Paradise Lost – Interview met Greg Mackintosh (guitars, keyboards)
Greg Mackintosh: “Music paints pictures to me and we try and do the same with our music”
Vijf jaar na ‘Obsidian’, dat uitkwam in volle coronatijd, is Paradise Lost klaar met hun zeventiende studiovrucht. Ditmaal draagt de geluidsdrager de gevleugelde titel ‘Ascension’. Beluistering van dit epos brengt je gegarandeerd in hogere sferen indien je enige tristesse en weemoed de baas kunt, want Paradise Lost is in optima forma en ze hebben alle elementen die hen zo legendarisch maken gebundeld in een uur intense doom/death/gothic metal. Een gesprek met gitarist, producer en componist Greg Mackintosh is altijd een hartelijk moment en ook nu vernemen we leuke anekdotes over de totstandkoming van ‘Ascension’, voorwaar een album dat hoog zal eindigen in menige jaarlijst!
Vera Matthijssens Ι 23 september 2025
How are you doing?
Pretty good. I got many days off for the last four months. Not always into music, but just enjoying home life, just doing boring things like gardening and reading a book and relaxing a little bit. I’ll fly out again to Norway tomorrow.
The previous album was ‘Obsidian’. That is already five years ago, but you know as well as I that you were not silent. We had Host, the side project and you recorded ‘Icon’ again. Did it have a kind of influence on making the material for the new album ‘Ascension’?
In a way yes I think. About three years ago, I had six or seven songs written for a new Paradise Lost record, but then I just decided I did not like them. I didn’t think it was good enough. So I scrapped everything and then I just stopped writing. We were doing some shows and touring a little bit and then we did the ‘Icon 30’ record and it kind of taught me a little bit about how I thought back in the days, back in maybe 1992, 1993. Over the years my style changed a bit and song-writing changed. I wanted to try to get that headspace again. I think it did inspire me a little bit. Not for all the songs, but it made a spark I could start writing again and most of it was made last autumn and winter. After we had done all the ‘Icon’ stuff, it gave us all a spark that inspired us.
A good one, because it is an iconic album (to remain in the same terminology)…
(laughs) Thank You…
When I started listening to the first song ‘Serpent On The Cross’ I was lost. It is so impressive!
Oh you liked it… That is definitely an ‘Icon’ type song, kind of more ‘Shades Of God’ actually which is one of our least thought about records, compared to ‘Gothic’ or ‘Icon’. So I was trying to do something a little bit in the vein of that record really. We went back to our roots with this record, we went back to the name of the band Paradise Lost. It is named after the book, what’s the book about, what kind of subjects does it deal with, what is relevant today that was in the book, or even previously in religious texts? So we really embraced the religious connotations and themes without being religion itself you know. The title ‘Ascension’ refers to that as well, ‘Serpent On The Cross’. It is all very religious stuff, but it is more the thinking behind those religious things, not the religion itself. So for instance ‘Ascension’ to me is probably a medical condition. It sounds bizarre. It is something I experienced myself when your self just detaches from your body and you become almost immune to dark force. Some people call it a mental break, some call it whatever, and some people call it ‘finding God’ in ascension. It is time to see what the truth is in I guess religious allegories you know. So it is that kind of thing.
Rising about the earthly suffers it is as well I guess…
Yeah. To me it is all about this. When I listen to music, what I talk about afterwards is in visual terms, which I know some people do, but not a lot of people. When something is really heavy, people say it is like a ten ton hammer. I don’t think like that. I think like ‘oh it is like a storm coming over the sea’ or something. It paints pictures to me and we try and do the same with our music, although it sometimes work and it sometimes does not work for other people, but when I am writing it, it always had some kind of visual connection. For instance ‘Silence Like The Grave’. When I first played Nick the music for that, he said ‘it sounds like a war, it sounds like a battle’, the rise and fall of empires. So that is what the song became about.
‘Salvation’ is also a very rich song, the leads are eminent in it… the contrast between growls and clean vocals is amazing on this record, because there is a real contrast, almost like shine and rain…
I am quite lucky about Nick as a vocalist, because he can do about three or four different styles of singing. That is easier to create songs, working with different dynamics in the song. When you want to sound in a certain way, we have multiple vocal styles, which is really cool. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I have heard the comments about ‘Serpent On The Cross’, the first song, saying ‘I hope he isn’t growling all the way through’, but then a few years ago, people said ‘I hope the growls come back’. So you cannot win sometimes, but that is not the point. The point is we do it from a dynamic perspective. We do it to paint pictures. He has quite a lot of different ranges he can compete with and that is good for me as a song-writer.
That makes it more interesting to listen to, because if everything is monotonous, then you return to the kind of robot like music and I don’t like that…
I always think: if everything is super heavy, then nothing is heavy. If everything is slow, nothing is slow. You need variation to make the heavy stuff heavier and the slow stuff slower in a variation.
Your guitar leads are very melodic, it always gives the listener a kind of beacon to return to…
I come up with guitar lines like singing lines. I just sing along with the song. If Nick is singing a catchy melody then I play a guitar part that might interact like that. For me a guitar line is like a vocal line.
Let us focus on the quieter songs now, acoustic guitars in ‘Lay A Wreath Upon The World’ and ‘Savage Days’ is also one of the highlights…
‘Savage Days’ was when we completed the album. This is like a darker version of our song ‘One Second’. I wasn’t trying to do that, but it just happened. And for the acoustics on ‘Lay A Wreath Upon The World’, I was just playing acoustic guitar in my kitchen with a microphone. I came up with the part and recorded it all, just with this microphone and then when I became to record the song actually, in the studio, I couldn’t do it sound that good as the one in my kitchen. So what you hear on the record is me just playing acoustic guitar in my kitchen (chuckles). It was a certain sound I could get and you cannot get it again, you know. So we decided to use it.
The video clip for ‘Serpent On The Cross’ should be very special, because I have seen on Facebook that the guy who made it, Lars Kristoffer Hormander, used several techniques. He mentioned something about AI… it sounded rather complex…
Me personally, I don’t like the second video. I don’t like the video for ‘Serpent On The Cross’.
It is flashy and modern of course…
Yeah it is not my thing. The first video, the video for ‘Silence Like The Grave’, I really love. That has atmosphere, but then we had to go on tour with King Diamond. We were touring and the record label said ‘we need another video’. We said ‘well, we cannot do anything, we are away on tour’, so the record company and the manager decided and said ‘we will find someone to do the video’ and then they sent us the video and I said ‘what’s this? I really don’t like it’ and they said ‘oh it is too late, because we already have to release it tomorrow’. Well, again, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
There might be an audience for it, it is flashy…
It winded me up at first, but now I think ‘okay, okay, hopefully people understand that you sometimes don’t have control over things’ you know…
On your birthday you have played at Graspop, isn’t it?
20th of June is my birthday, I played Graspop a lot on my birthday (laughs). I think I have played Graspop about five or six times on my birthday over the years. Graspop is my favourite festival, especially I had a really good time on stage this time. I think there was a good atmosphere in the tent this year.
What are your memories on supporting King Diamond?
It was interesting. The good parts were that the crowd was really respectful and nice. The best thing was the band, like Andy LaRocque and King Diamond and the rest of the guys were really lovely people. I think it would have been better for Paradise Lost, I think musically we better suit with Mercyful Fate than with King Diamond, because that is much more theatrical. Maybe some people did not get Paradise Lost, because King Diamond had all the castles and all the stuff on stage, but I had a good time doing it.
The story with the drummers does not stop. I cannot follow anymore…
Me neither (laughs)
I know that Guido Zima is gone after two years and now there is another one, but he has been in Paradise Lost already, Jeff Singer…
Jeff played drums for us for quite a long time a few years ago. In the early 2000’s, he played it for a few years, but he left because he had young children. When he joined the band he had no children, then he had three children close to each other and he could not tour anymore, so that’s why he left. It is a good reason for leaving. But he kept in contact with us now and then over the years and remained a friend, With Guido we recorded the album, he did a great job on the album, but his personality just did not fit with the band. He had a very fiery temper. There were a lot of arguments and I don’t have time for arguments in life anymore. I don’t need arguments. We need to be around people and just relax. That’s why that happened.
It is funny when you look at Metal Archives: still the same four people and many drummers, well, it is not like the main man was replaced many times…
If you see the pictures, the new photographs of the band for the new record, you see it is just the four of us, because we realized that it is the same four guys since 1988, but there are no constant changes and we want to keep it like that.
And they are still enthusiastic headbangers on stage when you see Paradise Lost. Always amusing…
Yeah that’s true. I enjoy it more now than when I was a kid in my early twenties. I was always like ‘oh I don’t like being away from home’, missing family and all the rest of it and now I am really relaxed about it and enjoy and live for the moment. That is fun. If I could I would give my younger self advice: just relax and live in the moment, enjoy it while it is here, don’t worry about things you cannot control.
I think you have to get older to get that self development
That’s it and you can never tell it to someone, you have to live it yourself.
There is an EU tour coming and I a very glad that you round off the first leg in Belgium…
That’s right. We usually do six or seven weeks tours through Europe. For me the last two weeks of the tour is too much. So we said to our manager: we want to do three or four week long tours, but can we do it in three parts? So we are going to do three European tours. We are going to do the first one in October and the last date is in Belgium and next year we are going to do the second EU tour where we do more places that we didn’t do the first time and then we are going to do a third tour where we are doing more places. We get to play in more countries that way. If you do three or four weeks you can maintain your enthusiasm for the shows.
The cover painting should be something from the 19th century… How did you find that?
We are familiar with it for quite a while. I had it as printing on my wall. It is called ‘the court of death’ by George Frederic Watts. I love the colours firstly, because it is like the baroque reds and greens and gold and I thought that would make a great impact and these colours would work well with this record. And secondly, when I decided that the album would be called ‘Ascension’, when you look at this painting, you see the figure in the middle that looks a bit like an angel, it looks very calm, and seems like it achieved enlightenment or ascending to a kind of nirvana and the figures around it, around the angel, all seem wrapped with grief or in turmoil, in chaos. And I thought that would really suit the title ‘Ascension’. The Watts gallery still exists, so we asked them if we could get the rights to use the original painting art and they said yes. I am going to go next year and see the original painting in the gallery when I get some time off.
Where is it?
It is in the south of England somewhere. A girl who works at our management office went there last year and she said it is really huge. The original painting is very large.
It suits the album, just like ‘Ascension’ as title suits Paradise Lost very much…
I really think so, I was really pleased how this album came together eventually. It took five years, but it started to come together really fast. We had a very strong idea what we wanted the album to sound like and look like and be. When it was all done, it was all very good, apart from the second video (chuckles).
Are there coming other videos later?
Yeah we just filmed a couple of weeks ago, we filmed a performance video for the third single which will be for ‘Tyrants Serenade’. That’s going to be the third single and the video will come out in two weeks I think. My favourite song of the record is called ‘Salvation’ and it is the slowest song and Nuclear Blast promised me around Christmas time and they will maybe doing a video for that song as well, because I see it as Christmas song or anti-Christmas song. I would love to have a video of that around Christmas time.
