The Sound of Progress - Lostprophets

Chances are if you’ve been within two feet of MTV2 in the past week you’ll have heard the insanely catchy do-do-do-dos of Lostprophets’ ‘Can’t Catch Tomorrow’ and stopped to watch the video which is more than a nod to 70s mod film Quadrophenia. “I love Quadrophenia,” Lostprophets’ guitarist Mike Lewis tells Gigwise. “We were watching it on the bus for like millionth time and we were like, ‘We should rip this off for a video.’ I thought the vibe of it really fits the song too. We actually wanted to do it in Brighton, but we were in the middle of an American tour so we couldn’t. We had to fly into LA to do the video and fly back out on tour.” And that’s how the whole of 2006 has been for the band – a manic year of air miles and tours, with awards and a number one album thrown in for good measure and of course, a few obligatory hiccups.
 
“The US tour was fun,” says Mike. “It was the longest US tour we’ve ever done. We were supposed to do a couple of weeks by ourselves and some shows with HIM. But they cancelled his tour, which left us in a weird spot. We were like well either we just go home or we keep on going and book our own shows. So we did that and when you’re playing a show in a city that’s just been announced like a week before you’re not gonna get that many people out. But some nights were really awesome.”

The band went straight from their three-month US tour into their current and second UK tour of the year, a couple of weeks before which their main support act, From First To Last, pulled out. But that was easily solved in the end too with the Welsh five-piece deciding they’d just play longer, move Bring Me The Horizon up to main support act and let other support acts The Blackout and The New 1920 go on stage a bit later than just after doors open.

Spreading their time flying between the US and the UK is nothing new to the Lostprophets. Mike and bassist Stuart Richardson now live in California, lead guitarist Lee Gaze lives in London, while singer Ian Watkins and keyboardist Jamie Oliver currently claim homelessness. And in terms of shows, it creates a contrast they welcome. “After playing the US it’s nice to come back here and do some big shows,” Mike says. “I always like playing in the UK. It’s my favourite place in the world to play. It’s nice to have that contrast - we go to the US and play like clubs and stuff, so we’re playing to 500 kids a night or something like that then we come back here and place to like 5000, it’s cool to have that difference.”

Rewind back to April of this year though and standing backstage at Earl’s Court waiting to play to 10,000 people before a note of new material had been heard, the band weren’t sure what the reaction to their UK return was going to be. Turns out they needn’t have worried. “Give It A Name was amazing,” says Mike. “It was one of the best shows I’ve ever played. We really didn’t expect that. For us to come back, our records wasn’t even out at that time, like we hadn’t been around for a while cos we’d been doing the record, so for us to go away for a year and then to come back to that amount of support, it blew us away. I remember coming off stage, we came off the back of the stage at Earl’s Court we all just hugged each other.”