Exclusive - Lostprophets: The Fightback Starts Here

Currently working on their new album, Lostprophets are getting ready to take on the world again.

Posted Tuesday, 15 February 2011 in

It's funny to think of Lostprophets being over a decade old as a band - there's always been a fire to them that means they'll always feel like the young chancers who burst out of Pontypridd at the end of the century rather than weathered veterans of a scene they helped pioneer.

Now, they find themselves in a unique position as they're finally able to emulate the likes of Metallica by releasing a fifth album that will define the next decade - and further - of their lives. They've been working on ideas everywhere from Los Angeles to Cardiff and Norfolk and Rock Sound caught up with the band to talk about the most crucial moment in their history, how they look back on the first 10 years and where they want to go from here.

In this extract from the new issue of Rock Sound - onsale now from WHSmith and all good newsagents, and you can buy it direct by clicking this link - the band discuss how their past will define their future, as well as why the new album is like a car chase with Will Smith.

It’s taken him a decade, but Ian Watkins has finally gone home. At various points during the life of Lostprophets he’s lived in fashionable east London or fashionable Los Angeles, but the singer recently bought a house back home in Wales. Despite the band having spent much of their collective youth trying kickflips in the local B&Q carpark and dreaming of escaping – and practically all of their 20s travelling the world – the only place he really feels comfortable is where he grew up, because of the warm mixture of nostalgia, comfort, familiarity and safety. And out of his newfound sense of calm will come the tone for the new record. Lyrically, ‘The Betrayed’ was the work of someone who’d had the shit metaphorically kicked out of them, a swaying boxer who’d taken just about enough but wasn’t down yet. What comes next will be the Hollywood moment – a knockout punch that brings the crowd to its feet.

“The last record was… y’know, I just wanted to kill everybody,” he says. “I’ve always been very guarded and kept things hypothetical, I’ve never been one to bare all. Music was an escape to me, and the last thing I wanted to do was bring all that into something I genuinely loved. On the last record I’d got to the point where I could touch on those subjects without sounding like I was moaning; I guess to a point give it the eloquence it deserved to get my point across.

“When you’re feeling negative you’re very self-analysing, introspective. You don’t want to stand on a plinth and say, ‘Come on, let’s get ‘em!’ You want to be on your own in a room with a candle on, moping. This is our life, and if it ends, well, we’re fucked. The spirit in all of us would be dead, like a grey husk.” He goes on to reveal the new record will be much, much more positive and likens it to an insanely adrenalising scene in an action movie. “It’s like Will Smith driving Mad Max’s car… like a high-speed police chase. Whether you’re the one in the police car or the car being chased is yet to be decided, [but you’re going through] ridiculous terrains – crowded streets, mountains, motorways, anywhere…”

If that sounds vague that’s because at this point in time, it is (“I’m not trying to not give you answers, we just write until it’s done,” laughs Stuart at one point. “I don’t know what it’s going to sound like – we’re going to go into the studio and we’re going to do it”). Currently they have 35 concrete ideas – a verse-chorus-verse here, a song skeleton there – which represent the culmination of their work in Sawmills, Norfolk and LA, but they won’t be slimmed down into coherent tracks until the band reconvene this month in LA, where they’ll stay until the record is finished. And after spending so long in so many studios over the past decade or so, the rest of the band know the process they’re about to undergo and the pressure it puts on their frontman.

“We’re a democracy, so we all have to okay something,” says Stuart. “We all come up with ideas and see what inspires Ian. It’s a pretty fucking long process, and I wish it was quicker.”

Jamie picks up the thread. “It’s difficult for Ian and his lyrics – he can come up with melodies in his sleep – but it’s like writing 12 new books for him, and he’d already written 12 at the beginning of the year."

“Ian’s always captained our ship and whatever he’s feeling is translated across the board. I remember ‘The Betrayed’ being a pretty dark time – having to throw away a record and potentially losing our fanbase in the UK was scary. Now Ian feels like it’s a new chapter, he hit me up the other day saying ‘Dude, I feel exactly like I did when we were doing ‘fakesound…’. And that’s rippling out through everything we’re doing.”

To read the rest of the article, click here to buy Rock Sound 145.