Fightstar: Living the dream
Fightstar have been nominated for Kerrang!'s best British band award twice.
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Monday, 03, Dec 2007 02:46
Fightstar's Charlie Simpson talks to Lewis Bazley about label disputes, global warming and living the dream since leaving Busted.
Simpson walked away from one of the most successful bands of recent times to the bemusement of his fans, choosing the post-hardcore of Fightstar ahead of Busted's pop and struggling to overcome snobbery from the rock faithful.
And while former bandmates James Bourne and Matt Willis opted for bubblegum punk and I'm A Celebrity. Get Me Out of Here! after the demise of the What I Go To School For popsters, Simpson trod the path of sweaty metal clubs, gruelling support slots and facing a volley of abuse and pints of snakebite to emerge as a wholly respected member of the British rock establishment.
Ahead of the release of bruising new single Deathcar, the two-time Kerrang! Award nominee told inthenews.co.uk about the challenges of breaking away.
Deathcar's out on Monday, and it strikes the listener instantly as the heaviest song on the new album (One Day Son, This Will All Be Yours). It's also got a echo of Iowa-era Slipknot - is that fair?
Slipknot are one of my favourite metal bands, so that comparison's fair definitely.
And the lyrical basis for the song was your fury at your ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend?
Well, that's not the case anymore, but at the time, that was the case. I was pretty angry (laughs). Do you know what the actual concept of the Deathcar is based on though?
It's the Japanese method of using death row patients for organ transplants, right?
Yeah, so I took that, and put a bit of a personal twist on it.
Click here to watch the video for Deathcar.
Is this a more personal album as a whole?
Yeah, definitely. The last album was more social commentary and a lot of it was written third person. And this one's very much based around a more personal look at life, it's not so much talking about things on a bigger scale. It's talking about personal places, times, actual things that happened.
Would you have had that kind of freedom with Island Records? (Fightstar left Island after they pushed the band to use a more populist sound for their second album.)
No, I don't think so at all. We kind of wrote three or four songs to demo the new record and took them to Island and the first thing they said was 'We want to move things in a more commercial direction'. And we thought after the amount of work we'd put in, we're not just going to go back on that, so we thought it was better if we just parted company. And we wrote the album in between deals, so we had no pressure at all to bow down to anyone, so we literally wrote the album we wanted to make. And by the time it was done, we signed to Gut and they were already on board with what we'd done.
Do you feel that, in comparison to your former bandmates, you're doing what you truly want to be now?
Yeah, man, I feel like I get up in the morning and I'm doing my dream job. I'm very lucky to do that. When we started this band it was everything I wanted out of playing music and now I get to do that every day.
You find yourself in strange situations sometimes. It was a weird experience, but it was interesting. But at the end of day, unless you're content with what you're doing, you're never going to be happy and now I get to wake up and be happy and believe in what I'm doing.
I remember reading an interview with Busted and while James and Matt said their favourite bands were the Beach Boys and Blink 182, you named Funeral For A Friend as yours - as a fan and having toured with them, how important have they been to Fightstar?
Those guys have been so amazing. We toured with them this year for two months in the US, and we'd had a bit of trouble mixing our album, because we were on the road while mixing it, which turned out to be a pretty stupid thing to do. So every day we'd be getting new mixes through and if we weren't happy with them, we'd have to send them back and it turned out to be a pretty tricky thing to do. But we were sharing a bus with Funeral and they really helped out, they'd listen to all the tunes and give their advice. They kind of took us under the wing.
Lewis Bazley
Click here to read the rest of the inthenews.co.uk interview with Fightstar's Charlie Simpson.