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Paradise Lost (Part 1): One of the Last of a Dying Breed

I had always wanted to interview Paradise Lost, and this time I grabbed the chance and sat down with guitarist Greg Mackintosh. Before we could finally talk, I had to endure many delays and troubles – but in the end, festivals always offer surprises of any kinds – including this interview.

How has your day been so far? I heard you were just coming from the hotel...
Yeah, me and our sound guy went to a bar in town last night and stayed very late, I feel like dead today, so...

But was it at least worth it?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It was a nice little bar, called something like “66” or so. Yeah, it was okay. Kinda weird that you smoke in bars over here, again.

Really?
Yeah, in Holland you can smoke in bars again, for me it´s pretty strange because we haven´t been allowed to do that in England for a long time already.

So do you like that or...?
No! I hate that, I´ve never smoked, so...

Finish the following three sentences:
1) If I could be an animal for a day...
I would want to be a lobster because I have just found out that they are immortal. Lobsters are immortal - found it out on the flight over here. [Lobsters do get very old because of the enzyme, telomerase, but they still have to die sooner or later, the editors]

They really are?
Yes, they are biologically immortal, they cannot die – I mean if you kill them or they get killed by natural predators, then yes. But they can´t die because they have cellular… they have this enzyme that rebuilds their DNA so they can live forever if no one kills them.

So would you want to live forever?
I just think it´s a cool fact...

Wouldn´t it be creepy if everyone around you disappears at some point...
Yeah, yeah, but wouldn´t it be crap as well to be a lobster, getting boiled or something!?

2) Let´s continue with the three sentences. Here´s the next one. One day I will be able to...
One day I will be able to...let me think...One day I will hopefully be able to enjoy holidays when I don´t fly as much for a living as I do now, because I just can´t enjoy holidays. I just came back from Egypt and stayed inside the whole time, it was too hot and I don´t like travelling...

So how does that work, being in a band like Paradise Lost and not liking travelling?
No, that´s WHY I don´t like travelling – I spend every weekend at an airport… I mean, I love the gigs, I love to go to places but it just takes up so much of your time. We´re playing like an hour and a half or an hour and fifteen tonight, and it´s three days. We flew in yesterday, took god knows how long. And tomorrow is the same thing. I don´t get back home till 10 o´clock tomorrow night or something. So yeah, (smirks) it is quite annoying. The gigs are good, it´s just – if they could invent teleport machines that would be pretty cool!

So did you like travelling before you joined the band?
Probably, because you do it so rarely. You know it´s like people going on airplanes for their holidays, they cheer when the plane lands and stuff like this, they get all excited and we´re just being there, miserable, sitting amongst them all since it´s the fifth flight for us that day or so...

And the last one of the sentences is: What makes me thoughtful, is...
I don´t know if this is coming with age but what makes me thoughtful is looking at birds in the garden. It would´ve never even crossed my mind to look at birds, and then I started looking at them recently and I can sit there and watch them for an hour or so – it is relaxing, it is cool. But I´ve never done that before, it sounds like I am getting old. I said that to my son, “Don´t you enjoy looking at birds?” – “No, what are you talking about?”. It´s like you´re getting told you´re an old man.

So how old is your son?
He just turned 16.

What does he think about you being on stage, playing music?
Hm, he likes it. I mean, he´s a really great guitar player but I´ve never made him start playing. He just started it when he was 11 years old. Last summer he came out to some of the gigs, he came to Graspop, and his hero is Slash, and he stood next to Slash. So I guess, I was cool for a day or two. Obviously, you´re getting home and you´re not cool anymore.

When you have a family, isn´t it hard to be away from home so much? Have you ever gotten used to it?
Yeah, well, I am used to it, been doing it for a long time already but yes, it is tough. But I used to think about it like this: I had a next-door neighbour once, that man was a plumber, saying, “I don´t know how you can go and travel the world at the same time as having kids and such”. And you know, I used to see him go to work before the kids got out of bed and getting back late when they were going to bed and he was just shouting at them because he had a bad day at work or something, so...At least when I go home, it´s quality time, you just get to see the plus points of it all...

Often, popularity comes with certain expectations from the fans and people around you – fans want to be like you, they see you as a role model. Do you perceive the situation like this and/or how do you feel about it?
Why? Why would anyone wanna be like...? (laughing) No, I don´t perceive it like this at all. We were there at the beginning, when there still weren´t that many bands in this scene and that makes you being perceived as forerunner of the scene - so I guess you influence people in some way. But I don´t see a reason why anyone would like to be like us, I mean, everybody starts out sounding like their heroes, and then goes into their own direction – that´s the way it should be. It´s good to be an influence to someone on the first record but after that, do your own thing. We did that, we sounded exactly the way as the bands we liked on our first record and after that we did our own thing.

This goes into a similar direction - interviewers often dig into private lives of their interview partners, how do you handle such situations? Are you totally open about it or do you prefer to keep quiet about it?
No, I am open about it. It´s normal, I am doing what everyone else knows, having a family and such. You know, I did a side project a couple of years ago, a death metal band called Vallenfyre and it´s all about me coping with my dad dying.

Is the band actually still around?
We´ve only done one record and we were doing a lot of festivals last year, not a lot, a couple of festivals. And it went down so well and we became really popular… so we decided to record a new album in January in America and then try and gig a lot more next year. You know, it´s a fun project, it´s like a lot of old friends, I´ve known all the guys in the band for twenty-something years, they´re all also in other bands...

I know many musicians who don´t like to talk about their family and private lives, so you´re an exception here...
Well fair enough, if they don´t wanna talk about it, I don´t see a problem in it. To be honest I am the only person I know who doesn´t have a Facebook account, even my mother has one. I don´t do Social Media, it´s not interesting for me at all. And I think that´s more invasive, that´s why I don´t do it. There is a reason why I don´t talk to certain people for a year or a week or whatever – it is because I don´t want to. So why would I want to constantly know what they are doing every day? I also don´t want them to know what I am doing all the time. So that´s why I think this is more invasive than doing a little interview.

So you´re basically anti Social Media?
I am anti-social (laughing). In general. I mean – why would I want to be virtually social if I can´t be social in real life?

Sounds interesting: being an anti-social member of a band...
It doesn´t work very well...no no... (grinning) I mean, I am always on my own somewhere because I never really hang out with anybody, but that´s just what keeps my head together if I´m touring a lot...The thing you don´t get when touring is space for yourself, so every time I can I like solitude for a while because it´s crazy when you´re touring all the time.

So how do you spend your “solitude times” when on tour?
Just reading, or anything that doesn´t have anything to do with hanging out with a lot of people all the time. I mean, it can be fun but also be a bit of a drag at times, and stressful, too. Then little things get on your nerves easily, so you have to remove yourself from the situation.

What kind of books and literature are you into?
All kinds, really. I didn´t use to like factual books, I used to always be into novels and novellas and this stuff but now I kinda like factual things as well. Like one book, “The Year 1000”. It´s just about how a normal person´s life would´ve been – from their perspective – in the year 1000 and it´s kind of interesting, it´s cool. And then I read one on the history of the home and everything that is in the home, like why do we use knives and forks, why do we have tables and why our bedrooms are upstairs and such things. So, anything, really. Even graphic novels.

Is there any book that you think people really should read?
Actually, I have to do some nepotism here because my younger brother wrote a graphic novel at the same time as I was writing the Vallenfyre album. And I didn´t know that he was writing the book – he didn´t know I was writing the album. And both things are about my dad dying. And I got a song called “Seeds” on the Vallenfyre album and his book is called “Seeds”. And it´s because when we went to the doctor they showed us an x-ray and said the cancer is spreading like seeds. So he wrote this graphic novel, he did the drawings and everything and it´s getting turned into a movie in America, but he´s never written a book before. And it´s really cool, it´s sad but also really funny – so it´s an interesting book, I told a few of my friends about it. There is a band called Bolt Thrower, and the bassist´s mother died not long after and I suggested her to read it and she loved it, so...

So wouldn´t it be something you´d like to do, writing the music for your brother´s book/movie?
No, not at all. It´s a tragic but comedic book as well, a lot of it is funny, and the movie is going to be that type of “When the wind blows” movie, not an anime type of it. I can only write miserable tunes, so it wouldn´t really fit to it.

How can people buy your brother´s book?
It´s on Amazon, it´s in book stores. Ross Mackintosh. The book is called “Seeds”. I mean he gave me a copy but I still bought a few on Amazon since I gave away my copy, so...Check it out!

Let´s get back to touring again – the 25th anniversary tour is coming up...
Yes, but before that – in a couple of weeks – we got a nearly three weeks tour of Scandinavia and Russia and places like that, so that´s gonna be pretty interesting because we´ve played Moscow and St. Petersburg a couple of times before but you have to take the train between the two so that´s making it more extensive. And we´re flying far to the east, seeing the Siberia area and such, that will be pretty cool, yeah. And then the 25th anniversary tour after that – I don´t know what to expect. I know we´re going to be playing a different setlist to what we´d normally do, songs we haven´t played for a long time or never before...

I saw on Facebook that you asked your fans what songs they´ would like to hear – how much are you actually looking into their wishes?
Oh yeah, we had a meeting about it. All the songs suggested were shown on a graph, all done by someone from our management office – she kinda takes care of all that stuff, collected the information to turn it into a graph. Then we looked at it and were like “oh, really? Oh, you wanna hear that one?”.

Many fans wonder whether there will be a DVD...
No. I´ve been asked that by a couple of people but I just think that we´ve done a couple of live DVDs in our career and I don´t think time´s right to do another one yet, really. It would be interesting but only to a few people I think. There´s already live DVDs out there so...everyone stands there with a phone anyways...

And DVD recordings wouldn´t stop people from doing that...?
No, it wouldn´t. Last time we filmed a live DVD, it´s on there, a lot of people holding their phones up whilst we were playing...

Check back soon to read the second part of the interview.

Author: Carina Ullmann (+ photos)
Date: 2013-08-28

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