Post by ***Fightstar*** on Feb 17, 2006 12:58:02 GMT -5
This is quickly becoming a love hate thing... 
I agree with some things he says, but others make me want to throttle him and slit his throat :@.
Source = www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,,1711099,00.html
Charlie Simpson is so wildly enthusiastic about his band Fightstar's forthcoming gig at the London Astoria he is literally lost for words. He tries to tell me how excited he is, but he's so excited he can't finish any of his sentences. "All the bands I went to see, growing up, at the Astoria . . ." he says, but his voice, a kind of well-bred mumble that befits his public school education, trails off. He tries again. "I always thought to myself, the day I played the Astoria, the day you get to the Astoria level . . ." He trails off again. "It's just, like, 2,000 people, which is a nutsload of people, and I always thought to myself . . ." Another sentence vanishes.
Still, he has a point. It's a venue steeped in rock history - Nirvana played there in the early 1990s - and it is often used as a sort of benchmark for success: last year, a lot of fuss was made because Arctic Monkeys managed to sell the place out without releasing a proper single. Nevertheless, there's something slightly odd about Simpson's enthusiasm for "getting to Astoria level", particularly when you take into account that less than two years ago, a group he fronted sold out Wembley Arena 11 times in the space of 12 months.
But that was Busted, the faux-punk boyband who briefly reigned supreme as Britain's biggest pop act. And, as Simpson points out, when he was playing Wembley with the band, "A lot of my friends said the same thing: you looked as if you would rather have been anywhere else but where you were. Every day at work, I was in a f**ked-up situation. I was in a music career, which was amazing, and I hated it because it wasn't fulfilling me in any sense of the word. I kept thinking, imagine if this was a band I really liked, I'd be loving it. It was like torture. I had to put on this front of being . . ." His voice trails off again.
Simpson says he hasn't really talked about his time in Busted before, and indeed, he looks like a bundle of nerves, albeit a spectacularly handsome one - he chain-smokes, his legs bounce up and down, he plays fretfully with his cigarette lighter. Then some of the media training he received as a member of Britain's premier boyband seems to kick in. "The trouble with talking about this is that I don't want to come across as being ungrateful. I was extremely fortunate in a way. I can only talk about this in relation to my own feelings. So, I'm not saying this in an ungrateful way; there were good experiences. But it was like torture."
After two million-selling albums and eight top-three singles, Simpson brought the torture to a premature conclusion by quitting Busted in January 2005 to concentrate on Fightstar, the "serious" rock band he had formed in his spare time a few years previously. Whatever you think of Busted or indeed Fightstar's music, it's hard not to be impressed by Simpson's bravery. That's not merely because, as his management pointed out to him, Busted's popularity showed no signs of waning - "if I'd stuck with it for another couple of years," he says, "I would never have had to work again" - but because Fightstar's music is pitched at the heavy rock market, the world of Kerrang! magazine, the Download festival and bands called Children of Bodom and Avenged Sevenfold.
Hard rock fans are easy to mock, with their piercings, outsized clothes and pen-chant for doing that thing with their fingers that's meant to represent the devil's horns, but they are a notoriously tough crowd to impress. "They take as much pride in hating bands as they do in loving them," notes Simpson, and they particularly hate anything to do with pop music. You can catch a flavour of their musical puritanism by talking to Dan Haigh, Fightstar's bassist. "I'm from a metal background," he announces, with a hint of pride in his voice. "I didn't watch TV or listen to the charts, so when I first met him, I didn't actually know who Charlie was." Most metal fans, however, knew precisely who Busted and Charlie Simpson were, and devoted a lot of time to loathing them.
The fact that Simpson and Fightstar seem to have turned their opinions around in the past year represents one of the more remarkable reinventions in recent musical history. Former boyband members go on to do a lot of things - present children's television, appear on reality shows, reinvent themselves as R&B vocalists, end up in rehab - but it seems fairly certain that Simpson is the first one to appear on the cover of Kerrang! plugging the release of a concept album based around a Japanese manga cartoon called Neon Genesis Evangelion, which contains not one, but two musical evocations of the apocalypse. "I thought to myself, this is not going to be an easy ride," he says. "I understand how hard rock fans feel inside out, because I was one of those people. The reason I've been able to take all the nuts that's been thrown at me is because I understand the people throwing it. It's been my personal kind of battle to show them where I'm coming from."
Blessed with the kind of face that girls climb over each other to get closer to, Simpson certainly looks like boyband material, but it still seems slightly odd that a teenage fan of Metallica and the Deftones ended up singing about school discos to arenas packed with screaming tots. He sighs: the way he tells it, it was all a terrible mistake. "When I was at school, I formed a band called Spleen, and I loved that band. At the same time, I met my girlfriend, my brother was at school with me. But all in one year, Spleen's drummer got expelled, so no more band, and my girlfriend and brother left school. I started to hate school, decided to leave. Then one day, my music teacher said he'd seen this ad - guitarist wanted for pop-punk style band. I thought I might as well do it. I wanted to play music. I didn't think about where it would go or what it would do."
He says he realised his error within minutes of signing Busted's record contract. "I remember driving back and saying to my manager, I hope I haven't done something stupid. The other members of Busted don't know I said this, but I said, 'Something feels weird, I'm not sure this is going to work out.' He said, 'No, it'll be fine.' I spoke to my brother and he expressed a bit of concern. He said, 'Be careful, because the way this is going, it's going to be incredibly hard for you to leave it and go into a rock band.' Then I started to think, oh nuts."
His fears were compounded by some very teenage-sounding worries about what his peers thought of him. "I started to go to gigs and realised that people were recognising me, and I thought, I really hope these people know what I'm really like, that I'm into the same stuff as them, but I realised they wouldn't know that, they'd think I was into the nuts that I was doing. I started to hate fame, I didn't want to go out, because I didn't want to be recognised for what I was being recognised for. Even now, it still gets to me: if people recognise me and ask if I was in Busted, I say no."
Ironically, Simpson occasionally becomes so agitated talking about his time as a teen idol that his face ends up contorted into the kind of bewildered bug-eyed sneer he used to pull in Busted's photo shoots. "The teen press!" he shudders. "I'd go through a six-hour day of interviews and nobody would ask one question about music. Day after day, I wasn't expressing my real feelings." Forming Fightstar only made matters worse -for one thing, the only people who turned up to their early gigs were Busted fans ("I was playing the music I loved to a lot of blank faces," Simpson concedes), and for another, "I'd be so happy playing with them and then I'd suddenly realise, oh f**k, I've got to get up tomorrow and go on kids' television."
Eventually, he seems to have had some kind of breakdown while on tour in Germany. "I sat in my room thinking, I can't do this any more, I'm becoming mentally unstable. I didn't want to upset anyone, but I was getting to the point where I might have done something stupid. So I rang my manager and said, look, I can't do this any more. The management tried to talk my parents into making me stay, and my parents were like, look, he's leaving, make the arrangements. The day Busted split up, I was driving up to Warwick to play with Fightstar, listening to Radio 1, and these girls phone in going [tearfully], Oh, f**king Charlie, boo hoo. It just didn't bother me. I just thought, well, if you knew what I've had to deal with, you'd shut your f**king mouths."
Even with Busted gone, Simpson's history left Fightstar in an anomalous position. "We've had to prove more than any other rock band has ever had to prove," he says. "It was a war, every day," nods Haigh, "it really was." They are presumably one of the few bands who considered making potential record buyers flee from their gigs in tears a mark of success. "A good turning point for us came when we saw a 10-year-old kid at the front with his parents, our support band came on, they were pretty heavy, and about five minutes later we saw this kid leave, crying," recalls drummer Omar Abidi. "You feel a bit guilty," he adds, in a voice that suggests he doesn't feel guilty at all, "but the fans who were there for Charlie, it became pretty obvious to them when they heard our detuned guitars, that perhaps this wasn't their cup of tea any more."
Gradually the teenyboppers departed and the rock press began grudgingly showering the band with superlatives. Their concept album is now officially eagerly awaited, the Astoria is sold out and Simpson is "flabbergasted" at the speed of Fightstar's acceptance. Indeed, he is even enthusiastic about an interview he did with a guitar magazine this morning, which sounds, to the unqualified observer at least, like a protracted attempt to bore the former teen idol to death. "They asked me what guitars we use and what pick-ups we use and what tunings we use," he smiles. Beneath his big hat, the eyes that once caused millions of eight-year-old hearts to break are shining with eagerness. "This is a dream scenario."
ยท Fightstar's single Waste a Moment is released on March 6 on XXXlabel.
I agree with some things he says, but others make me want to throttle him and slit his throat :@.
Source = www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,,1711099,00.html
Charlie Simpson is so wildly enthusiastic about his band Fightstar's forthcoming gig at the London Astoria he is literally lost for words. He tries to tell me how excited he is, but he's so excited he can't finish any of his sentences. "All the bands I went to see, growing up, at the Astoria . . ." he says, but his voice, a kind of well-bred mumble that befits his public school education, trails off. He tries again. "I always thought to myself, the day I played the Astoria, the day you get to the Astoria level . . ." He trails off again. "It's just, like, 2,000 people, which is a nutsload of people, and I always thought to myself . . ." Another sentence vanishes.
Still, he has a point. It's a venue steeped in rock history - Nirvana played there in the early 1990s - and it is often used as a sort of benchmark for success: last year, a lot of fuss was made because Arctic Monkeys managed to sell the place out without releasing a proper single. Nevertheless, there's something slightly odd about Simpson's enthusiasm for "getting to Astoria level", particularly when you take into account that less than two years ago, a group he fronted sold out Wembley Arena 11 times in the space of 12 months.
But that was Busted, the faux-punk boyband who briefly reigned supreme as Britain's biggest pop act. And, as Simpson points out, when he was playing Wembley with the band, "A lot of my friends said the same thing: you looked as if you would rather have been anywhere else but where you were. Every day at work, I was in a f**ked-up situation. I was in a music career, which was amazing, and I hated it because it wasn't fulfilling me in any sense of the word. I kept thinking, imagine if this was a band I really liked, I'd be loving it. It was like torture. I had to put on this front of being . . ." His voice trails off again.
Simpson says he hasn't really talked about his time in Busted before, and indeed, he looks like a bundle of nerves, albeit a spectacularly handsome one - he chain-smokes, his legs bounce up and down, he plays fretfully with his cigarette lighter. Then some of the media training he received as a member of Britain's premier boyband seems to kick in. "The trouble with talking about this is that I don't want to come across as being ungrateful. I was extremely fortunate in a way. I can only talk about this in relation to my own feelings. So, I'm not saying this in an ungrateful way; there were good experiences. But it was like torture."
After two million-selling albums and eight top-three singles, Simpson brought the torture to a premature conclusion by quitting Busted in January 2005 to concentrate on Fightstar, the "serious" rock band he had formed in his spare time a few years previously. Whatever you think of Busted or indeed Fightstar's music, it's hard not to be impressed by Simpson's bravery. That's not merely because, as his management pointed out to him, Busted's popularity showed no signs of waning - "if I'd stuck with it for another couple of years," he says, "I would never have had to work again" - but because Fightstar's music is pitched at the heavy rock market, the world of Kerrang! magazine, the Download festival and bands called Children of Bodom and Avenged Sevenfold.
Hard rock fans are easy to mock, with their piercings, outsized clothes and pen-chant for doing that thing with their fingers that's meant to represent the devil's horns, but they are a notoriously tough crowd to impress. "They take as much pride in hating bands as they do in loving them," notes Simpson, and they particularly hate anything to do with pop music. You can catch a flavour of their musical puritanism by talking to Dan Haigh, Fightstar's bassist. "I'm from a metal background," he announces, with a hint of pride in his voice. "I didn't watch TV or listen to the charts, so when I first met him, I didn't actually know who Charlie was." Most metal fans, however, knew precisely who Busted and Charlie Simpson were, and devoted a lot of time to loathing them.
The fact that Simpson and Fightstar seem to have turned their opinions around in the past year represents one of the more remarkable reinventions in recent musical history. Former boyband members go on to do a lot of things - present children's television, appear on reality shows, reinvent themselves as R&B vocalists, end up in rehab - but it seems fairly certain that Simpson is the first one to appear on the cover of Kerrang! plugging the release of a concept album based around a Japanese manga cartoon called Neon Genesis Evangelion, which contains not one, but two musical evocations of the apocalypse. "I thought to myself, this is not going to be an easy ride," he says. "I understand how hard rock fans feel inside out, because I was one of those people. The reason I've been able to take all the nuts that's been thrown at me is because I understand the people throwing it. It's been my personal kind of battle to show them where I'm coming from."
Blessed with the kind of face that girls climb over each other to get closer to, Simpson certainly looks like boyband material, but it still seems slightly odd that a teenage fan of Metallica and the Deftones ended up singing about school discos to arenas packed with screaming tots. He sighs: the way he tells it, it was all a terrible mistake. "When I was at school, I formed a band called Spleen, and I loved that band. At the same time, I met my girlfriend, my brother was at school with me. But all in one year, Spleen's drummer got expelled, so no more band, and my girlfriend and brother left school. I started to hate school, decided to leave. Then one day, my music teacher said he'd seen this ad - guitarist wanted for pop-punk style band. I thought I might as well do it. I wanted to play music. I didn't think about where it would go or what it would do."
He says he realised his error within minutes of signing Busted's record contract. "I remember driving back and saying to my manager, I hope I haven't done something stupid. The other members of Busted don't know I said this, but I said, 'Something feels weird, I'm not sure this is going to work out.' He said, 'No, it'll be fine.' I spoke to my brother and he expressed a bit of concern. He said, 'Be careful, because the way this is going, it's going to be incredibly hard for you to leave it and go into a rock band.' Then I started to think, oh nuts."
His fears were compounded by some very teenage-sounding worries about what his peers thought of him. "I started to go to gigs and realised that people were recognising me, and I thought, I really hope these people know what I'm really like, that I'm into the same stuff as them, but I realised they wouldn't know that, they'd think I was into the nuts that I was doing. I started to hate fame, I didn't want to go out, because I didn't want to be recognised for what I was being recognised for. Even now, it still gets to me: if people recognise me and ask if I was in Busted, I say no."
Ironically, Simpson occasionally becomes so agitated talking about his time as a teen idol that his face ends up contorted into the kind of bewildered bug-eyed sneer he used to pull in Busted's photo shoots. "The teen press!" he shudders. "I'd go through a six-hour day of interviews and nobody would ask one question about music. Day after day, I wasn't expressing my real feelings." Forming Fightstar only made matters worse -for one thing, the only people who turned up to their early gigs were Busted fans ("I was playing the music I loved to a lot of blank faces," Simpson concedes), and for another, "I'd be so happy playing with them and then I'd suddenly realise, oh f**k, I've got to get up tomorrow and go on kids' television."
Eventually, he seems to have had some kind of breakdown while on tour in Germany. "I sat in my room thinking, I can't do this any more, I'm becoming mentally unstable. I didn't want to upset anyone, but I was getting to the point where I might have done something stupid. So I rang my manager and said, look, I can't do this any more. The management tried to talk my parents into making me stay, and my parents were like, look, he's leaving, make the arrangements. The day Busted split up, I was driving up to Warwick to play with Fightstar, listening to Radio 1, and these girls phone in going [tearfully], Oh, f**king Charlie, boo hoo. It just didn't bother me. I just thought, well, if you knew what I've had to deal with, you'd shut your f**king mouths."
Even with Busted gone, Simpson's history left Fightstar in an anomalous position. "We've had to prove more than any other rock band has ever had to prove," he says. "It was a war, every day," nods Haigh, "it really was." They are presumably one of the few bands who considered making potential record buyers flee from their gigs in tears a mark of success. "A good turning point for us came when we saw a 10-year-old kid at the front with his parents, our support band came on, they were pretty heavy, and about five minutes later we saw this kid leave, crying," recalls drummer Omar Abidi. "You feel a bit guilty," he adds, in a voice that suggests he doesn't feel guilty at all, "but the fans who were there for Charlie, it became pretty obvious to them when they heard our detuned guitars, that perhaps this wasn't their cup of tea any more."
Gradually the teenyboppers departed and the rock press began grudgingly showering the band with superlatives. Their concept album is now officially eagerly awaited, the Astoria is sold out and Simpson is "flabbergasted" at the speed of Fightstar's acceptance. Indeed, he is even enthusiastic about an interview he did with a guitar magazine this morning, which sounds, to the unqualified observer at least, like a protracted attempt to bore the former teen idol to death. "They asked me what guitars we use and what pick-ups we use and what tunings we use," he smiles. Beneath his big hat, the eyes that once caused millions of eight-year-old hearts to break are shining with eagerness. "This is a dream scenario."
ยท Fightstar's single Waste a Moment is released on March 6 on XXXlabel.
![...:Nadiah:...[SUCKER] Avatar](http://a710.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/40/m_18a0a98fd3ccfea1e82210fe59176745.jpg)
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