“We were laughing at one of the titles because it was so miserable”: Paradise Lost on three decades of turning woe into iconic metal

“I've just been in the Florida Keys for two weeks. It fucking pissed down most of the time.”

It is, according to Nick Holmes, often easier to be miserable. For those who have followed Paradise Lost for any part of their long career, this will sound self-evident. Since forming in Halifax in Yorkshire in 1988 and announcing themselves to the world with 1990’s Lost Paradise debut, where death metal met sludgy darkness, and its genre-naming-and-defining follow-up Gothic, the dark cloud has followed them. Often put there by other people – Kerrang! included – but just as often thanks to a blunt sense of humour and inability to put too much of a smile on things.

On their new album Ascension, in this sense it’s business as usual. Paradise Lost – Nick, guitarists Gregor Mackintosh and Aaron Aedy, bassist Steve Edmondson and, on this record, now-ex drummer Guido Montanarini – may have toyed with their palette over the years, taking in death metal, synths, arena rock, doom, electronics, but they’ve always had that darkness in them.

It's made them iconic. As one of the so-called 'big-three' of doom from Yorkshire underground label Peaceville alongside My Dying Bride and Anathema, they were instrumental in crafting a very British sound that wallowed in woe and expressed it through a wrought-iron heaviness. As they went on, they would become a huge influence on such practitioners of dark musical arts as Ville Valo, while a spread of bands from Darkthrone and Cradle Of Filth, to Opeth, to Green Lung, to Gatecreeper to regular Creeper, Lacuna Coil and even My Chem have all found inspiration in PL's rotting misery. On Ascension, that shadowiness is articulated by an older man than Nick once was.

“It's just looking at life, misfortune, happiness, death, everything that goes with it from the perspective of a man who's in his mid-50s, as opposed to a man who was in his late-40s, whenever it was I last wrote the last album,” says Nick today, with a wide, would-you-believe-it grin. “Since I hit 50, I don't know where the time's going. It's absolutely terrifying. I remember the six-week holiday at school seemed to go on forever, yeah? And now six weeks is nothing!

“My outlook on life hasn't really changed much. Music’s still miserable, lyrics are still miserable. I'm quite kind of cynical about things – always have been. I'm not scared of dying, particularly. I used to be, when I was younger, but I don't really care anymore. So, that's a change.”

He chuckles.

“I do like to be kind of… quietly optimistic about things, I guess. But I don't really show that in the lyrics that often!”

Take Lay A Wreath Upon The World, where, over a classic Paradise Lost doom-laden riff, Nick barks, ‘Hallowed man won't heed the warning / As Hell ascends to greet the earth / Shadowed lands in deep and dawning / Our descent will be the birth.’ Cheerful, aye?

“Yeah,” he laughs. “That’s a blanket ‘we're fucked’ kind of thing. I came up with that title a long time ago, actually. I said it to Greg and we were just laughing about it because it's so miserable.”

For all this, Nick is, and has always been, a funny bloke, albeit one with a sarcastic sense of humour. In the ’90s, K! would often make gags likening him to perma-grumpy comedy old man Victor Meldrew. Having passed ‘Meldrew point’ last year (19,537 days, the age actor Richard Wilson was when he first played him), Nick actually reckons he’s pretty sprightly among his peers.

“I've noticed people around me are way more like that than I am. A lot of my good friends have really gone like that, really cantankerous. I don't think I'm that bad, actually. I’ll find myself moaning that someone's parked their car, like, 10 centimetres further away than they did they did last time, and I’ll hear myself and go, ‘Oh, Jesus…’”

Wherever Paradise Lost have gone, that sense of – by their own admission – almost comedy misery has followed, even if the song didn’t remain the same. From the crushing early years, they turned their hand to the stadium-goth-metal of 1993’s Icon and huge-selling successor Draconian Times, the Depeche Mode-ish electronics of 1998’s at-the-time controversial One Second and follow-up Host, when they cut their hair and pared back guitar; the later years ability to mix their biggest sounds with that grimy, early edge. Now they’ve “gone full circle”, says Nick, but it was always there anyway.

“We're still death metal kids, you know? That’s never gone away. Even when we were kind of poncing around with our haircuts, it was kind of put on the shelf around that time, but it's certainly come right back.

“I just love dark movies. I was into horror before I was into heavy metal, and it was a natural thing to get into, particularly the harder stuff like Venom. But that death metal kid is still inside me, and Greg as well. It never really dies.”

But people thought it had. At one point, despite still being huge, some wrote them off as a lost cause – going too far from their roots. Nick recalls K!’s 1/5 review of 2001’s Believe In Nothing, which declared, “If ever a band snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, it was Paradise Lost.”

“It was a kind of strange time,” he reflects. “There was no internet either, which would have been funny, seeing comments around that time. The fucking server would have collapsed from all the negativity.

“We were kind of all over the place, though. I remember the album cover, with all the bees. We were working with some design company – I think they designed the first couple of Oasis albums, actually, which worked great for Oasis, but for us, it was weird. It was a weird time. That cover kind of represents what was going on inside our brains.”

These, though, were a few years in a long, long service at the Paradise Lost coalface.

“Nowadays you can kind of wander off, and do things that are slightly out of your normal zone. But in those days, if you made metal, you had to make metal. If you made anything else, you were just cursed!”

What Paradise Lost have done well as times have changed, without really trying beyond just doing what comes naturally, is maintain their reputation as masters of misery. Musically, anyway. But even if Nick does spend most of the conversation laughing, and on Twitter has offered such dry humour as David Brent’s “Get the guitar…” when England missed out on the Euro 2021 final by a penalty, the reputation stays.

“When Venom started, I didn't know anything about them. I just heard At War With Satan and loved it. I was like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys?’ and had one picture to go on. Now, with the information at your fingertips, the mystery is fucking dead. You can try and be as mysterious as you want, but then someone will take a photograph of you buying cat litter in fucking Tesco.”

Three-and-a half decades in, Nick puts his band’s enduring success down to “loving what we’re doing, so why stop?”

“We've never done proper jobs. This has always been our job, and it's our complete focal point. And it has never not been that, because we never had distractions in that respect. We haven't got high-paying jobs that make us think, ‘Oh, I'm earning more money in that – see you later,’ and then you get back together again in three years because you miss the drinking and stuff.”

And still, after all this time: misery. With another big grin, Nick proudly says that’s all he knows, even if he tries not to.

“It’s kind of compounded misery, but within the misery, there's a glint of hope. I like to see that, when I watch a movie and it's all dark and miserable, but then you see someone almost finds a way out the situation – then the doors closed and there is no way out. I enjoy that teasing of a glimmer of hope. So, I might stick in a line that's actually really positive, playing with the entire the song, so you go, ‘Oh, hang on, this this sounds positive, cool… Oh no, it's not. No, it's gone. It's gone dark again.’”

Such is the case with Ascension. But then, would you want anything else? It’s just Paradise Lost being Paradise Lost.

“It’s natural for us to do it. We definitely have a laugh, though. I know some bands, naming no names, but they have a very cheerful exterior, they present themselves as a cheerful band, and they’re the most miserable bastards I've ever met behind the scenes!

“I wouldn't say we're as cheerful as we used to be, but we're kind of the wrong side of 40 now. So the only thing we've got to look forward to is death!”

Miserable? Yes. Rib-tickling? Also yes. It's the way Nick Holmes tells them…

Ascension is out now via Nuclear Blast. Paradise Lost tour the UK from October 9.

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