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Fightstar.
Say you're a hot young metal band. You've just recorded your debut album with internationally renowned producer Colin Richardson, responsible for heavy classics from the likes of Slipknot and Machinehead. You're about to tour Australia for the very first time as special guests of one of your favourite bands and key influences. Yet you have a problem, one which threatens to undermine your credibility. And that problem has a chorus that goes "I'm glad I / Crashed the wedding..."
Fightstar's guitarist Alex Westaway shrugs when I put it to him, but agrees that he's a little relieved that the massive UK success of pop-punk teenage pinups Busted wasn't echoed in Australia.
When Fightstar were starting out much was made of guitarist/vocalist Charlie Simpson's tenure in the chart topping, Wembley-filling trio, with more than a few unkind suggestions in their homeland that his motivations for forming Fightstar were more to do with clawing back some street cred than any serious musical aspirations.
"It's a constant battle, really," he sighs, "but I think we're kind of over it now because we've had such good support with the2 UK press: magazines like 'Rocksound' and 'Kerrang' have been so good to us and actually believed in us from the beginning, when they came to our early shows and saw we were actually for real. So now we're just trying to show more and more people that we're just four guys who make music."
Without having heard a note of Fightstar until recently, I had also noted the change in tone on music blogs and UK music boards over the past 18 months, from "Charlie from Busted makes transparent grab for relevance via metal band" to "they're actually pretty good" and finally to "I missed out on Fightstar tickets: anyone got any?"
"Yeah, that's been really cool to see," Westaway snickers softly.
"It is really good to see us winning the battle, in a way."
As far as credible entrees to the Australian audience go, opening for Funeral For A Friend has to be up there.
"It's a real honour to be playing with 'Funeral," he agrees, genuine reverence in his voice. "We're kinda friends with those guys but we've never actually played with them, so it's going to be really cool to support them. I'd kinda say we're the same kind of genre. I've been a big fan of their since the first album came out - I love that album - and they've kind of inspired us musically as well, so it'll be good to kind of tell them that."
Their debut, 'Grand Unification', is a solid slab of rock, but despite the Year Zero-sounding title, Westaway denies there was any particular game plan in mind when they entered the studio.
"We just really wanted to do something that we'd be really proud of to the best of our ability," he shrugs.
"It kinda happened naturally: we didn't put that much thought into how the songs were actually to be written, or how it was going to sound [as an album]. We wrote four of the songs while we were actually towards the end of the recording process: it was very much about how the songs were working individually."
Of course, having a producer like Colin Richardson on board helps a bit too.
"We were all big fans of his," Westaway enthuses. "Our bassist [Dan Haigh] is the biggest Machinehead fan, and our manager said 'OK, give me a list [of your dream producers] and I'll see what I can do' and Colin was number one - and then a couple of days later Colin came back saying 'yeah, I'd love to work with you' and we were blown away. Oh man, it was weird," he chuckles at the memory. "It was one of the highlights of my career, that day."
So I trust that the rest of the day was spent strutting around going "oh yeah, I'm a musician me. Who thinks so? Oh, only internationally renowned producer Colin Richardson..."
"Yeah, kind of," he laughs. "You get that arrogance for a day or two, but then it wears off and you think 'um, actually, I'm not that great.'"
Would that be around the same time the realisation hit that the only people who care are other musicians?
"Exactly: the only people who've actually heard of Colin Richardson are actually in my band anyway. It makes it kind of hard to brag about it."
Andrew P Street
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Fightstar support Funeral For A Friend at Thebarton Theatre on Wed 5 April.
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