Riding the endless waves...
To borrow a line from David Lynch's sci-fi classic Dune; “a beginning is a very delicate time”. So if you’re going to start a band, it’s always best to have a plan. Paradise understand this, as unlike most of the bands who emerge from Dalston's primordial soup, these guys seem to know exactly what they’re going for and have a pretty good idea of how they’ll be getting there.
Built around long-serving session players Tony and Joseph, Paradise inhabit their own rather ethereal corner of the musical universe. Blurring the lines between the soaring soundscapes of Popol Vuh and Spiritualized and the more straight-up, classic-sounding pop of Love and the Beach Boys, their music is a heady rush of shoegazy indie/electronica delivering a hit of pure, feel-good sunshine directly into your veins.
With their debut single ‘Endless Waves’ about to drop on Blue Rider records (worth picking up for the cover of Slapp Happy’s Blue Flower on the B-side alone), the band are due to play their first headline show ever at The Victoria next week, but not before I had a chance to pick Tony's brains for a bit first.
Paradise - Endless Wave/Blue Flower by Paradiselovesyou
How did Paradise come about then?
Tony: Well, me and Joe are the core of the band and we met when both session players for Jeremy Jay. We worked with him for about two years, toured Europe a couple of times and wrote a couple of albums with him so we ended up knowing each other pretty well.
We’d wanted to start a band for a while, basically because we’d had a lot of experience being in other people’s bands, but we’d never really done our own thing. Obviously we’d both bonded over music, so we came up with a few demos and a mixtape pretty quickly. It’s all come on from there really.
You and Joe have come from quite different musical backgrounds. How does it balanace out in Paradise?
It’s quite a nice dynamic really. I mean, the reason why we felt strongly about starting Paradise is because we have a mutual love of certain types of music, and we hold the same aesthetics when it comes to how music should sound and feel.
We both really like the mood and atmosphere of quite droney music like krautrock and electronic, but we’re also quite keen on straight-up pop songs, so the band is really an attempt to bring these two things together.
So have you managed to play any shows yet, or will the single release be the first?
Yeah, we’ve played a couple of shows already, but they’ve been fairly low key. When we started the band a year and a half ago we played some shows at the Shacklewell and Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen, just to get our profile up.
Obviously on the back of that we got management and a lot of people we knew in the industry advised us to take a bit of time off and really try and develop the sound more before we pushed it so we took a bit of a break to work things out. So yeah, the show at The Victoria will be the first show since our “re-launch”.
It's quite rare nowadays for people to build a product before putting themselves out there – a lot of bands just jump straight into playing shows.
I think quite a lot of DIY bands in East London make the mistake of getting a bit carried away by the initial buzz. It’s like they start getting press and offered some decent shows before they’ve worked out what they want to sound like, and before they know it their labelled as ‘this sort of band’ or ‘that sort of band’, which is very hard to break away from.
So if you were forever labelled a drone band, you’d be OK with that?
Ermm, I guess we’re OK that. It’s quite weird being labelled anything because we have such broad influences so it’s always a bit strange when someone picks out and focuses on just one particular aspect of your music, but that’s always going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So how did the Endless Wave single come about?
We actually wrote that song quite a while ago. I think it really captures that spark of energy that happens when you first start a band, so it’s the perfect song to have as a first single.
We’ve been really lucky with it really, we managed to get some studio time at XL Records, which was a really big learning experience for us, they gave us 2 or 3 weeks on and off to really have a crack at nailing down our sound. One of the A and R people working there at the time had just started a single label called Blue Rider and she asked if we wanted to put it out on there. We’re really excited about it, because it means we get to grow with a label.
The B-side is a Slapp Happy cover, right?
Yeah, it’s one of our favourite songs. We really think the sentiments of the lyrics really capture how we feel; it’s the perfect song for our vibes. The Mazzy Star version is an amazing cover, and we wanted to add some electronic elements and make it our own.
It’s a bit risky putting a cover on your first release though?
Yeah, we had a bunch of other songs we’d recorded that we could have put as the B-side, but they weren’t really developed properly so we decided to keep them back for the album. I dunno, a cover seemed like a really cool move.
It worked for the Futureheads.
Exactly.
Paradise's debut 7" 'Endless Wave/Blue Flowers' is out now.
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