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Author: Snap Magazine
Date: July 2006
Link: Snap Magazine

These Welsh pin-ups started out vaguely n� metal on 2001�s The Fake Sound of Progress, but five years later are channeling equal parts My Chemical Romance and Joe Strummer on their spunky third effort.

What kind of creative charge did you feel on Liberation Transmission?

Ian Watkins: It was as basic as better songs. When we listen to the other albums, we love them and stuff and they represented us at that time, but the one thing we felt was lacking was real songs. There were a lot of cool ideas here and there, a lot of riffs here and there, but this time we wanted to make 12 really good songs, not necessarily drawing from any one genre. We felt that, this being our third album, we were more qualified to tackle that. So we looked to our old influences growing up, like the Police, the Clash, Duran Duran, a lot of �80s British pop stuff.

Did that feel a little risky after already having established a sound that people were buying into?

Watkins: We don�t even think about it. We�ve always written music for ourselves, as naive as that sounds. If we try to write it and predict what people will like and we don�t like it, and then if nobody else likes it anyway, what�s the point? This way, if nobody likes it, at least we do.

Did you like working with Bob Rock?

Watkins: We knew Bob was tough. He�s a hassle, a pain in the ass, but he�s awesome. He�s very passionate. If he hates something, you�ll know, and if he loves something, he�ll be totally over the moon. When we first met up with him, we played him a CD of the songs we had; he stopped it after 14 seconds and asked if we actually thought it was good. But that�s what we needed. We didn�t need a “yes” guy; we needed somebody to challenge us.

These seem like more personal songs than on your first two albums. Are they?

Watkins: Yeah, they are. I�d rather focus on the politics of emotion than anything else, something more personal than global, something you can really change right now. You can empower yourself to change if it�s about emotions. I�d never written any songs really about myself, and these are obviously about myself, I think. As trite and clich�d as this sounds, I�d been through the breakup stuff and everything. But this is the first time I wrote about that instead of disguising it. It was kind of weird.