Interview - In Your Ear 2001
Author: Jennifer Hinrichs
Date: 19th November 2001
Link: In Your Ear
You’ve probably never heard of the Lostprophets. And it’s pretty hard to comprehend that one of the best new bands in rock is almost a complete secret in the United States. Their splicing of melodic vocal arrangements paralleled with scathing screaming entwines faultlessly with grating guitar riffs and spacey DJ overlays. You think you’ve heard it all before, but you ain’t heard nothin’ until you’ve heard the lostprophets.
The best thing about the band is that their release, The Fake Sound of Progress, is only their first and it was recorded over two years ago. That means the lostprophets have plenty of time ahead of them to do even more great things. Their album has already gone gold in the UK, and they’re working on doing the same here in the States. The band will be rocking crowds and belting it out alongside fellow metal heavyweights Hatebreed, Ill Nino, and Andrew WK on the second stage at Ozzfest for the entire tour.
With rave reviews from all kinds of press, a successful album already tucked under their collective belt, an integral spot on one of the most successful annual summer tours (not to mention they were handpicked to headline the MTV2 tour that recently wrapped up which featured fellow Ozzfest cohorts The Apex Theory), it seems the lostprophets are poised to make that predicted crossover and take the US music industry by storm. Is the band truly on the “edge of greatness?” Quite possibly, but the lostprophets make no assumptions about the future nor do they worry about it. They would prefer to skate, swim, get a tan and rock the living hell out of anyone that comes to their shows.
6 bored kids equals
Boredom spawns some interesting things. Apparently there’s not much to do for six bored kids (vocalist Ian Watkins, guitarists Lee Gaze and Mike Lewis, bassist Stuart Richardson, drummer Mike Chiplin and DJ Jaime Oliver) in the small town of Pontyprydd, Wales (that’s in England, for all you youngsters). “All six of us, who looked like us, talked like us and wanted to skate and play music, didn’t want to play rugby and go out and get [drunk] and stuff like that. So, we separated ourselves away from everybody else,” Jaime recalls.
In a place where rugby and pints led the way into the working world, the six members of the lostprophets decided they would try something different. Music presented itself as the best escape from the typical. “We hung out in the studio that Stu worked in, which is where we were recording and writing music,” Jaime says.
But even music got to be discouraging. The band was evolving at the beginning of the ‘nu-metal’ phenomenon, but there were still leftovers from the “Brit-pop” trend and, as always, plenty of radio-made pop to flood the airwaves. So, the lostprophets took matters into their own hands. “We weren’t really hearing what we wanted to hear in the music scene,” asserts Ian, “There were really no cool bands coming out. So we were just writing music that we liked and putting elements that we liked in it. We weren’t really worried about what anyone else thought.”
The band experimented with tons of elements trying to find what worked best for them and what sounded best to them. Jaime explains, “It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s get a demo done to get a record deal.’ It was, ‘Hey, let’s write some songs we like today.’ We had the works trying it all out. We had rappers, we had the saxophone player, we had keyboards, we had female backup vocalists, all because we just wanted to experiment and write songs.”
In the face of adversity comes innovation
For the lostprophets, living in a small Welsh town was both good and bad. When the lostprophets were starting out, the bad was that “Brit-pop” was still holding the charts and LP were anything but. “When we started out, the biggest problem we had were bands like Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, and Catatonia had just become big. And, I’m not commenting on quality of their sound, but what happened was all the venues in our area wanted the next Stereophonics, the next Manic Street Preachers, the next Super Furry Animals. So, they could only sell shows to people who wanted to see those types of bands,” explains Jaime.
With their hyperactive montage of punk and metal, the lostprophets didn’t really fit in with the bands that were claiming record sales and the concert-going crowds, especially in their small town. Jaime says, “When we came along as these little skatey-punk kids playing crappy metal songs, [the venue owners] were like, ‘No, we want fucking leopard coat wearing, shoe starers playing the easy listening indie rock.’ So getting shows firstly was really hard and finding other bands in our area like us doing the same sort of thing was very difficult as well. None of the venues really supported what we were doing in our area.”
But that didn’t stop the LP. Since Ian and Mike had been in a hardcore band prior to the materialization of the lostprophets, they were both familiar with the processes of booking their own shows on their own terms. Consequently, the band began booking their own shows with bands that they liked and wanted to play with, since their style wasn’t quite mainstream enough for their area. “What we were doing then was considered underground. We were playing loads of hardcore shows with hardcore bands with the same music we’re playing now. It was considered the same sort of genre – there wasn’t this ‘nu-metal’ thing. We were playing like a hardcore band, we looked like a hardcore band, but we were doing something a bit different,” Jaime notes.
The good part about being from a small town is that the lostprophets were able to hone their sound in an atmosphere that wasn’t pressuring them into the immediate spotlight. Jaime states, “We weren’t on demand with the potential quick spotlight on us. In London, the focus was on ‘buzz’ bands, and those bands never had time to develop; they were basically under the spotlight straightaway. We were unknown until we were developed. So when we did go to London, we could stand up to the critiques that were handed out.”
Here comes the big time
Once the band was able to get more gigs lined up, they began to realize that they needed something to sell in order to make money for the band and to appease their new fans. The LP scrounged up some dinero and threw together a demo. But, instead of submitting it to label after label, the band found a card from an independent label and sent their stuff to them. The label, Visible Noise, was so blown away by what the lostprophets had created that they offered to sign the band and give them a chance to record their demo with some financial backing.
The first recording of The Fake Sound of Progress was done on a limited budget that resulted in a lower-quality version. “We recorded the album in about a week and a half, and it cost about $6,000, and that’s [essentially] the album you hear today. We tried mixing the songs and we ran out of time. We recorded to the best of what we could afford and with the equipment we had in our means. We needed another week really to sit there and give the album some shape,” Jaime comments, “So basically when the majors picked us up, we got that extra week to mix the album.”
The band anticipated their independent release to be their “portfolio.” But when Columbia Records “picked” the band up, the label actually gave them a chance to rework the album instead of recording a new one. Since everyone agreed the album was solid, all the band really did was turn up the sound. Jamie explains, “We just turned the levels up, and basically put in the bits we forgot to put in last time.” Early fans sometimes criticize the group for changing the sound. “Everyone’s like, ‘Why did you do this, why did you do that? Why did you wreck the album?’ It’s exactly the same songs you fucking idiot. They’re the same songs with the knobs turned a bit more,” Jaime exclaims, “We didn’t go in there and wreck it; we went in there and made it sound better!”
Words, phrases and beginnings
The lostprophets, like most bands, make writing a collective effort. Although any member that is inspired can bring in an idea, according to Ian, guitarist Lee (who is the most notoriously introverted member of the group) is the one who comes up with a lot of their music. “Lee is constantly writing riffs. We lose so many because we don’t record them because he makes them up then forgets them. It’s weird; the guy who comes up with all the riffs in the band doesn’t listen to music. He kind of stopped. He listened to The Police and to Iron Maiden and Anthrax and then lost interest in music.”
After that, everyone just adds their own flavor. In Ian’s case, his obsession is melody. “I love writing melodies. I love doing five-piece harmonies when we’re recording. ‘Let’s put a harmony there, let’s put another harmony, and another harmony.’ And then we turn into Queensryche, and then the producers are like ‘Stop. You’re sounding like fucking opera.’ I just want to write the best melodies to the songs as possible because everything should complement everything.”
Ian also writes the lyrics, and those are based on what he sees around him. But he makes a special effort to keep the stories vague enough so that listeners can relate to them in their own ways. Ian explains, “Sometimes I would start writing a song about one thing and then I’d end up singing something completely different toward the end. I never really cared about writing a coherent story from start to finish. They’re more ambiguous so if people want to read into, people can read into them what they will. I’m not gonna [explicitly] say what a song is about because it could wreck certain peoples’ versions of it. I know what it means to me, but I’m not going to go and lay that out.”
That quality is one that allows fans to relate to the lostprophets on a level that is more than just an appreciation of their talent. “I think people should be intelligent enough to read their own thing into the lyrics,” Ian says, “There’s no right or wrong for what they’re about. Whatever they think it’s about is valid to them, and I’m happy about that. That’s how I always wanted it to be. They’re not specific stories; they’re more thoughts and ideas.”
What you see is what you get
If you’ve ever seen the lostprophets, then you know how intense their live performances are. During live sets, in addition to working his turntables and generally bouncing around the stage, Jaime will do the screaming. “When I first joined the band, the only reason that I did the screamin’ was because Ian couldn’t sing and scream a whole set because he would lose his voice. So he said, ‘Why don’t you do the screamin’ so you can lose your voice, so that I can prolong mine?’ And so I said ‘Eh, sure why not?’ ” Jaime says with a grin, “So then Ian was trying to do the harmonies, and he couldn’t do that too, so he had me do the harmonies as well, so now I am doing the screamin’ and the high harmonies. I give 110 percent, oh, it kills me.”
The lostprophets’ live shows give you your money’s worth. They understand that a band is there to put on a show and not to simply perform their songs. Each member will give their all during each performance. Jaime feels this is one of the most essential components to the band’s success. “I’ve always thought about why we’ve been given a break. I think it’s because we do things that are really hard. No other band screams and sings because it’s really hard to scream and sing without losing your voice. No other band really goes crazy and plays ’cause it’s fucking impossible practically. And, you know, we don’t play very good, but we go crazy,” he jokes.
For now, the lostprophets are content to play across the world and share their music with those who are willing to listen. While on tour, the band is working on new material, and they guarantee that it will work just the same as their first album. Ian remarks, “The music we write is honest. It’s music we like. It’s a mixture of everything we like. Nothing is contrived about it. Our goal is to write music we like. We have no other agenda beyond that. If you get bogged down with agendas, you start losing sight of enjoying the music.”
Author: Jennifer Hinrichs
Date: 19th November 2001
Link: In Your Ear
You’ve probably never heard of the Lostprophets. And it’s pretty hard to comprehend that one of the best new bands in rock is almost a complete secret in the United States. Their splicing of melodic vocal arrangements paralleled with scathing screaming entwines faultlessly with grating guitar riffs and spacey DJ overlays. You think you’ve heard it all before, but you ain’t heard nothin’ until you’ve heard the lostprophets.
The best thing about the band is that their release, The Fake Sound of Progress, is only their first and it was recorded over two years ago. That means the lostprophets have plenty of time ahead of them to do even more great things. Their album has already gone gold in the UK, and they’re working on doing the same here in the States. The band will be rocking crowds and belting it out alongside fellow metal heavyweights Hatebreed, Ill Nino, and Andrew WK on the second stage at Ozzfest for the entire tour.
With rave reviews from all kinds of press, a successful album already tucked under their collective belt, an integral spot on one of the most successful annual summer tours (not to mention they were handpicked to headline the MTV2 tour that recently wrapped up which featured fellow Ozzfest cohorts The Apex Theory), it seems the lostprophets are poised to make that predicted crossover and take the US music industry by storm. Is the band truly on the “edge of greatness?” Quite possibly, but the lostprophets make no assumptions about the future nor do they worry about it. They would prefer to skate, swim, get a tan and rock the living hell out of anyone that comes to their shows.
6 bored kids equals
Boredom spawns some interesting things. Apparently there’s not much to do for six bored kids (vocalist Ian Watkins, guitarists Lee Gaze and Mike Lewis, bassist Stuart Richardson, drummer Mike Chiplin and DJ Jaime Oliver) in the small town of Pontyprydd, Wales (that’s in England, for all you youngsters). “All six of us, who looked like us, talked like us and wanted to skate and play music, didn’t want to play rugby and go out and get [drunk] and stuff like that. So, we separated ourselves away from everybody else,” Jaime recalls.
In a place where rugby and pints led the way into the working world, the six members of the lostprophets decided they would try something different. Music presented itself as the best escape from the typical. “We hung out in the studio that Stu worked in, which is where we were recording and writing music,” Jaime says.
But even music got to be discouraging. The band was evolving at the beginning of the ‘nu-metal’ phenomenon, but there were still leftovers from the “Brit-pop” trend and, as always, plenty of radio-made pop to flood the airwaves. So, the lostprophets took matters into their own hands. “We weren’t really hearing what we wanted to hear in the music scene,” asserts Ian, “There were really no cool bands coming out. So we were just writing music that we liked and putting elements that we liked in it. We weren’t really worried about what anyone else thought.”
The band experimented with tons of elements trying to find what worked best for them and what sounded best to them. Jaime explains, “It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s get a demo done to get a record deal.’ It was, ‘Hey, let’s write some songs we like today.’ We had the works trying it all out. We had rappers, we had the saxophone player, we had keyboards, we had female backup vocalists, all because we just wanted to experiment and write songs.”
In the face of adversity comes innovation
For the lostprophets, living in a small Welsh town was both good and bad. When the lostprophets were starting out, the bad was that “Brit-pop” was still holding the charts and LP were anything but. “When we started out, the biggest problem we had were bands like Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, and Catatonia had just become big. And, I’m not commenting on quality of their sound, but what happened was all the venues in our area wanted the next Stereophonics, the next Manic Street Preachers, the next Super Furry Animals. So, they could only sell shows to people who wanted to see those types of bands,” explains Jaime.
With their hyperactive montage of punk and metal, the lostprophets didn’t really fit in with the bands that were claiming record sales and the concert-going crowds, especially in their small town. Jaime says, “When we came along as these little skatey-punk kids playing crappy metal songs, [the venue owners] were like, ‘No, we want fucking leopard coat wearing, shoe starers playing the easy listening indie rock.’ So getting shows firstly was really hard and finding other bands in our area like us doing the same sort of thing was very difficult as well. None of the venues really supported what we were doing in our area.”
But that didn’t stop the LP. Since Ian and Mike had been in a hardcore band prior to the materialization of the lostprophets, they were both familiar with the processes of booking their own shows on their own terms. Consequently, the band began booking their own shows with bands that they liked and wanted to play with, since their style wasn’t quite mainstream enough for their area. “What we were doing then was considered underground. We were playing loads of hardcore shows with hardcore bands with the same music we’re playing now. It was considered the same sort of genre – there wasn’t this ‘nu-metal’ thing. We were playing like a hardcore band, we looked like a hardcore band, but we were doing something a bit different,” Jaime notes.
The good part about being from a small town is that the lostprophets were able to hone their sound in an atmosphere that wasn’t pressuring them into the immediate spotlight. Jaime states, “We weren’t on demand with the potential quick spotlight on us. In London, the focus was on ‘buzz’ bands, and those bands never had time to develop; they were basically under the spotlight straightaway. We were unknown until we were developed. So when we did go to London, we could stand up to the critiques that were handed out.”
Here comes the big time
Once the band was able to get more gigs lined up, they began to realize that they needed something to sell in order to make money for the band and to appease their new fans. The LP scrounged up some dinero and threw together a demo. But, instead of submitting it to label after label, the band found a card from an independent label and sent their stuff to them. The label, Visible Noise, was so blown away by what the lostprophets had created that they offered to sign the band and give them a chance to record their demo with some financial backing.
The first recording of The Fake Sound of Progress was done on a limited budget that resulted in a lower-quality version. “We recorded the album in about a week and a half, and it cost about $6,000, and that’s [essentially] the album you hear today. We tried mixing the songs and we ran out of time. We recorded to the best of what we could afford and with the equipment we had in our means. We needed another week really to sit there and give the album some shape,” Jaime comments, “So basically when the majors picked us up, we got that extra week to mix the album.”
The band anticipated their independent release to be their “portfolio.” But when Columbia Records “picked” the band up, the label actually gave them a chance to rework the album instead of recording a new one. Since everyone agreed the album was solid, all the band really did was turn up the sound. Jamie explains, “We just turned the levels up, and basically put in the bits we forgot to put in last time.” Early fans sometimes criticize the group for changing the sound. “Everyone’s like, ‘Why did you do this, why did you do that? Why did you wreck the album?’ It’s exactly the same songs you fucking idiot. They’re the same songs with the knobs turned a bit more,” Jaime exclaims, “We didn’t go in there and wreck it; we went in there and made it sound better!”
Words, phrases and beginnings
The lostprophets, like most bands, make writing a collective effort. Although any member that is inspired can bring in an idea, according to Ian, guitarist Lee (who is the most notoriously introverted member of the group) is the one who comes up with a lot of their music. “Lee is constantly writing riffs. We lose so many because we don’t record them because he makes them up then forgets them. It’s weird; the guy who comes up with all the riffs in the band doesn’t listen to music. He kind of stopped. He listened to The Police and to Iron Maiden and Anthrax and then lost interest in music.”
After that, everyone just adds their own flavor. In Ian’s case, his obsession is melody. “I love writing melodies. I love doing five-piece harmonies when we’re recording. ‘Let’s put a harmony there, let’s put another harmony, and another harmony.’ And then we turn into Queensryche, and then the producers are like ‘Stop. You’re sounding like fucking opera.’ I just want to write the best melodies to the songs as possible because everything should complement everything.”
Ian also writes the lyrics, and those are based on what he sees around him. But he makes a special effort to keep the stories vague enough so that listeners can relate to them in their own ways. Ian explains, “Sometimes I would start writing a song about one thing and then I’d end up singing something completely different toward the end. I never really cared about writing a coherent story from start to finish. They’re more ambiguous so if people want to read into, people can read into them what they will. I’m not gonna [explicitly] say what a song is about because it could wreck certain peoples’ versions of it. I know what it means to me, but I’m not going to go and lay that out.”
That quality is one that allows fans to relate to the lostprophets on a level that is more than just an appreciation of their talent. “I think people should be intelligent enough to read their own thing into the lyrics,” Ian says, “There’s no right or wrong for what they’re about. Whatever they think it’s about is valid to them, and I’m happy about that. That’s how I always wanted it to be. They’re not specific stories; they’re more thoughts and ideas.”
What you see is what you get
If you’ve ever seen the lostprophets, then you know how intense their live performances are. During live sets, in addition to working his turntables and generally bouncing around the stage, Jaime will do the screaming. “When I first joined the band, the only reason that I did the screamin’ was because Ian couldn’t sing and scream a whole set because he would lose his voice. So he said, ‘Why don’t you do the screamin’ so you can lose your voice, so that I can prolong mine?’ And so I said ‘Eh, sure why not?’ ” Jaime says with a grin, “So then Ian was trying to do the harmonies, and he couldn’t do that too, so he had me do the harmonies as well, so now I am doing the screamin’ and the high harmonies. I give 110 percent, oh, it kills me.”
The lostprophets’ live shows give you your money’s worth. They understand that a band is there to put on a show and not to simply perform their songs. Each member will give their all during each performance. Jaime feels this is one of the most essential components to the band’s success. “I’ve always thought about why we’ve been given a break. I think it’s because we do things that are really hard. No other band screams and sings because it’s really hard to scream and sing without losing your voice. No other band really goes crazy and plays ’cause it’s fucking impossible practically. And, you know, we don’t play very good, but we go crazy,” he jokes.
For now, the lostprophets are content to play across the world and share their music with those who are willing to listen. While on tour, the band is working on new material, and they guarantee that it will work just the same as their first album. Ian remarks, “The music we write is honest. It’s music we like. It’s a mixture of everything we like. Nothing is contrived about it. Our goal is to write music we like. We have no other agenda beyond that. If you get bogged down with agendas, you start losing sight of enjoying the music.”
