Paradise Lost singer Nick Holmes admits that he once told chart-topping, multi-platinum-selling rockers Snow Patrol that they’d never be successful.
Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, the vocalist, who’s fronted his Yorkshire-based goth metal five-piece since 1988, says that he encountered members of the Northern Irish/Scottish band at an afterparty before they were famous.
After finding out what they were called, he cast the wildly inaccurate prediction that they’d never “get anywhere”.
Holmes tells us: “We were at an afterparty in the lobby of a famous London hotel and, because I’d had a few drinks, I got a bit chatty. I asked one of them, ‘What’s the name of your band?’ He said, ‘Snow Patrol.’
“I remember saying, ‘Fucking Jesus! You won’t get anywhere with that fucking name!’ Then they went on to be one of the biggest bands in the world and the guy [guitarist/keyboardist Johnny McDaid] married Courteney Cox.”
For the record, Snow Patrol have sold upwards of 10 million albums worldwide and topped the UK charts twice. Their third album, 2003’s Final Straw, has been certified platinum five times over in the UK. McDaid joined the band in 2011 and has been dating Cox since 2013, but the pair are actually unmarried.
It wasn’t the first time Paradise Lost’s crystal ball was well off the mark. Holmes admits to Hammer that his band’s lead guitarist Greg Mackintosh was unimpressed by nu metal pioneers Korn.
The singer laughs: “When Korn were just starting to pick up a bit of steam, Greg said, if they get big, he’ll eat his hat. He’s still trying to get through it!”
Paradise Lost will release their long-awaited 17th studio album, Ascension, on September 19 via Nuclear Blast. During a Hammer interview last month, Holmes spoke about the new album’s anti-religious themes.
“The whole thing that Ascension’s about is, basically, you live a bad life, then all of a sudden you can believe in God and say a prayer, and you’ll be forgiven for being a twat when you were alive,” he explained.
“I kind of like the fact that people need to do that, and they’re so desperate and terrified of dying. Religion is all about dying anyway, or the fear of dying. Someone made something up once and said, ‘If you believe in this, you’ll be better off when you die.’ That’s where it comes from.”
A European tour to promote Ascension will kick off at Manchester’s New Century Hall on October 9.
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