it is and listen to a few bits and think "yeah, that’s really great" and go out and buy it. I’m not interested in what style it is or what type of band it is.

You tend to find that a lot of the re-issues where an album gets released and 6 months later it gets re-released as a double CD with extra tracks and this sort of stuff. Basically this is a record company cashin. But they look at the bands and are "I can’t believe you’ve done that, the bands ripping us off." But 9 times out of 10 it’s not the bands that are doing it, it’s the record company. Because at the end of the day all a band is to a record company is a commodity. That’s all you are. They just look at you and think "ok, here’s this band, how much money can we make off them". They’re not interested in your music or anything else. You’re just a product. So if they sell you’re album and they think, ok, if we re-issue this as a double album, then that fan will go out and buy it twice so we’re getting twice as much money for it. I know it looks bad for the bands, but 9 times out of 10 it’s more a record company thing than anything else.

Well like I say, if the record company has the rights to your record, then they can do pretty much what they please. I would prefer it if that was the case, if there was live tracks or unreleased b-sides, I would rather just put it out initially, maybe for a limited period or something. And then it becomes a normal album. I’d rather it comes out to start with. Then your hardened fans who are going to go out and buy it straight away, get the double pack with the extra song or whatever, and then later on down the road when you’ve pressed so many, just release it as a single CD. At least they haven’t got to go out and buy it again then.

You can never expect anything. In this industry it doesn’t pay you to expect. All you can do is sort of hope really. But we’d got to the point with MFN where they’d just taken us as far as they can. We did the Draconian Times album and we got in at something like no 8 here in the album charts, and they did a really good marketing campaign. We did Donington and everything. And then we got to the One Second album, which was our last contracted album for MFN. And they basically said to us we’ll really get behind this like with the last album if you’ll just sign for some more albums. And we were like, well, we don’t really want to do that, we want to do this album and see what happens with it first. And when we’re out of contract we can sort of see what’s going on with the bands career and then sort of decide then. And they weren’t happy with that, they were like if you don’t sign for anymore albums then we’re not going to push this as well. Which is like shooting yourself in the foot. At the end of the day if they promote an album and it sells really well, then they’re going to make money on it. But they’re philosophy was, "ok, if you’re not going to sign for any more, we’re not really going to push this album, so it’s going to look like you’re taking a bit of a dip." So we weren’t really very happy with that situation and thought we’re not going to be held over a barrel with it. At the end of the day it’s the record company that’s going to loose out as well, so we thought if that’s your attitude then we’ll do as much as we can ourselves to promote One Second. And it still sold really really well. We’re really very pleased with it, because of the change and everything. And EMI were just so really fired up about it. We talked with them a lot about the ideas that we had, that they were totally in to. And they have sort of said they really believe in the band. The marketing campaign in Europe for this album has been phenomenal.

We’d like to this time. We always keep threatening to do that, but is just been one of those situations where we never really felt the time was right. Because with America I think if you’re going to do it, you only have one stab at it. So you’ve really got to make sure the timing is perfect. We’ve never really felt that we were strong enough to do something. But with this album the response in Europe and from the fans and everything, we really do think this is the most accessible album. I think it will cross from rock based to pop based. I mean, even me mums heard it and she likes middle of the road stuff, and she loves it. So I think it’ll really cross over for us and the time is now right for us to have a go at America.

All I would say to people is you’ve got to have the belief. If you work hard enough, keep going at something and believe in yourself. You haven’t got to be the best musician in the world, I’m not. I love playing the drums, that’s all I ever wanted to do. And I was not going to let anyone tell me that I wasn’t going to be able to do this. Believe in yourself and you’ll get there. Don’t believe people who say you can’t, believe you can. I did. If you believe in it, and be enthusiastic about it and love it, even if it does turn out that you didn’t get there, at least you can say well, "I didn’t do it, but I had a bloody great time trying." And you’ve got no regrets then.

Definitely. But it’s like the thing was if we’d taken the step from like Gothic or Icon straight onto Host, then I think everyone would’ve been like "bloody hell, what’s going on here?" Because I think it would’ve been too drastic.

Yeah, like I say, with One Second we started going down this road and this is where we really wanted to go. You can’t change too quickly. You’ve got to get people used to the idea because I think it would’ve just alienated too many people. The change from all guitar to the would’ve been too much. When we got to One Second we were fed up with the bludgeoning guitar stuff. We still wanted to make it heavy and atmospheric, but experiment with stuff. This is the 90s y’know. You can create a lot more atmosphere and depth to a record by using different sounds. Unless you’re going to have 47 tracks of guitar going to create this bottom end sort of thing. We always wanted to do this, but we had to do it a bit at a time.

I would love to do something like that. I think our music is more geared towards that. There’s a song called It’s Too Late on the album which is all real strings and that just works so well. Most of our songs have got some strings in there of some description. We tend to use real strings in the studio, but obviously you can’t bring a full orchestra in here to play live. But I think it would work, so I’d love to do something like that.

Um, well it definitely wouldn’t be Kerrang! I guess it would depend what mood I’m in at the time. If I was feeling in a rocky mood I’d have to go for Metal Hammer.

Um, it’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how it would work. But I like the theory. The Euro and all that kind of thing. It would make it much easier when you’re travelling around obviously. Instead of having to change money everytime you go somewhere, you know you can spend if whereever you go, that would be interesting. But I also like the idea of us maintaining our independance.

I think it will come around anyway, it’s going towards that. If we dig our feet in, I think it’s only a matter of time anyway.

Well Nostradamus said years ago about it. I think we’ve been on self destruct mode for years. All this stuff going on in Kosova, you can’t win with the amount and sort of weaponry that all these countries have got at the moment. I think getting into a war is a ridiculous situation, because if there does become another world war, there ain’t going to be a world. You only have to have one madman who decides to use a nuke, and everyone will. You’re just waiting for one person to use it.

Well it’s just another year really. I’m not going to party any more than I would for any other new year really.

I’ll just sit in a local pub y’know, snogging people at midnight. Just a bog standard New Years Eve. At least we know three songs that will be played- Robbie Williams, and Prince.

Final words. I hope people will give us a fair crack of the whip with this one. It is a bit different, and it’s not an instant record. It’s not one you’ll hear the first time and think "oh yeah, I love that". But it’s like from my point of view it’s like if I loved a record when I first heard it I’d hate it about a month later. But those records that take a while to get into, 10 years down the road, you’ll still appreciate them.

Oh definitely. This is just a very low key affair for us. We’ve not played in such a long time, and basically the label wanted us to play some low key shows to celebrate the album coming out. But we’re going to come back later in the year and we’ll have a full production. A lot depends on how the album sells. English fans are always complaining that we go round Europe with the video screens and whole production, and when we come back to England and we don’t bring anything. And it’s like because in Europe we play much bigger venues. If we brought the whole thing, we’d have to play bigger places. You need to play small theatres, and if people aren’t coming out to the shows, then you can’t justify bringing it over. But hopefully if we get a good response this time, we’d love to come to England and bring the full production, because I think people would be amazed at what the shows like.