Latest news with #ParadiseLost
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The story of Within Temptation (so far)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Sharon den Adel laughs a lot as she speaks. She makes for entertaining company and seems to exude both a calm, confident air and an overwhelmingly positive attitude. She looks to be on the verge of tears, however, as she recalls the UK tour that was her worst ever moment in Within Temptation, the band she co-founded with her high school sweetheart, husband-to-be, songwriting partner and guitarist Robert Westerholt. The pair had been the beating heart of the band since its inception in 1996, but the pressures of burgeoning success and combining a simultaneous romantic and working relationship had simply become too much. It was 2007, and their fourth album, The Heart Of Everything, had propelled them to worldwide success. It debuted at No.1 in the Netherlands, making it their second album to top the charts in their homeland, but they had also broken into the US Billboard charts for the first time. The record was widely seen as a pinnacle of symphonic metal, and it paved the way for a major world tour. Behind the scenes, though, things had reached an impasse. 'We had America done, and then a European tour, and it was terrible,' Sharon recalls. 'The tour wasn't terrible, we had a lot of success, but [Robert and I] were not in a good place together. Eventually we broke up and we still had to go through England. And that was the worst tour ever, because we had already split up and still had to do it. It was agony, but I think the audience loved it, because I never had so much passion as at that time. I was just screaming it all out!' The period nearly saw the end of Within Temptation, but the pair decided there was a lot worth salvaging, in both musical and personal terms. They set about redefining how they could work and live together, and the band continued to cement their ongoing position as one of Europe's most successful metal bands. Worldwide arena tours and chart-topping albums seemed a long way away when the members of Within Temptation first got together in the small town of Waddinxveen in South Holland. Sharon was a grunge kid who was singing in a band project in school. Schoolmate Robert Westerholt, meanwhile, had a series of 'proper' bands, and Sharon was happy to jump in when the singer of one of them skipped one too many sessions. After morphing through a few more versions, Within Temptation were born, and they quickly began work on their 1997 debut album, Enter. As well as Sharon's soaring vocals, the album made use of Robert's gruff death metal growls and heavy doom riffs. The symphonic elements were yet to crystalise, but there was a darkly lustrous sweep that owed more than a little to the arch goth-metal of Paradise Lost's aptly titled Gothic. The band embarked on a brief tour of the Netherlands, and their fifth ever gig was at Dynamo Open Air, which at the time was one of Europe's biggest festivals. 'It was the most amazing moment at that point in my life, but it was also the most scary, because I had no clue how anything worked. We were still figuring things out and we were playing for 10,000 people in a tent,' Sharon recalls today. 'Our record label was great at promoting us, and when we came to the festival there wasn't a wall that didn't have my face on it. It's like, 'Oh my God, I see myself a thousand times. But there were 10,000 people going, 'Who the heck are this band and why is everybody talking about them?'' Even so, playing in a metal band in the Netherlands in the late 90s was more a calling than a career plan. The likes of Pestilence and The Gathering had enjoyed limited international success, but it did not look like a fast track to fame and fortune, and in the band's early days Sharon also worked at a fashion company. As a child she had dreamed of being a designer, but practicalities funnelled her into the management side – until Within Temptation gave her the chance to combine two of her greatest passions. 'When we started with this very epic sound, I felt like, 'This is my chance.' I always felt like it fit the music. If you make epic-sounding music, you need an epic dress as well,' Sharon says. She remains heavily involved in the band's strong visual presentation to this day, even if she had to nudge her bandmates at certain points along the way. 'We started in pirate blouses,' she says. 'And one of them I made myself for Robert. Actually, it was one of the pieces that I had to deliver to get my degree.' Their second album, 2000's Mother Earth, was a watershed moment for Within Temptation and the nascent symphonic metal scene in general. The sweeping Ice Queen single became a surprise hit, and the band found themselves rising stars in Europe. 2004 follow-up The Silent Force continued the band's ascent as they further explored grandiose elements. Over in Finland, Nightwish were doing something not too dissimilar, but Sharon insists there was no rivalry between the two bands. 'It was in the minds of journalists and it was rivalry that they created,' she shrugs. Sharon would later duet with original Nightwish vocalist Tarja Turunen on Within Temptation track Paradise (What About Us?), and Tarja joined the Dutch band as a special guest on parts of last year's Bleed Out tour. 'Our paths didn't cross for a long while, which is strange, because there were so few women in metal back then,' Sharon says. 'It would have been nice to have someone like her to confide in. It is sometimes tough to be on the road with only men.' A notable tour that didn't feature men only was the band's first trip to the US, where they played alongside Lacuna Coil, The Gathering, In This Moment, Stolen Babies and Kylesa on a tour dubbed The Hottest Chicks In Metal Tour 2007. 'I didn't know it was the Hottest Chicks tour until I was on the airplane going over to America,' Sharon says. 'I found it hilarious. It's just a way to sell the tour, of course, and I understand where it comes from, but there would never be The Hottest Men In Metal Tour.' That tour was in support of 2007's The Heart Of Everything, which saw the band hit the pinnacle of their pure symphonic metal era. The US leg saw them playing small clubs, but their profile was growing, and in Europe they were selling out theatres and appearing at major festivals such as France's Hellfest, Austria's Nova Rock and Download in the UK. They were now major stars, but they were never really a band for rock star shenanigans. 'We had the occasional private jet moment,' says Sharon with a laugh. 'I remember playing the Desert Rock festival in Dubai, and all the bands were picked up in these huge Hummers in different colours. We were treated like royalty. You can enjoy it, but you have to realise it's not real life. It will ruin you in the end if you buy into it.' Despite the growing success, they avoided many of the temptations of the road. Where some bands have drug dealers on speed dial, Within Temptation would travel with their racquets and would occasionally employ a professional tennis coach to come out to them. The fact that Sharon and Robert had welcomed their first child together also helped keep them grounded, but added to the pressures on the couple, which came to a head on the tour for Heart Of Everything and their subsequent, if ultimately temporary, split. 'It was something that was bound to happen, I guess, because we've been school sweethearts since we were 18. You grow up and you're in a different place, a different person,' Sharon sighs. 'We just grew apart because you do everything together. You write together, you perform together, you have a family together. And I do not suggest anyone does that. You need to have space on your own to develop, but also to have something different to talk about with your partner.' There followed several months of soul-searching that Sharon describes as 'the heaviest and the darkest period of us being together'. The song In And Out of Love that Sharon recorded with Dutch DJ Armin van Buuren was a reflection on the process, and her first real inkling that she might want to do something outside Within Temptation. Eventually though, Sharon and Robert got back together and looked at new ways of working within the band. 'He said, 'I can't be in the band anymore if you want to have a relationship', and I said, 'I think that's a good thing, because we're like two captains on the boat and we are killing each other in front of everyone else,'' Sharon recalls. 'We had an Eastern European tour and we went without him. I said, 'You have to take care of Luna, our baby, and I'm going to go on tour and we'll figure it out when I come back.' When Sharon returned, they spent a few months figuring out how to make their relationship work. 'We were actually dating again a little bit, going out together again,' she says. 'That was a starting point.' The long-term solution involved Robert stepping back from touring completely to look after their expanding family, while remaining a pivotal songwriter. 'He does one-off things with us, but he doesn't miss really being on tour with us,' says Sharon. 'He's more the composer and he enjoys enjoying the show from afar.' Having taken the symphonic elements as far as they could on The Heart Of Everything, and the spectacular orchestra-accompanied Black Symphony show and live album, Within Temptation entered a more experimental phase. 2011's The Unforgiving was a concept album with related short films and comic books that embraced their 80s musical influences. 2014's Hydra was a many-headed beast packed with musical twists and guest appearances, the most surprising of which was And We Run featuring rapper Xzibit. 'I think we were testing ourselves through this whole time,' Sharon nods. 'It was that whole arc of wanting to try different things and to move on as a band. Just struggling to find our new identity a little bit. The Xzibit song drew some negativity but we loved it, and I still think it's a great song. I've always also liked the combination of rock and rap together, right from Aerosmith with Run DMC.' The cycle spun on, and at the end of another world tour supporting Hydra, the whole band found themselves burned out. The singer in particular found it difficult to return to Within Temptation and experienced crippling writer's block. 'I didn't feel it anymore, perhaps also because of things that were happening in my personal life,' she says. 'My dad was diagnosed with cancer and I felt the need to be at home a lot. At the same time, I needed to make a different kind of music, because I was in a different kind of emotional world.' The outcome was a solo project dubbed My Indigo, which resulted in an album of the same name. It was released, Sharon says, on the day of her dad's funeral. It was a more vulnerable and introspective work that also helped to unblock the creative channels, ultimately leading to new Within Temptation music in 2019's industrial-tinged Resist and their most recent album, 2023's Bleed Out. The latter could be seen as the band's most political release yet, written against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the title track dealing with the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by Iran's 'morality' police. Sharon also travelled to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to film a video for standalone single A Fool's Parade featuring Ukrainian artist Alex Yarmak. 'I felt it was pretty safe,' she recalls. 'We had a few air alerts while there, and I did get a bit of a scare, because it was a MiG apparently, and I was told they can have supersonic bombs that can destroy a specific area in a few seconds. So, OK, we're going down to the metro station now [to shelter].' For Sharon it was a profound experience, and another notable chapter in what has been an extraordinary career – and one that's certainly not over yet. 'Next year we'll have been in existence for 30 years,' she muses. 'I don't know how or even if we'll celebrate it, because mostly we never look back. We want to do a new album with new ideas again. That's the drug that we need, and it's all about looking forwards.' Within Temptation play Download and Wacken festivals this summer.
Arab News
2 days ago
- General
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: The Fetters of Rhyme
Author: Rebecca M. Rush In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from 'the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.' Milton, however, was not initiating a new line of thought — English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth's reign. 'The Fetters of Rhyme' traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s. Rebecca Rush uncovers the associations early modern readers attached to rhyming forms.
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Paradise lost? Today's teens miss out on beauty of yesterday's poetry
Good weather can only mean one thing: Leaving Cert English paper one. Soundings. The Planter's Daughter versus Paradise Lost. Emily Dickinson vibing on a funeral in her brain. Dylan Thomas's point-blank refusal to mourn. Paddy Kavanagh counting the bicycles headed down to Billy Brennan's yard, hornier than a goat, thirsty at the prospect of chasing a bit of skirt down Iniskeen Road on a July evening. Feeling nostalgic, I reached for a copy of the great green book and started to leaf through its fabled pages. First published in 1969, Soundings — more cultural touchstone than simple poetry anthology — had more reprints than the King James Bible. There isn't a house in Ireland built in the last 55 years that hasn't had a half dozen copies cycle through it. Notes, scribbled in pencil, about the margins. Arrows and underlines elucidating on curious metaphors. A girl's name. A heart with an arrow through it. The lovestruck doodles were poems all by themselves. An introduction from editor and academic Augustine Martin implored students to ignore the glossaries provided in the footnotes. 'Nobody — teacher, classmate, critic or parent — can read a poem for you,' Augustine warned. 'Ultimately, the reader himself must lay hold to the poem and experience it in the intimacy of his own mind. Unless he does this, the whole effort of teaching is at worst a fraud, at best a waste of time.' The front cover of the much-loved Soundings poetry book, which was part of the Leaving Cert English curriculum for many years. Strong words, and ones that my own English teacher taught by. To dare read the footnotes was a cowardly surrender to conformity. He would rather you die thinking Austin Clarke had genuinely lost a heifer if it meant you read the poem your way — even if you misunderstood it — so long as you didn't go straight to the bottom to see what the cheat-sheet said. Sadly, Soundings was dumped off the Leaving Cert English curriculum in 2000 after a significant revision of the English syllabus. This new module introduced a broader and more diverse range of texts, including contemporary authors, modern novels, and film studies. The aim was to modernise the curriculum and move beyond the traditional, predominantly male and canonical selections that characterised Soundings. While the reasoning was sound, one can't help wondering what students today and for the last 25 years have lost by being deprived of the exposure to some of the greatest minds in literature. When you're young and live in your own head, reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples can be quite formative. Especially if you had a teacher who brought it to life, as I had. What happened? Was Paradise Lost too dark, too apocalyptic, too critical of Man's first disobedience, to be trusted in the hands of an 18-year-old? Has the Department of Education ever watched an episode of Euphoria? Perhaps the straw that broke the lost heifer's back was The Planter's Daughter, Austin Clarke's love letter to a beauty so profound, it silenced entire pubs. Nowadays, a line of pure genius such as 'They say that her beauty/Was music in mouth' could be construed as a sentiment a little too close to outright objectification, and therefore be disqualified as leery misogynistic nonsense. If that's the calculation, then, oh, what a loss. Some German students visited our school during my secondary school years. I slow-danced with a young fraulein from Baden-Württemberg to The Pretenders I'll Stand by You at a disco in the town hall, and weeks later, in an effort to keep the romance alive until I was old enough to run away to the Black Forest to lumberjack, I wrote her a letter in which I may have told her that she was 'the Sunday in every week'. The scribbles in the margins were commonplace. In my defence, it was the pre-internet age, and we had bonded over our mutual love of poetry and Dawson's Creek. You miss all the shots you don't take. Weeks passed before a letter arrived with a German stamp on it. 'Why Sunday?' the fraulein asked, obviously unimpressed. 'It's the worst day of the week. It is long and boring, and I get depressed because I have to go back to school on Monday.' Bloody Germans, one might say, but here was a valuable lesson in her cold-eyed critique. 'No poem means quite the same thing to any two readers,' Augustine Martin said, 'or even the same reader at different periods of his life.' The fraulein read it her way, and I read it mine. Nostalgia is a seductive sauce, but I can't help thinking Soundings was something worth keeping in the schoolbags of our kids. How else will teenagers come to know that "beauty is truth, truth beauty'? And "that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know". So too, that "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven'. When you're young, there's surely no more relatable a sentiment than that.
Arab News
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Fetters of Rhyme' by Rebecca M. Rush
In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from 'the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.' Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth's reign. 'The Fetters of Rhyme' traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
We got a 28-year-old music journalist to review a 30-year-old Radiohead album and this is what he wrote
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. I was born on October 19, 1996, which means I was released 19 months after The Bends was. It's not an album I'm nostalgic for: I grew up in households where New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands and 70s prog rock were near-constant soundtracks. I started discovering the modern acts in those genres and, as my tastes started expanding towards their more avant-garde fringes, I noticed more and more of my favourites citing influence from Radiohead. I'd heard of Radiohead before, but only via the memes. I knew the jokes about their fan-base being pretentious adult virgins long before I knew even one of their lyrics. Eventually, though, this mysterious band's impact on the music I loved – acknowledged by everyone from Leprous to Loathe – became too intense to ignore. I started with OK Computer, familiar with its frequent anointment as one of the best albums ever made, and I liked it. Not as great as Gothic by Paradise Lost, I thought, but still very good. So then I stuck on The Bends and… fucking hell. That was the revelation. As a junior-millennial rock fanatic, hearing The Bends felt tantamount to digging up the first fish who grew legs. So many of the bands who blew up during my youth – Muse, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Kings Of Leon, even the bloody Darkness – suddenly had a common ancestor. And none of them did The Bends better than Radiohead did The Bends. I have two enduring memories of my first listens. One is being taken aback by just how sad it was. Like, I knew that Radiohead were a sad band, but this was sad. This album's just driven home from having its puppy put down only to accidentally hit its toddler in the driveway. Although sad music's always appealed to me (note the above Paradise Lost reference), the sheer desperation of Street Spirit (Fade Out) still stood out. Somehow, the song's microscopic glimmer of hope made it all the more heart-rending, ending four minutes of arpeggiated chords, down-trodden wailing and ruminations on the pointlessness of life with one last-resort command: 'Immerse your soul in love.' There was a similar, dying flicker in the black hole of Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was. Thom Yorke conveyed his desire to be stronger emotionally, yet did so in defeated solemnity, loosely strumming an acoustic guitar and half-singing/half-whispering as if he already knew that his dream was impossible. My Iron Lung also soundtracked positivity drowning in a quagmire, likening Radiohead's breakthrough single Creep and the subsequent demand for another hit to a life-support machine: for all it did to sustain them, it hugely constrained their capabilities. The second memory is of how, for all that sorrow, The Bends refused to simply slump down and sit still. There was a power and volume to the album that all those memes I saw never as much as hinted at. The title track was a cacophonously loud expression of stagnation, with even Yorke's mightiest vocal cries getting overwhelmed by the distortion of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's guitars. Black Star – behind a chorus that so, so many of Radiohead's acolytes have tried to replicate – built a wall of riffing that was just as impervious. Other songs reserved their noise for crescendos, and these included some of the album's biggest singles, High And Dry and Fake Plastic Trees. Their buzzing bridges and solos felt like climaxes to grand classical movements, a tactic that forged entire careers for This Will Destroy You, Maybeshewill and myriad others once the 2000s' post-rock scene reached full steam. At the risk of sounding as wanky as I was once led to believe Radiohead's fan-base was, it was an ingenious balance of freeness, strength and control. In 2025, it's almost tempting to laugh at how despondent Radiohead were 30 years ago. Oh, you thought life back then was bad? Try dolloping a climate crisis and the West's increasing embrace of fascism on top of your problems! However, The Bends represents both a refined collection of music and an entire mood that has transcended its time. No matter when you listen to it, it will give your blues the most dynamic soundtrack. OK Computer may be more acclaimed, Kid A may be more rebellious… but, when it comes to era-defining cues and versatile song craft, nothing Radiohead have done will ever beat The Bands for me.
