Komodo Rock | Komodo Rock Talks With Aaron Aedy Of Paradise Lost

Komodo Rock Talks With Aaron Aedy Of Paradise Lost

Saturday, 15 December 2007

However you look at them, Paradise Lost have proven to be one of the most influential and have a longevity that many never gave them credit for. Billed at various times as the Fathers of Doom Metal and the Godfathers of Gothic Metal, and flirtations with a more synthrock orientated approach thrown in there, experimentation has never been a problem for the Halifax natives.

With the release of the bands 11th album 'In Reqiuem' earlier this year, Paradise Lost have once again bounced back to confound their critics.

Komodo Rock's Mike Elliott caught up with guitarist Aaron Aedy as the band neared the completion of their latest UK Tour to find out more.

Mike Elliott: You've just finished touring in America with Nightwish. How was it?

Aaron Aedy: Excellent, very good actually. Firstly the Nightwish people are absolutely phenomenally wonderful people, they're Finnish and I've never met a bad Finn! They were so nice, they looked after us so well. It was like are you sure we can't do anything to help, they were really good friends.

The crowd reactions were very good for us. They started off pretty good, and by the end of the show the reaction had got better, so hopefully we've won over a few new fans. I think fans of Nightwish potentially would like us so it was a good bill in that respect. The other thing as well, because they are friends of ours they made it a two band bill so there wasn't even a third band, so we got to play nearly an hour each night. It was really good.

ME: Earlier this year you were on the road with Type O Negative as well.

AA: Yeah we've been really busy, we did a European Tour of our own before the American tour. I've only been home for ten days in the last four months! I just had a week at home before this UK leg kicked off. Before that before the European Tour and US Tour for six weeks I had three days at home, I'm now touring to December 22nd, so quite looking forward to getting home just in time for Christmas.

ME: And then of course back on the road with HIM.

AA: We've got a couple of festivals in January before the HIM thing as well. It's better to have people wanting you to play than not. I am looking forward to a break over Christmas though.

ME: It's got to be hard being out there for so long.

AA: It's hard waiting all day to play, that's the hard bit. Actually doing the gig is awesome, that's my favorite bit. Waiting around all day to do it is a pain.

ME: Traveling...

AA: Or venues that don't have showers that work. The only three things you think about on the road are showers, food and internet, it's all you worry about. There's nothing worse, you'll get to a big venue, there were some in the States with 2500 capacity and they don't even have a shower. It's like why?

ME: Do American bands not shower?

AA: Maybe the venues just don't care. If they've got a toilet, they can fit a shower so I just don't understand it.

ME: So how did the HIM thing come about?

AA: Well we've known Ville and the guys for a long long time. While we were on the Nightwish tour, we were in Minneapolis, Jeff's really good mates with the drum tech, we know a bunch of their techs from when we played in Finland, and we were talking to them in the pub. They were saying that they didn't like the support band that were out with them at the time, and we said you should have taken us out instead! And they were like we'd never though of that. And then the next week...

ME: And like all good stories it started in a pub!

AA: Yeah it starts in a pub over a Jamiesons and a Guinness.

ME: You're really looking forward to it by the sounds of it.

AA: Yes, I'm looking forward to it. It'll be nice to play with them in the States, they're absolutely huge over there, but the European tour will be fun too, and hopefully they'll be some HIM fans that haven't heard of us before.

ME: Especially where HIM have got heavier and heavier album after album.

AA: You never know. It's ok to play to the same crowd time after time, but you don't make new fans like that. Last couple of years we've been branching out. In the past we hardly ever supported. We just never did it. It's quite nice now to try and win new people in. Plus it's always nice to tour with bands we get on with. Opeth are another band we toured with, and we're good friends with them too. It's a bit like a traveling social club!

ME: All this touring has been in support of the new album, how's that been going down out on the road?

AA: Really well! We've pulled a few old classics out of the bag, but especially this week in the UK, there's been a lot of younger fans, teenagers, and they're mad for the new stuff, and they don't know much of the old stuff. It's been pretty to cool to have the younger people there. The new albums been going down well, the one we weren't sure of was 'Never for the Damned', but it's been going down awesome. We play about five or six songs of the new album.

ME: This album has almost propelled you back into the limelight.

AA: The last three albums I think have been a building process to a more rockier sound. Host is still a great album, I love Host. It's probably the most miserable album we've done. People think it has to be heavy to be like miserable, but that's the darkest record we've done. The thing is with Host, it sounded better live, we'd put some more guitars on it, it had more energy live. It was a shame the tour for that wasn't that long. We'd gone back to the studio to start writing Believe in Nothing pretty quickly. Two of my favorite Paradise Lost songs are from that session. I love World Protected, I wish we played that live, and a b-side called Gone which I really like.

ME: Talking of B-Sides, going back to Draconian Times era, you covered Walk Away. Why?

AA: Why not? We were big Sisters fans when we were younger, and it was one we knew we could heavy up quite well. The one cover that I used to love playing live the most was A Small Town Boy, that sounded really heavy live.

ME: So are you doing any covers in the live set right now?

AA: No, we only do them off the current album, although we do get asked for Small Town Boy sometimes. Somebody asked for 'Death Walks Behind You' the other day, that was an Atomic Rooster song.

ME: Is that something you might throw in as an encore?

AA: I don't know, maybe. I think we've got so many of our own songs, people aren't hearing all the songs they want to. We've got like 140 or 150 songs, and your trying to cram them into an hour and half, there's always someone that says they didn't play 'so and so'. I saw Iron Maiden in 1986 and they didn't play The Trooper and I was really pissed off! We've had a couple of nights where we didn't play 'As I Die' and people are like huh? We generally make up the set of what we fancy playing?

ME: Night by Night?

AA: Nah, we'll do a bunch of rehearsals before a tour, and we'll just play the songs we've rehearsed.

ME: You've just had a DVD come out as well. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

AA: No, I haven't seen it! [Laughs]

ME: Can you make stuff up that might be on it?

AA: [Laughs] I'll give you the brief synopsis though. Literally there was an independent film maker, and he asked if he it'd be fine to follow us around, interview us about the history of the band. Not really an official thing, but he paid to come and see us in Mexico, Greece, Prague all over the place, and we just go through the history of the band, individually, so it was quite interesting to go over the memories. He was going to release it independently, but I think Century Media bought the rights to maintain some control over. I've seen a pre-release edit, it's quite interesting to see what everyones different opinions are. I literally got given a copy yesterday and it's still in the cellophane.

ME: So it looks good in cellophane?

AA: It looks great in cellophane! So I don't know, some people have said on our forums that it was great, others that it was a bit amateurish, so I don't know.

ME: You cut a video for The Unreachable recently while you were in the States.

AA: That was the same guy! He offered us as a thank you to do this video, but we haven't seen it! To tell you the truth, I don't know if it went to plan. We weren't going to release the fact that we were doing it, and then if it was terrible, we were just not going to use it. There's still a small chance it'll be good.

ME: But your not confident...

AA: I haven't seen it so I can;t say, but I wouldn't say I'm overly confident, but until I see it, I won't rule anything out.

ME: You were talking about your forums just then, and you make good use of the internet. Is it something you've found over the last few years has really helped the band?

AA: I think so. The other thing is, it's quite a nice community of fans we've got. They all do meet ups, they fly from all over the world and do meet ups in say London or Germany. It's quite nice, I like the community aspect of it. In some ways it's an evil as well, you'll see people on Blabbermouth making stupid comments, not about us, but when you click on a story, regardless of what the story is, when the Nightwish singer got sacked or whatever, and it'll be like “Woot! First post. Meshuggah rock”. You see that more than anything. “These guys suck” “I'd shag her”. It's almost like the eternal soapbox for the idiot.

People have asked though about guitar tab, or they've asked about tuning. And I like that I can reply I actually tuned it in this and you start here.

ME: You use myspace, and you've got your videos on YouTube as well. Do you think that's the way things are moving?

AA: I think YouTube's great. You can type in almost anything, it's like my favorite thing on YouTube, there's a Hocus Pocus by Focus live. It's like 1974 or something in America. It's just so funny, it's really well played, but the singers mental. He does different things all the way through.

ME: Do you think downloading is a real problem for you?

AA: Big style, it's hurt us really bad, it's hurt everyone really bad. You find now that all bands are on tour because they can't make money from records. It's very difficult. A lot of people still buy records, but sales are about a tenth of what they would have expected to be eight years ago. You get less fees when your on tour because promoters have a wealth of choice, cause everyones on tour, so your trying to make money from merchandise, to keep paying for things. It's a lot harder to make money from records now, you used to pay for your tour from what you made from your records. People are stripping down productions, they're not taking out lights, and it's a shame. I think the business is still trying to find it's balance, the record companies were caught completely off guard. The thing is people say we're just ripping off the record label, but they always get paid first, and then you haven't got as much money to spend on records.

Luckily studio costs have come down. Studios have had to close or reduce their costs. A friend of mines a video producer and he said to me that for a rock video, what used to cost 50k, they now what the same video for 4!

It's had a knock on effect on everyone in the industry.

ME: Do you think a balance is going to be found?

AA: I think there's going to have to be something. It's got better because people are more into buying online. I think if the prices come down, more people are going to buy. I think there's a whole, almost generation of kids especially now that just think it's acceptable to download for free, and the next wave will think it's alright to buy online, and if the prices are low enough then why not? I think CD prices did get far too expensive, when they were like 15 or 16, it was stupid. I stopped buying as many CD's. But now, I bought a load of re masters and they were like 5 each. I think it's more about the pricing they have to settle the pricing and get a little bit of security. The idea where you subscribe to a service for like 20 a month and you can download as many songs as you want, but they're DRM enabled, so they're protected and the minute you stop subscribing you can't use the songs. You play 20 a month and you can listen to thousands and thousands of songs. I think that's quite a good idea, and then the artist, if there song is downloaded or listened to they'll get a mechanical royalty, I think that's the way forward.

ME: You don't think the way forward is what Radiohead have done and what Trent Reznor has said he's going to do?

AA: I think that's quite a good idea. I think a lot of fans were pissed off though that it wasn't a higher bitrate. I was going to buy it on there, I said I'd pay a fiver for that so was going to pay diver for it, but then I saw the bitrate and was “I'd like it at better quality than that”. I've got nearly two grands worth of speakers in my studio so it's gotta sound good through them. I do think that's a good idea, but they are going to release it on CD through a record label. I thought it was a good idea, a pretty brave idea. The weird thing was you had people paying 25 for it, it's like why do that? It's bloody ridiculous, I don't see why people did that.

ME: But they did....

AA: They did and it's mental, and at least that money is going back to the artist to pay for recording.

ME: I think that's why they paid it though, because every penny I'm paying is going straight to the artist.

AA: In that regard I do like that. I think you do need record companies or hire someone for some things, otherwise your not concentrating on music your concentrating on business more. It takes somebody with cash behind them to take the risk though.

ME: It didn't matter to them if it failed.

AA: The thing is, they knew they'd get maybe two million hits on the website, if half of them bought it for a quid then that's a lot of money. I can see it as a possibility of a good way forward. It's like Thunder and Marillion they do everything independently themselves, they're almost like a cottage industry to themselves.

ME: Things have certainly changed and are going to continue to change.

AA: It's totally turned on it's head. We first noticed it in 2000. We had Believe in Nothing just finished recorded, actually maybe it was 2001, we said we could have the tapes ready and mastered in September or early October, but they said “Oh we can't release once we're into October, because it's Superstar traffic for Christmas, so we'll have to delay it till February”. But they made this decision after they'd already given DJ's CD's and a DJ in Spain put it on the net, so for 6 months before it came out it was on the Internet. So when it came out out, a) we're already bored of it or b) we've already got it.

ME: That's a major level cock up by the record label though.

AA: Oh yeah it was, but it didn't help us! It was a real cock up though, and that's why people like Metallica and people like did that play back parties where people didn't get a copy of the CD, they just went into a room altogether to hear it, and where you get “Type O Negatives New album available in stores in August” every 30 seconds, it's so annoying. I can see why people are doing it though, they're almost throwing ideas in the air and seeing what sticks...

ME: One last one then, how does it feel to be regarded as the godfathers of Gothic Metal?

AA: It's kinda flattering! It's pretty cool because somebody said it once and it kinda caught on, so people must agree with it. We don't really think about it, but it's flattering, it's kinda nice. We were certainly there at the early startings of gothic metal.

ME: People also say your the Fathers of Doom Metal.

AA: Yeah... I think Candlemass did it first. We were really into Candlemas and Trouble when we started, and Celtic Frost.

ME: Based on those last two things, how would you genrefy yourself?

AA: Malcolm Dome once called us Gondoliers of Gloom, which I loved! Somebody else called us Gothic Doom Classicist years ago. Paradise Lost. That's the only genre define for me. Paradise Lost is Paradise Lost.