Staind Up!

Ten years to the month since the release of Nirvana’s classic Nevermind and rock is back on top again with nu-metal and punk-pop outfits ranging from Slipknot to Limp Bizkit hitting the headlines and hogging the charts. The only difference is, this time around the focus has shifted away from the US North-West and the erstwhile grunge capital Seattle, to the North Eastern States of New England.

Springfield, Massachusetts outfit Staind are high among the latest contenders for the long- vacant crown of hard rock gods. The band’s third album Break The Cycle – already a million-plus seller in the US looks like doing similar business on this side of the pond. Currently on permanent MTV rotation, the first single to be taken from it, the infectious acoustic ballad ‘It’s Been Awhile’ is zooming up the UK and Irish singles charts. Meanwhile, the band’s recent UK debut saw the newly consecrated Kerrang! favourites receive the kind of ecstatic reception usually reserved for long lost legends.

“Rock has never gone away, boy bands have never gone away, teen-pop R&B has never gone away.” insists Staind frontman Aaron Lewis, before taking to the stage at a packed Astoria in London. “It’s always been a cyclical thing with the media and the music industry but the fans for the kind of music we play have always been out there.”

Staind formed in 1994 when Lewis met guitarist Mike Mushok at a Christmas party in their hometown. Adding drummer Jon Wysocki and bassist Johnny April, they played their first gig in February 1995. According to Lewis the New England club scene at the time was dominated totally by covers bands. “All the headlining bands in the bars were playing other people’s music,” he explains. “As fucked up as it may seem, cover bands get paid a lot more than bands doing their own stuff. What we did was we played the covers and then we’d throw in some originals. It worked for us, we took all the money, bought ourselves a van to tour with and were eventually able to go into the studio.”

It was the mid 1990’s when grunge still reigned and Staind honed their live chops emulating the big names of the day: “We did everything from Alice In Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Tool, Helmet, Pantera, Rage Against The Machine, all the way to through to Pearl Jam,” Lewis recalls. “If we heard a song we liked on the radio we’d tape it, go along to our jam session and rehearse it ‘till we had it down perfect.”

Their DIY debut, Tormented was issued in 1996 selling 800 copies on the day of release and soon after Staind got their big break supporting Limp Bizkit at a club in Connecticut. However the Bizkit’s Fred Durst apparently blew a fuse when he saw their album cover, (which features a bleeding Bible with a knife through it and a crucified Barbie doll). Mistaking them for Satanists he tossed the CD across the dressing room and tried to have them removed from the bill. However, he relented and after hearing their set he declared them his favourite band, signing them to his Flip label. Now close friends with Durst, Lewis has no regrets about the album cover. “It was meant to be shocking,” he says. “It reflected my life at the time and where I was at. Lack of faith in religion, loss of faith in love, loss of faith in life, in everything.”

Their second album Dysfunction expanded on the pent-up aggression and heavy hooks of their debut but with Break The Cycle Staind have opted for a more acoustic song-oriented, radio friendly sheen, albeit with enough of an edge not to alienate their early fan-base.

“We just tried to write good songs, we didn’t think about whether they were heavy or not,” Lewis claims. “We’ve always been a hard-edged band but we never wanted to be locked into just being a hard band, we concentrated on making it as good as we could. We’re all different in our tastes in music. I enjoy everything from James Taylor to Gordon Lightfoot and Crosby Stills & Nash. Another consideration was that we didn’t want to do anything that we couldn’t recreate live. We consider ourselves a live band first and foremost, we don’t want to have to bring a DAT machine out onstage every time we play.”

For Lewis, now 28 and married, success has come relatively late – something he says he’s eternally grateful for.

“I’m really glad it didn’t happen when I was twenty-one. I couldn’t have handled it back then. We’re not a big partying band on the road, there’s never a backstage party after the show. It’s a bit old school really, “ he concludes. “We like smoking a bit of weed and kicking back a bottle of beer or two, that’s about it.”

Break The Cycle is released on Elektra/East West