“It was strange, we were kind of mingling backstage with Kiss and it was like, ‘What is this? How did this happen?” laughs Gregor. They were soon added to a raft of festival bills across Europe, the most prestigious being the last-ever Monsters Of Rock at Castle Donington alongside the likes of Kiss and Ozzy Osbourne in 1996. The success of the record turned Paradise Lost into a very big deal indeed.
It was the last time that you could get an album that would sell six figures in multiple countries.” It wasn’t just our peak, it was a peak for metal and our industry really. It’s not really given the same kudos these days, but back then chart placings really made the big cheeses sit up and take notice, and that can open doors for you it can get you on tours and on festival bills, which it definitely did for us. In fact, midweek I believe it was Top 10, and that had a lot of industry insiders going, ‘Wow! A Top 10 metal act!’… even though it didn’t quite make Top 10. “It was quite unobtainable to get that kind of success around that time for a metal band over here. “In the UK especially, it was pretty shocking for us,” Gregor recalls. The record landed at No.16 in the UK albums chart, a staggering achievement for a group who, only five years prior, were as grim and guttural a doom band as you can imagine. When Draconian Times was released on June 12, 1995, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, and the profile of the band soared.
Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes: (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns) To be fair, we couldn’t have used anything else from that documentary because it was all batshit crazy!” “There was a little bit of dissent here and there but, even with all the red tape, Nick really wanted to use it. “Our manager at the time wasn’t very happy about it,” he tells us. These days such a move would definitely cause outrage but, as Gregor explains, even in the looser days of the mid 90s it caused something of a storm behind the scenes. What we didn’t realise is that, to get that on there, we had to effectively pay the families of his victims royalties from the song. I had no idea it was going to be such a ballache to get, but we got it and put it in the song. “We had just watched this Charles Manson documentary, The Man Who Killed the Sixties, and there was this really poignant bit where he sums the whole documentary up and we thought that we should use it. “We thought that the breakdown section, the little acoustic bit, needed something in there,” says Gregor. The ‘thing’ that really elevated Forever Failure and made it stand out was the use of a sample from notorious cult leader Charles Manson at both the start and during mid-section, adding to the haunting quality of the song. I was trying to write this doom metal song and he was pushing me in this more flamboyant direction, which he was doing vocally as well, so it just became this… thing.” So, as we wrote the song, he pushed me down that route. If you don’t know it, it’s some odd little folk song from the 60s, and this solo that became Forever Failure had this similar sort of crescendo to it. “We used to write and record on a tape recorder, starting with the riff usually, but I played Nick this solo and he said it reminded him of a weird little song like ‘I Left A Cake Out In the Rain’ by Richard Harris. “The first thing that was written for the song was the solo, which is weird, because that is usually the last thing to come,” Gregor remembers.
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