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INTERVIEW | MORE INTERVIEWS | SUBMIT MATERIALInterview with Lostprophets | VIEW COMMENTS [0 Comments] | ADD COMMENTS |  Posted on 14.01.10 | Interviewer Graham Finney Ahead of the release of their eagerly awaiting new album, The Betrayed, Planet Loud had a chat to Stuart from the band about the album and the struggle that went into making it. Planet Loud - Hey mate, how's it going? Lostprophets - Good man, wicked. Just fucking around the house. Planet Loud - Things must be good, especially with the new album just about to come out. You pretty relieved? Lostprophets - Yeah, I'm just glad that people are hearing it. I've no idea if it's good or bad as I'm so close to it. I'm so detatched from it that's it's wierd that is out. Planet Loud - The reaction has been good then? Lostprophets - Yeah, people are saying it's the best record we've done so I would hope so. It just goes to show that, if you want to do something right then you've got to do it yourself, you know what I mean? Planet Loud - Sadly, yes. It's common knowledge that you scrapped the original recordings. What stage where you at with those? Lostprophets - We were ready to mix. Basically, John had done rough mixes for us which are, these days, pretty much the final thing. It's like you get the rough mixes these days, whack it through Pro-Tools and you've got the final product. I mean, these days, when you've got the rough mixes, what else can you do with them? It's like here's your rough mixes but, apart from making it maybe a bit louder, what else can you do. You give people the rough mixes and they come back and it's not really that much different and you think 'wow, I just paid someone a hundred grand to do pretty much nothing..' and you get pretty bummed out by the whole thing. We did it with John and he came back with it and we were listening to it and I said to him 'wow John, there's a lot of stuff on there' and we tried to sit down and take some of it off with him but it just didn't work out. I don't want to get into a slanging match but he was pretty adamant how he wanted the record to sound and I was pretty adamant how we wanted the record to sound and we couldn't get it into his head. At the end of the day though, he's a really great guy.. Planet Loud - That doesn't matter though, its your record.. Lostprophets - Exactly. We were trying to tell him what we wanted but he didn't get it.. Planet Loud - How far apart were your two visions? Lostprophets - Well, basically he just wanted to get us in the charts and on the cover of stuff like AP and get us a Number One then who cares what happens after that. We've never really been about that even though we are a commercial band, there has always been some credibility about our band whether some people see it or not. We always try to make the right decisions and I felt really uncomfortable with where he was pushing our band. Planet Loud - Was it a group decision to scrap the recordings? Lostprophets - Yeah, we were all pretty united on that. Basically when we heard the rough mixes we looked at each other and said "shit dude, this sounds like Good Charlotte' and it didn't sound like us. It sounded like all the other bands he'd produced like Good Charlotte and The Used. No disrespect to those bands but that's not what we were going for. The wierd thing with our band is that there is six guys in the band and we're all into different stuff and one day we'll be writing the poppiest song ever and the next we'll be writing something that sounds like Converge. We just do it for a laugh, we have fun when we're writing songs - that's why you get songs like Atro City and For He's A Jolly Good Felon on the same record. I don't think there are many bands that can do that whether that's a good or bad thing. One thing I personally hate is when you put on an album and, just from hearing the first song, you can tell what the rest of the record is going to sound like. We write what we want to write and what we enjoy, that's it. Planet Loud - In the last interview I did with Ian and he said the reason you started the band was only because you wanted to be in a band with your mates and have a laugh. Nice to see nothing has changed? Lostprophets - Exactly. What's the most fun thing you can do? Be in a band. One thing we've learned over the years is that when we do something for fun it works out but, if we try to be more calculating and do certain things because it will help us with something else, it always comes back and shoots us in the foot. You've got to learn to leave the business side out of it and just enjoy what you're doing. Planet Loud - Is it hard to do that though at the level you are at? Lostprophets - Yeah, I still try to think that we're in the same band and I still see us as the underdogs. I feel like we have a point to prove and that we've never been the critics darlings. I don't really give a fuck but I feel like we have something to prove. I still feel like the same guy who was playing the Camden Underworld all those years ago. Going back to the business thing though, it can be tempting to cash in, especially if someone says if you do this then we'll get you a house as you'll be thinking 'wow, I could do with a house, I've got a family now'.. but if we do anything calculated then it always ends up backfiring on us. Planet Loud - Just after you scrapped the original songs, what was the mood like in the band? Lostprophets - We were pretty devastated as we'd spent all our record budget by that point. Luckily most of us live out here but to keep flying the rest of the band back and forward and putting them up in hotels and stuff for a few months the costs really mount up. We approached Bob Rock but he told us he couldn't start recording until June or July (2009) so we carried on sending songs in to our label in the US and they wanted it to be more polished and more commercial and we just lost our heads. They wanted something like Nickelback and we asked if they knew what sort of band we were. They couldn't understand how you could have a song like Atro City on the same record as a song like Felon. It sounds boring but we kept into arguments with them and eventually told them to go and fuck themselves and came back to the UK and struck up a relationship with the UK label. Planet Loud - Bearing in mind you took complete control of this record do you think that you've had no or little control over your previous albums? Lostprophets - Yeah, it's always felt that way. You write your demos and the producer changes everything. Sometimes they're for the good but, as a band, we've spent a lot of time in the studio and know the tricks. If you are a band and you still don't what you're doing on your fourth record then you shouldn't be making music. We're ten years into this and, having worked with some of the best guys in the business, we took what we had learned from them and applied it ourselves. We took the stuff we liked, binned the stuff we didn't like and tried to explore a few different avenues. Planet Loud - You worked in a studio before the band, have you learned any new tricks over the four albums? Lostprophets - Yeah, I'll always be watching people and learning and asking questions and annoying people. I think the biggest thing I've learned is to make sure everything is tight as fuck. There's no secrets, you've just got have good songs. If you don't think your songs are good then the record will suck. Simple as. Even some of the worst recorded records like Damage by Black Flag, it's unlistenable to by todays standards but you can't fuck with those songs. Same with The Who, The Stooges, they weren't the best recordings in the world but you can't fuck with those songs. Planet Loud - Are you happy with the way The Betrayed turned out? Lostprophets - Yeah, we're really happy with it. The producer in me wants to go back and remix a bit but that's always going to happen. I really just wanted to make an honest sounding record maybe it's a little too honest in parts but that's not a bad thing. I didn't want it to sound overly polished. My biggest influences over the last ten years have been bands like Trail Of The Dead. I'm not really into that polished sound that a lot of new bands sounds. I think they all suck. I can hear the drum samples and the auto-tuning. Maybe I'm getting old. In fact, it's not that I'm getting old at all, all these new bands have the same haircuts, they all look the same and they all sound the same. Jesus Christ. Is our scene that bad these days? Planet Loud - Those accusations were also thrown at you guys early on in your career. Is that something you conciously moved away from? Lostprophets - We've always been part of the problem since we came out but we always made fun of it but it never came across that way. We got offered Smash Hits years ago and we took puppies because we thought it would be funny but nobody got it. I think the biggest misconception about this band is that we love to take the piss. We're pretty sarcastic but in a fun way. For better or for worse though, we write some catchy songs and, even though we grew up on hardcore and punk, we love pop melodies. I think that is what will shock people most about this record is that they'll be thinking that, as we produced it ourselves there will be none of that pop shit on there but there are a lot of pop songs on there. That was our decision though, not our record label telling us. Planet Loud - Lyrically the record is quite dark in places though. Are the lyrics a reflection of the last few years? Lostprophets - The thing with Ian is that he's always been dark and a bit moody. He's got a bit of a dark sense of humour. People may think that he comes across as squeaky clean and that, as a band we come across as squeaky clean but we're not. We toured with some tough guy bands who the press love and we meet them and they're assholes but, at the same time, we come out and we're branded as a fucking boy band. In the end we told him to tell the truth in his lyrics. He's had a rough couple of years with loads of difficult shit going on with his family which nobody needs to go through. Planet Loud - Were you surprised how angry some of the lyrics were when you saw them? Lostprophets - Not really, as that's the kind of person we know he is. I remember thinking 'thank fuck' when he turned round and sang 'turn round muthafucker, 'cos we aint done..' because he sang it with such venom that I couldn't stop laughing. Planet Loud - Is the album title aimed at any particular group of people? Lostprophets - I hate to sound negative when we've had such a great ten years. I hate it when people moan about what life has dealt them. Life isn't that great for us but it's alright. We can support ourselves by playing music so things aren't that fucking bad. The title is more to do with every time we have been let down by someone in the past. We've let people down, we've let ourselves down and people have let us down. It's about that. We're always positive or we try to be but, this time, we were like 'man, we're pissed off'. Planet Loud - The kids will only see the fact that you've headlined Download, sold out Wembley, got houses in America. Do you think the anger on this record will surprise them? Lostprophets - Maybe but, like I said, I hate it when bands who are seen to be doing well moan about what they've been dealt. This record is our shout back at the people who've let us down. It's almost like we've been bottling things up for ten years. It's like people have been fucking us over for ten years and we've had a smile on our faces all that time. This record is us punching back. You can only get pushed so far. Planet Loud - Did any of this affect your friendships as you've been mates longer than you've been a band? Lostprophets - We've had some rough spots but it's definitely made us closer than ever because, if you can still be friends after you've called each other things you shouldn't have then that shows true friendship. Planet Loud - Did seeing what Ian was going though make this whole album even tougher? Lostprophets - That was hard yeah but the rest of us have had some pretty tough stuff going on as well. I was producing this record while my wife was pregnant with our second child. I spent six months of my daughter growing up working on this record so I was angry every day. I was sat working on this record not able to believe how we'd been fucked over by record labels, producers and all that. It was like a pressure cooker. Ian would turn up late and I blow up at him and then we wouldn't see him for a day. It was crazy. Planet Loud - Was there a point where you thought enough is enough? Lostprophets - No, we just kept going. My manager was keeping me away from the record label during that time as well. They didn't hear anything until it was all finished. I didn't sleep for night as I was working on this record. It was pretty harsh. I'm really glad I did it but I'm more glad that I survived it. I had a little production team to help me pick up the slack when I was fried but it was a really tough time. Planet Loud - You must have stopped yourself for a break though? Lostprophets - Sure I wanted to but I didn't. I just kept going, six days a week, fourteen hours a day. It wasn't a good situation. I was really depressed during that period which is kind of what the song Darkest Blue is about, I wanted Ian to write about that. The whole song is about letting depression take over you and giving in to it. He was down as well and he was living in LA and going through that and it was horrible. Planet Loud - What kept you going? Lostprophets - Pride and stubborness. I mean this in the nicest way but I wanted to say fuck you to every producer who had produced a record before. I don't mean the personally but I had that 'I can do this' mentality. I had this voice in the back of my mind telling me how much I sucked and how much everyone was waiting for me to fall. Planet Loud - Do you think you had a point to prove with this record? Lostprophets - Definitely. I mixed some of the songs with my baby asleep in the bed next to me. It was pretty full on. It was ridiculous. We ran out of time in the studio so I had to mix the rest in my bedroom. Planet Loud - Did the music come out as a result of the lyrics or were the angrier songs born from what you were feeling? Lostprophets - I think songs like Atro City were written about three years ago. That was the first song we wrote and it was just after we'd toured America for three months with no label support. We were supposed to tour America supporting HIM but they pulled out so the label left us out on tour but didn't tell anyone. Basically we toured America for three months solid with no advertising so we would turn up at radio stations and they didn't know we were playing. We would be outside handing out flyers in the street. Our management told us to keep on because the label loved us but we found out they didn't give a shit about us which is where the whole betrayal thing started. Planet Loud - How much of a head fuck was that? Lostprophets - My wife was giving birth to my first child during that time so I left that tour after two and a half months and someone had to stand in for me. Having a kid is tough anyway but doing it while on tour was just unreal. Planet Loud - Ian told me that what he had been through made him realise what was important to him. Would you agree with that? Lostprophets - Yeah, basically. It's really easy to take it for granted because all you have to do is say yes to things. If you're a lazy band you can just turn up on time and that's that. There was an element of that happening with the third record and we'd all become tired of the rigours of being in a band. Everyone was fried out. When we went with John we wanted to make a record in three weeks. Planet Loud - What have you learned from the experiences of the last record and making The Betrayed? Lostprophets - Trust your gut feeling. Love what you do and that's what this record is about. We sat down and asked ourselves if we were really into this and that's when we sat down and had a second wind. We're really excited about the future now. Planet Loud - Do you see this as a new chapter for the band? Lostprophets - Yeah, definitely. I hope so. If people didn't get us before they won't now and if they do then they'll get this record. I think The Betrayed will divide people. I think for the first time ever we've made a stand. We've always worried about what other people think. Not every band has the balls to stand up and scrap an entire record and tell their label to get fucked. This is definitely our fuck you record. Planet Loud - Well, good luck with the record... Lostprophets - No problem man, thanks for supporting us. Interact - http://www.myspace.com/lostprophets Find more articles on Lostprophets Related Tags Lostprophets The Blackout Kids In Glass Houses USER COMMENTS - 0 Comments ADD COMMENT |
       
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