The kings of Gothic Metal return with this their tenth and most raw album in many a long day. Gregor Mackintosh spoke with Metal Chaos ahead of the albums release to give the low down on what "In Requiem" has in store for those faithful followers of all things bleak!

Initially the first thing that strikes you when you listen to the album is that it is a lot more raw, organic and stripped down sounding. Also something we did very deliberately was not to edit everything until it is perfect. There is a trend in metal music today, and we have done it in the past to pro tools their drums so they are perfectly in tune with their guitars etc. On this record we deliberately recorded the drums in like a day and a half, the bass in a day and guitars in a couple of days, and all without editing. We wanted to capture an almost live raw feel to the album and not edit the life out of the record. The guy who mixed it, Mike Fraser, did a great job of capturing that sense of rawness but also a very wide sound to it. I mean half the battle with this record was to stop people messing with it. We had to say to engineers not to edit anything, we just want to record it. It isn't a perfect album and that was the whole idea. It's way less commercial I think.

Of course this could be a nightmare for some labels, but because we were signed to Century Media for this one it wouldn't be such a trial for them as they know this market very well. A good thing about being on Century Media I've noticed, as we'd been on major labels for the last nine years, is that they don't ring you up while your in the studio and say we need a single. I hate that! It really gets in the way of song writing and recording as you start to think about the commerciality of your songs. Which is of course a very bad thing. So this time around we did completely the opposite, we just didn't think about making any singles but make a strong album. An interesting album. This album is less catchy that stuff we have done before, but if you scratch the surface it's a little more interesting. The when it was finished we gave it to Century Media and said of you want to put a single out, put one out. It was up to them to choose. So it makes for a far less stressful recording period.

We are not the best people to ask when it comes time to commerciality and what people like. Nor are we the best people to ask what to do in a business sense, that is best left to other people. We just do the album and leave it up to other people. So long as they are not asking us to dress up in banana costumes then we're OK with it.

To record the video for “The Enemy” you chose Yalta in the Crimean peninsula and director Edward 209. How was it to work with Edward 209, as he is famed for is bizarre opinions on making videos?

It was actually my choice to get Edward involved. I'd heard of him before from some other videos he'd done. Believe it or not he emailed me out of the blue to just check out his stuff. So I checked all the other videos he'd done and I thought he'd done some interesting stuff. Granted a bit weird, a bit off the wall and by no means commercial. So I forwarded his details to our management and told them that when we come to do a video can they put forward this guys name and see what happens? Century Media were all for it, so they contacted him and he said he wanted to do it, but wanted to do it right on the coast of the Black Sea. We thought why not as we'd never been there, and we had great fun shooting the video. Which is unusual as they are usually a real pain in the arse to do. It was a great laugh. We had stunt men showing us how to do stunts, which was like being a big kid again. We really did spend the whole 2 days laughing which when you see the video is strange as it is the most depressing thing I've seen in my life.

Rhys Fulber again produced the album. What makes Rhys such an integral part of the recording process for Paradise Lost?

When we were writing the material for this album we didn't have Rhys in mind. We were thinking we wanted this album to sound different, so maybe Rhys wasn't the right man for the job. When we started looking around for someone to produce it and after speaking to a few people it became apparent that it's better the devil you know. Rhys was a big fan of the band for a long time. We meet him in 1995 at the Dynamo Festival in Holland. He really knows his stuff as far as out material goes in addition to being an accomplished musician himself. He as much as anything wants to hear his favourite Paradise Lost album. So from respect he is good to have around as a third party. He is not a producer that comes in and changes everything or wants to change the way we write songs. He is someone who we trust, and trust his opinion. It was also his idea to use Mike Fraser and we thought the combination of the two could be really good. It was a real honour to work with Mike Fraser, and for him to say he wanted to do the album. He has mixed some of my favourite records. I mean he did "Sonic Temple" by The Cult. Getting to meet him in Vancouver at Brian Adam's studio had us in awe.  He is real old school. You either have his qualities or you haven't. I have worked with a lot of engineers and these days everyone of them needs a screen to look at, but Mike turns all the screens over and just listens. It is very rare to see some just listen to music these days, and he really brought something to the mix that brought the music to life.

Personally I really like it. I mean at times it can get a little tedious if you're say double tracking some guitar parts. Ultimately I really like it, and as we usually go for places in the middle of nowhere you tend to stay focused. We've recorded in lots of different places and if you record in the middle of a cities you will get side tracked and end up getting pissed all the time. Obviously it's not good for the financial status of the band, not when you're paying a grand a day for a studio. So the Chapel is secluded and keeps you focused on what you are doing. Nick and myself then went to a place just outside Vancouver. It's an island just outside Vancouver itself. We flew into Vancouver and took this ferry across to this place called Gibsons; it was where the Beachcombers was filmed in the Seventies. We were in this studio where you over look lakes and mountains and it as a real nice place to record. From there we then went to the centre of Vancouver to Brian Adams place to do the mix. It was nice to travel around and see all these nice places while recording. 

We usually have a fair amount of input into the designs, but we had a huge amount of input into this one. Initially we just gave the artist the title, "In Requiem", and asked him to come up with as many images as he could that he interpreted from the title. The original meaning of the word requiem was a celebration of death. It was then taken by the great composers and has become synonymous with lamentation or a song for the dead but he took all these literal meanings and applied it to the artwork. Some of the images that came back we didn't like and some came back that we really liked, from there we went back and forth to tweak the images a bit until we were happy with them. We then took the most striking one, which is the one with the broken angel figure and put it on the front as we thought it was a strong image. Then when you see the whole packaging there are a lot of the other images incorporated in it, which while nothing like the cover have still the same interpretation of the title of the album.   

You are credited with the writing of all the music for the band; do you ever feel there is a weight of expectation or pressure upon you when it comes time to writing new material?

I don't worry about it all. I'm a great believer in destiny and everything happens for a reason. I can try as hard as I like to try and appeal to whatever audience I want but at the end of the day it is in the hands of the Gods. No one knows what is going to happen. The only honest thing to do is write some music you want to hear that makes you feel good. Put it out there and see what happens. That is the only honest way to do it. Some people are very good at writing for commercial purposes but not me. I better at writing stuff I like and then see what happens. It's all about the style of playing that shapes it into a Paradise Lost song. I have a certain style of playing the guitar as do all the other guys in the band, and we couldn't change that even if we wanted to. For example "Gothic" was released in 1991 but if play that back to back with the new album you can still tell it is the same guys playing on the record. Purely because we have a certain style that is ingrained in us and there is nothing we can do about it.

I usually come up with a basic song or parts of a song which is when I give it to Nick. He then comes up with a melody line and some lyrics, he'll then give it back to me and we'll to and fro for a while. That will go on until we think we've got the beginning of a good song, then we'll send it to the rest of the band to see what they think. If they agree it's worth getting together and rehearse it, then we go and do that and if the song works in the live environment of the rehearsal room then we'll work on it until it's done. It's a case of one song down and onto the next one. We'll do that until we've got enough material, or so we think, before we head into a studio. We'll rehearse them for three or so weeks before recording as we want to make sure they are the best they can be. We're our own worst critics, we don't want anything to slip through the net that could be embarrassing in a years time. 

I'm pretty philosophical about it really. I mean they are all part of our history and have no regrets. In nearly every interview I've done have asked me about the "Host" album. I've been saying that whether you like it or not it was recorded nearly nine / ten years ago and you're still bringing it up. Which can only mean it caused a reaction good or bad. That is what I think about most of the records. I'd rather have a record that caused some kind of reaction than something that just floated on by. You learn from your mistakes, and you take those lessons to the next album.

Your recent show at the London Koko was recorded for an up and coming DVD. How did this concept come about? How pleased were you with the show?

Yeah, very pleased with the show. Initially it wasn't our idea to do the DVD, but something that someone else mentioned to us. Once we got thinking about the idea we thought playing everything from "Gothic" to the new album and see how it gelled together was an interesting concept. It was also an occasion to air a few songs we hadn't even thought about in ten years. We played the song "Gothic" form the "Gothic" album and we had to had to go an re-record the female vocals and strings for the show, as the originals are in some vault in central Europe. So it was quite a lengthy process to recreate some of these songs live but I'm glad we did, and to play them alongside the new songs  amazed me how compatible they were. I worked pretty well. It also helps that I love the venue, it used to be the Camden Palace and just love the old music hall style venue. The crowd were great, and it was great to see someone who wasn't born when "Gothic" was written singing along to the song.

In those situations how do you go about selecting the set list, as effectively you need to have a ‘best of’ feel about it? Irrespective of whether you want to play the songs or not.

Initially we had a poll where people were saying which songs they wanted. Some suggestions were a bit to off the wall as some songs were so obscure only one person would know it; and some suggestion were quite good. Some of the songs we put in the set were there because the show was advertised as a definitive set and some people took that as we'd play all obscure songs, but to me definitive suggests songs that shaped our career. So we picked two or three songs from each of our albums that we thought defined our sound at that point in time. So from the "Gothic" album we chose "Eternal" and "Gothic", from "Shades Of God" we chose "Pity The Sadness" and "As I Die" and so on. That was the general consensus and we mixed it all up in a completely roundabout order to such a degree we opened with the new single which wasn't even out. Which was a bit of a risk, but it is such a good live song we just risked it. I think we pulled it off and the crowd were responsive.

November 2007 sees the band embark on an extensive US tour supporting Nightwish. Do you feel the US audiences ‘get’ Paradise Lost? Is the USA a place you enjoy touring?

My views have changed over the years for a mixture of reasons. The first time we went to the States we went with Morbid Angel in the early 1990's and it was a bit of a disaster. We were involved in a very narrow minded scene then, and when we went to America all Morbid Angel fans wanted to hear was things as fast as they could be played, and we were playing as slow as possible. It was a kind of clash of interests. Then we went back a couple of years ago with Opeth and had a really positive experience. I'm hoping the same for the Nightwish tour. A lot of that is down to the internet. Things like MySpace and various other mediums opened American eyes to European music, and visa versa. The world is a much smaller place now and the Americans are sitting up and taking notice of a lot more things. They're slowly realising slowly where some of their music came from. A lot of bands have got big in America that I never in a million years would have believed would make it, so it is an interesting and exciting place to go. It is very different in different areas. I mean if you go to the mid west or deep south you will get different attitudes to the east coast, but that is no different than traveling around Europe. I have got a good feeling for the Nightwish tour, despite their music being quite different to ours we have played with them before and get along with them as people. That is often more important when you are on the road with people.

At the moment with it being summer festival period, tours aren't being booked. No one wants to tour while the summer festivals are on because everyone is wanting to do the festival circuit. We're getting lots of festival offers in and being booked for those, so between now and the end of August we are going to do as many festivals in as many countries as we can. Then from the first week of September we are going to do a full on European tour through until October, then it is off with Nightwish. This year we will try and get to places we haven't been to in a while like Israel, where we haven't been in over ten years.

2008 will mark the 20th anniversary of the bands creation. Can we expect anything to mark this landmark? Did you ever think you’d be still making music 20 years on?

Most definitely but we don't know how yet. Our manager keeps coming up with really lame ideas, but when he comes up with a good one I'm sure we'll grasp onto it. We do want to celebrate the occasion as people keep asking us how does it feel? It's gone very fast. It seems like only the other day we toured "Icon". I guess if you're having a good time then the time goes pretty fast. We're very fortunate I suppose. We never really look past the immediate future as you never know what is around the corner. When we started we were nothing more than a bunch of school friends who enjoyed listening to music, then began playing together and couldn't believe it when someone wanted to put us on record. Our entire career has been based upon circumstance and accident. We were the pioneers of Gothic Metal but if by that they mean we were the first band to call ourselves Gothic Metal, yes we were but we only said it was because Rough Trade didn't want to put the record out. They didn't want to put "Gothic" out, as they didn't think it was Death Metal or Doom Metal they asked us what we wanted to call it? So we just said Gothic Metal, they stuck a sticker on it calling it Gothic Metal and that was it.