lee gaze lostprophets

Interview by: Mary Evans

Date: January 2010

Venue: Email

Photos by: Lostprophets

Unfortunately due to time constraints the band were unable to answer all of our questions... so here's what we got out of them!

Ok, let’s jump straight in with regards to the new album, The Betrayed. Three or so years in the making, you started working on this, your fourth album, but decided to scrap it and start again. Can you tell us a little about why you did this?

We wrote the whole thing around 2007 before going to a producer, as I’m sure it’s well documented that didn’t work out for us. It was really frustrating cause after years worth of work so we had to go back to square one. We tried to work with another guy but our schedules just didn’t match up so that just left us to do it….

You decided to take over recording and production yourselves, how did this change things for you as a band?

For those reasons really, basically when you’re in a band and you’re on a major label, you just presume that’s the way to do it; just to go into the studio with some guy… I mean when you think about it it’s a weird way to go about things, especially if you know what you’re doing because it’s like saying ‘I’m having some guy stand over my shoulder saying I shouldn’t do it like that, I should do it like this.’ We’ve worked really hard on this band and learnt what we were doing so we were like, ‘Why are we having this guy direct us and obviously he’s not necessarily going to have the same ideas as us.’

Working with another person worked well for the first record to help us get a feel for the whole thing, but after the failed attempts of working with other people on this record we started to think that if we couldn’t do it ourselves, should we be doing it?

Which songs do you look forward to performing live?

We love playing a mix of songs. We always want to play our older material for the buzz, but its exciting to play our new material to a crowd as well and see how they receive it.

Your second single, Where We Belong, was officially released this week. What has the reaction been like thus far or is it too soon to tell?

Really good so far. It’s seems like a typical Lostprophets song for the fans, it's been received really well. It’s pretty amazing that it got in the charts and it was the only heavy song in there.

You’ll soon be touring the UK – starting in February and running through until the beginning of March – what can fans expect from this?

It will be a lot of fun, the adrenaline we get from playing live is immense, we will put our all into it.

Will there be much new material in the set?

Yeah, we’ll definitely play our favourites from the album.

In this internet orientated age it is nice to see a band like yourselves embrace technology and mediums such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. How important do you feel it is to communicate with your fans on such a level?

I think it’s probably the most important thing you could do. I communicate with the fans on a daily basis and you get a chance to be really honest about stuff. Back in the day it was the same as messages, I used to send messages to a band and if they replied it meant so much. I really want to do as much as I can for the fans.