Who says that Welsh rock stars are so serious? The veteran rock & rollers from across the pond, LostProphets, give Inked Magazine the details on their new album, Weapons, while gracing us with their crazy stories and infectious laughter. From getting an infection as a result of a tattoo to a drunken party on a ship, LostProphets band members, including keyboardist Jaime Oliver, lead singer Ian Watkins, drummer Luke Johnson, guitarist Mike Lewis, and bassist/producer Stuart Richardson, tell Inked how the band and their new album, Weapons, stands apart.


Inked Magazine: You guys are with a new label for Weapons. Do you feel like this is your official cross over into the US market?

Jamie: It's more of a return. We were on Sony in the U.S. for about six or seven years. We parted ways with them on our last record. This new album on Fearless records, Weapons, is more like a return and it's nice to be back to be honest.

Stuart: I agree.

Inked: How does this new album differ from the others?

Jaime: I think that we have just honed in a little bit more on what the band is, what
the sound of the band is.

Luke: I’m new. This is the first album that I have played on so it’s wicked for me. I came into LostProphets
on the back of the last album that was recorded, so I just really wanted to get into the studio and
put my mark on something. So that definitely makes this different from the other four albums.

Jaime: And it’s a real solid record, it’s a real rock record. It represents who we are right now, it’s fresh.
It’s exciting for us to be with a brand new team and have Luke aboard. You know there is something just really
weird about it, it feels like a second first you know a second beginning.

Inked: How do you think that you guys have grown from your first album to this one?

Ian: I think that you take life experience and you go with it, and you make mistakes but you learn from them.
You just enjoy it along the way. The goal isn’t about getting there, its but about the journey.

Jaime: we have taken some alternative routes to get here. Like on the last record, it just didn’t really work out. We finished the last record but we didn’t feel like it was the record that we wanted to make. We learned so much about our abilities and ourselves and we’ve been able to bring that into this record with so much more confidence. I think that with time comes wisdom and trust in each other’s abilities.

Stuart: We just do it because we love it, and we keep fighting the good fight. We’ve changed a lot, we were a lot
more stupid. That’s pretty much it, ya know. It’s not rocket science. You write music because you love it and that’s it.

Inked: How did you guys record weapons? What was your process?

Jaime: We initially went into a little house in the East Coast of England.

Luke: It was suppose to be a secret. Hahaha it was suppose to be on the "hush-hush." After a week there were a bunch of kids always just hanging around outside of the house and ringing the doorbell. It was pretty funny.

Jaime: Yeah, we just wanted to really live together and actually just live the music and stuff like that. So we wrote a bunch of songs there and then we took a little bit of space after that, just to come to grips with what we have. Having Luke on board was so valuable because he was able to listen to the music that we previously written objectively and he was just like, "we should do this; we should do that." When we went into the studio and we collaborated with producer Ken Andrews, we took in like 90 ideas. And we were like, "Can we make an album after this," and he was like "yeah totally." So after the Norfolk experience, we just wrote a couple more songs and recorded at NRG in L.A.