In the first of our podcast and video versions of the “People Behind The Pedals” series, we are delighted to welcome Steven Battelle, frontman of the excellent LostAlone.
We talk to Steven about his musical background, guitars, gear, collaboration with McFly and his love of Queen II.
You can also hear the podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music
Guitar FX Direct talks to LostAlone’s Steven Battelle – transcript below
Simon
Hi, and welcome to the People Behind The Pedals podcast.
And today, we’re going to be talking to Steven Battelle from Lost Alone.
So if you know Lost Alone, you’ll know that Steven is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer.
And if you haven’t come across them, you should check them out, they’re brilliant.
So welcome, Steven.
Steven
Hello, I’m very happy to be here.
Simon
Well, we’re delighted to have you here.
So we were hoping to have a quick chat about gear, guitars, pedals, of course, but let’s start at the beginning.
What got you into music?
Steven
It was definitely my mum and dad.
Both had different ends of the spectrum music that they were playing all the time to me.
So my dad was very much Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, and my mum was Queen, Madonna, Wham, like very like.
And my mum was definitely 80s Queen, though I have since become a big fan of early Queen.
My initial instruction to Queen was the 80s.
So my mum was very much 80s, my dad was over 70s when I think about it.
But those two things were obviously just, it was a constant in the house.
And I feel that only like now do I realise that’s the unique thing that created what I both like and make.
Simon
Yeah, I can see that immediately with a heavy sound and yet this incredible sense of melody and just great catchy tunes.
Steven
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Simon
Do you remember the first record you bought?
Steven
The first record that I would have physically bought myself would be a vinyl and it would be myself and my still drummer now, Mark.
We used to go to record fairs that came through Derby, which is where I was from.
We were doing paper rounds and we were getting like, you know, nine pounds a week.
But we’d save that and then every Sunday, every once a month, every Sunday, a record fair would come to the cricket ground in Derby.
And we’d go, and we’d go through the records.
Mark collected Status Quo, which was so weird for a 12-year-old in the mid-90s.
And I was looking for Queen stuff.
And there was obviously a lot more Queen than Quo because it doesn’t seem to be the collector’s market.
But we were like kind of old souls in like teenage boys’ bodies because we were there with all these kind of like men.
I remember we’d look on the walls…
And that’s where the ones in the plastic, where they were like 30 pounds was just not even a chance we’d ever be able to afford.
So we were going through the, you know, trying to get records for like, you know, under 10 pounds or like two for that.
And I don’t think it’s quite sad to me.
I mean, I get asked this question quite a lot.
I don’t know the first one I bought because, but what I do like is, and I think it’s such a thing we miss now, and I do definitely.
I loved that era looking back of where I knew I wanted to collect Queen, but I had no concept until I got the record home, whether I was buying 80s polished, like the Hot Space record, or if I was buying early 70s, extremely heavy riffs, there was no reference point to me to check what was what.
So it was this amazing blind kind of, oh, I’ve got a feeling about Queen II, the cover, you know, it looks like the Bohemian Rhapsody video.
I’ll get that.
So I like to think it was Queen II, because I always have, I have the cassette in front of me.
I have that record tattooed on my arm.
That’s my all time favourite record.
And I know it is one of the first I personally bought, but I couldn’t tell the exact truth that it was.
It just feels like it was.
Simon
And from that point, you just had to pick up a guitar, or were you already there?
Steven
I had, like, my parents, which I’m really grateful for now, wasn’t at the time.
My mum and dad sent me to classical guitar lessons when I was five.
And that was like just a thing that the school, just a very normal school in Derby, there was a guitar teacher, and I was like, I had to play guitar.
So I went to this guy called Jonathan Priestley, and it was a Thursday night.
It wasn’t at the school, it was at a shop in Derby called Foldes, upstairs, and my mum, everyone else was going home to watch cartoons, and me and my mum would be stood in the rain, waiting for the bus to go into town and have a half an hour guitar lesson.
I was hated every minute.
I had to do that.
And even though my mum and dad love music, they’re not musical, right?
They don’t play anything.
So what I started realizing by the time I was probably about seven or eight is when they told me to practice, I could come downstairs, have some music in front of me, play absolutely anything.
They would think I was playing what was on it.
It was just a con artist, which was horrible really.
So I did that and I never realized that all guitarists will get this, but I didn’t realize when I was doing classical that I was learning chords, but I wasn’t being told they were chords.
Because it was all finger picking notes.
So when it came to hitting, you know, age 12 at secondary school, and suddenly it was like a guy had an electric guitar, and that’s when I got into Queen and all this.
Suddenly I was like, oh, I don’t want to do that anymore.
Oh, there’s a guy doing acoustic guitar lessons where he strummed chords.
And I went to one lesson and realized I knew all of them.
I just hadn’t been told that that was a thing.
I’d been plucking the bass notes.
So I stopped having them straight away, and then I never had another lesson.
But I, again, with Mark, my drummer, he got a small drum kit.
I got my first electric guitar, and then we’ve just been together ever since.
And we never…
I do think my classical guitar lessons gave me a bed of how to play guitar, but I could not play you a classical piece of music.
And I couldn’t when I was like…I kind of wish I’d paid attention.
Simon
So when you got the guitar, was it immediately a vehicle for your writing or did you learn the covers first?
Steven
It was both.
It was instantly, how do I play Queen songs?
And it was staring at…
I’d found that one of these record fairs, an early 80s VHS of a series, and Brian May did the first one, called Starlix.
And it was the first time like big famous guitar players had sat down with their gear.
This is like a normal thing now on YouTube, and sat down and then he’d played like 12 of his famous solos, and he would play at the speed, and then he would go, and now I play it slowly, and really talk you through it.
So I used to try and do that.
And then, yeah, it was a real mixture of…
I mean, instantly for me, the second I was…
We were obviously…
Me and Mark had bands straight away, and the first band was just me and Mark, and it was anyone who would join the band with us at school.
But instantly, it was songwriting for me.
I wrote…
You know, we did all the classic covers, which I still find so odd.
It’s still the classic covers you do.
I mean, I know people always do contemporary stuff, but when you’re a guitar player, you still hit, like, weird things like Johnny B. Goode.
How is that still a thing that people play now?
But I don’t know, it’s weird.
But yes, we did things like that.
We did more obscure things, like we did, like…
This is in the mid-90s, but we were doing, like, deep cuts from the first Queen record.
That was what we were learning.
It was really strange.
And then we were doing, like, really contemporary stuff at the time.
We had, like, an Oasis era where we just…
All the songs…
We either covered Oasis or all the songs I wrote sounded like Oasis.
Right.
And then as we got more, like, 16, we got into, like, a Derby scene, and then a few of the older people played me, like, people like the Pixies.
And it had just, like, game-changed my life.
I was like What?
Like, this is insane.
Like, I couldn’t compute that, like, the singer was the same guy who was shouting and also singing.
All these things where I just hadn’t…
I’d been so…
Me and Mark were, like, so different to other people at the time.
When they were all listening to real alternate music at the time, we were listening to Queen and Status Quo and a bit of Beatles.
So it really hit hard when we were kind of that age.
We were more of a scene with our first kind of proper band.
It was like a hot punky band of our school band called Stumble.
Suddenly we were in a scene with older people because they’d let us play with them.
And they were showing us, like, you know, Nirvana and the Pixies and just loads of, like, you know, Breeders.
All these other more alternate bands.
And then I think metal hit hard.
So we were massive Iron Maiden fans.
And we had a period where we went into the really dark metal and then Maiden kind of shone through.
It was Maiden and Metallica who shone through
So we did all that very quickly.
We did a lot of, like, all the different kind of genres.
But we never ditched them.
We collected them all like, right, I’m that Iron Maiden fan.
And I was still going to see Iron Maiden now.
You know, we collected all these different worlds that we just loved so much.
Simon
So you’re starting to write at this point.
Were you primarily coming up with riffs, or were you starting almost to write prose and then fit the music to the lyric?
Steven
Very early on, it would have been writing guitar things and then thinking, oh, what can we make a song out of this?
Very, I think maybe it was a bit collaborative to start with, with whoever was in the band.
Very quickly, at least by 14, I was very arrogantly like, I’m the songwriter, every band I’m in, we play everything that I write.
You don’t have a choice.
To start with, I was the singer and guitar player.
Then when we formed this band at 16, when it was crazy, when it was such a bold thing to do at that point, but it was three members from one school and two members from another.
Which when you’re that age, you don’t know people from other schools.
But we somehow formed a band with two schools that were like rivals.
And in that band, I wasn’t the lead singer.
I was the guitar player, songwriter.
I think that’s because Oasis were around.
I was Noel Gallagher.
But it was like, what I realize now when I hear the songs, all the choruses, so the lead singer would sing everything.
Whenever it got to the chorus, I wasn’t really doing the harmony parts.
I was doing the lead when he was going to the harmony.
So I was obviously on this weird path of like, I’m going to be the singer as well.
But yeah, it was very much from like a couple of years in when I wasn’t like a kid anymore, it was how I still write today, which is I don’t write with an instrument.
I go for walks.
This is primarily as well now for my own songs.
For my own songs, I never sit down and go, I’m going to write a song.
I will go for walks or go on trips and stuff.
And while I’m walking, I will hear the music, the rhythm specifically, all the nuances, and then the lyrics at the same time will start happening.
And then it’s kind of for me, a real race and a fight to get that documented as quickly as possible.
I do use my voice memo a lot now, but I used to just have it where I had a real thing of, if I don’t still have this all in my head when I get to where I need to document it, it’s not worth it.
And I probably lost loads of cool ideas doing that.
But I just want to do it whereas now, if I’ve even start thinking of an idea, I flip my phone on to voice memo.
So there’s so many memos of me like heavy breathing, walking somewhere, but me singing randomly and shouting things about drums.
I now put my phone on religiously when I have a shower.
I record every shower I have because that is where I will have 90% of my ideas for other people.
Like if I know I could, because I think you’re aware, but I write a lot of songs for other artists.
And that’s very different for me.
It’s not my own songs.
When I say my own, I mean for my band or whatever.
That is like me, just like who I am.
For other artists, I really enjoy.
So if I was in a session today, I would have got up, immersed myself in that artist, whatever they’ve released, go and have a shower.
And then I would just start always being that artist in the shower, singing out ideas and lyric ideas and telling myself the future me, going, okay, this lyric will be awesome as this.
And then I’ll get out of the shower and listen to what I’ve talked about and then maybe document a riff or an idea into a video, which I’ll then take with me to a session.
And depending on how sessions can be where the artist has got their own ideas, or they might need like you to prompt it, I’ll be like, okay, well, this is in the shower today.
That normally breaks the ice as well, because they’re like, what?
So it’s kind of like…
Simon
So you’ve been working with the McFly guys.
How was that?
Steven
So that’s kind of weird.
It’s been like two and a half years.
There’s a producer called Jason Perry, who was in an amazing band called A, in like the early 2000s.
And he’s now like a producer.
He’s had a lot of big records.
And he’s worked with McFly for quite a few years.
I knew Jason just purely because he worked with the guy who mixed the Lost Alone record.
And one day, Jason tweeted me going, there’s a song called Doomageddon.
And he tweeted just going, Doomageddon, awesome song.
And we kind of just became kind of acquaintances.
He called me up one day and said, hey man, would you be able to send some ideas over for McFly?
I was like, yeah, definitely.
I didn’t listen to McFly.
I just knew the public perception of who they are, like a pop rock band.
So I just wrote a couple of ideas of what I thought they would be looking for, which was acoustic, jangly, kind of really poppy.
And Jason just replied going, no, dude, they want riffs.
And I was like, okay, cool.
He mentioned Kiss and Van Halen.
So I just sat right here, which is again different to how I do my own stuff, picked up my guitar, and I just did very simply with like drums, bass, and guitar, 10 riffs in an hour, which is very easy to me.
I just, I’m sure I don’t know if you play guitar, but like if I pick up a guitar, if I pick up a guitar, I will just write, I won’t even write a riff, as in I realise now I am writing riffs because I’ve been in sessions where I’ve played absolute nonsense and someone’s gone, can we have that?
And I’m like, okay, just naturally, when you’re a guitar player, you do this noodle about, but to other people, that’s a riff.
So anyway, it’s quite easy for me to write 10 riffs.
I did that, and Jason just replied about an hour late to go, dude, one of those riffs has definitely already made a song.
They love it and they’re working on it right now, and it’s a song they already had, but it’s what they needed.
So I was like, oh, this is ace.
They want to know if you want to come down.
And I was like, yeah, definitely.
So I went down the next day, and I stayed for two and a half years, and I’m going back there.
I’ll be there this week again.
I just hit it off very well with them personally, musically and individually.
Weirdly, we all individually shared a love of something that we really loved.
So myself and Dougie love Jurassic Park.
I’m actually wearing a Jurassic Park T-shirt, and he properly…
So we’re obsessed over that, and as we’ve become very good friends, we love music.
We love just talking about music.
And then I got the tattoo from Home Alone movie on my hand.
Tom and me both love Christmas and musical theatre.
I mean, he loves Home Alone, and we both love musicals.
So we hear it off.
Me and Harry love Alan Partridge, like obsessively Alan Partridge fans.
And then me and Danny just love production and songwriting, and Oasis and Bruce Springsteen.
So it was weird how well we all hit it off, and collectively we hit it off.
And then most importantly, on that first day, I’ll never forget it, we had that kind of awkward, you know, first meeting people, it’s nerve-racking, whoever it is.
But what felt nice about that, their setup is very much like a recording studio.
It’s not like a little room where you’re writing.
It is an amazing studio.
So it really felt like a normal experience to be where you’re with a band, like my own band.
They just gave me a guitar and a Marshall stack and went, go on then.
And I put my head down and played a riff.
I played this riff, a couple of chords showed it, Danny and Dougie and Harry joined in.
And there’s a great video of this that Jason Perry took.
And that song is the last track on their album that went to number two last year.
And it was like the first thing I played to them.
And then full circle moment is Lost Alone supporting them on tour in December (2023).
And I played that song on stage with them every night.
So it’s such a weird, weird thing.
And then I ended up writing the album’s 10 songs.
I wrote, co-wrote seven of the songs on the record with them.
And it was a really awesome experience where they really brought me into the band.
Like I, because they were making the record as we were writing it, it was very different to other writes.
I do well, go to a session, write a song, and then you get told a few weeks later, oh, they’re using it and here’s the recording.
This was me in the room as it was being made and they made me feel real part of.
So it felt like when the record came out, I was jumping up and down like I’d released the record.
I hadn’t because I’m not in the band, but it felt very much part of the whole thing.
So yeah, it was, it remains a brilliant thing.
We, myself, Danny and Dougie now have a writing team together where we write for other artists that have been doing that for just over a year now.
Simon
Well, I was going to ask you how you influenced each other, but hugely by the sense of things.
Steven
I think so, yeah.
I think on all levels, musically, that’s the reason to bring me in, is to influence.
Those guys do not need help writing.
My perception of them before I met them was, I never had any interest in them.
I think they used to be in Smash Hits magazine.
I’m a crank guy.
I wouldn’t have known if they even wrote their own songs or played instruments.
Within five minutes of being there, I was like, oh, these are some of the best songwriters I’ve ever met, and they’re awesome players, and they love it.
It was a complete, like my ignorance to what they were before I met them was like, you know, just insane.
So in terms of the reason to get something like me into a record like that is, it’s a band who’s had a huge success, and it’s a real admirable thing.
They’re not just going, well, we’ve sold seven million records and had X amount of number one singers.
We can do this.
They’re like, oh no, we want to make this kind of record.
So I said, to the producer, who would be cool?
Who would be a cool flavor to put in the room that would do things that we wouldn’t consider doing?
And that’s the reason.
And really, I think the kind of perception of like that not all rock bands would do that . It’s so weird when you think about, you know, my favorite Aerosmith and Bon Jovi eras are where they had some of the biggest pop writers ever co-writing their songs, Desmond Child.
You know, Mutt Lang co-wrote the big Def Leppard stuff.
So yeah, in terms of the influence on me, I can tell you directly the biggest influence as a writer I’ve taken away from those guys is honestly, I would finish songs with them that were recorded.
I was like, that is a seriously good song.
Three weeks later, they would want to pull it apart and make it better.
And I was just like, wow, they really don’t just settle for the best thing.
They want to find even more in a song, whereas I’ve always been quite like, I like and not compare myself to Freddie Mercury, but I always have this analogy because I know so much about Queen, that Brian May would take six months on one note and Freddie Mercury was a songwriter where he would come into a studio, have five hours of manic genius, and then leave and never want to hear the song again.
But it was amazing.
And I would always say to myself, like I explained about how I write songs earlier, I like to capture the moment, get it done, and then I’m on to the next thing.
So I did find it really interesting that it’s maybe, and then go back and go, oh wow, like this, it’s made me analyse stuff, let stuff lie for a couple of days or weeks.
This could actually be better here because that bit is incredible.
So that’s a big influence they had on me, definitely.
Simon
So did you get involved with the production at all?
The reason I ask is that I noticed on the more recent albums, you’ve got full production credits, and that looks like some sort of evolution from the first albums that Lost Alone did.
It seemed to be all the band involved, and then you brought in an external Dan Weller, and now it seems like it’s just yourself.
Steven
Yeah, there’s a real easy lineage of that, I think.
I think it’s quite normal for bands, but one thing I’ll say is, with no disrespect to any producer we’ve ever had, because we had awesome producers, I don’t think I ever realized that I was producing the record and never gave myself the credit. Because if you listen to a Lost Alone demo compared to the recording, it is identical, just not recorded as well.
So really easily, our first record was produced by, I think, me, because the songs, the demos are the same, but when you go into a studio then, you just presume that the engineer is the producer.
It was just naivety, and he was great.
So first record says a guy called Matt Ellis, which I would now say, with my knowledge now, he recorded the band.
Every single thing you hear is what I made those decisions.
They are on the original demo.
The second record is a different story, because what I wish happened there was that it was co-produced by me and these two guys, because that’s what we signed to Warner Brothers in America.
And we worked with two of the biggest producers on the planet, a guy called Jack Knife Lee, who the week before us had done U2, and the week after us was doing REM.
And the other guy we worked with, Greg Wells.
Greg Wells is probably now the biggest producer on the planet.
Anyone here listening who records at home or uses Pro Tools or Logic, you’re probably all using his plugins, like the Greg Wells Waves plugins.
And he’s produced everyone from Adele to Katy Perry to 21 Pilots to Deftones.
He also did all the production on the Hollywood musical, The Greatest Showman, like the biggest soundtrack of all time.
So with that, we chose them as producers because they were like huge producers.
That’s the most production I think I’ve ever had.
Jack Knifeley did three songs and Greg did eight, because that really was sitting down and taking the songs and going, with Jack Knifeley, he wanted to talk about structure, with Greg Wells it was more about, we had a song called Vesuvius on that record.
It was a really fast riff.
And the way I talk about production with him, he was the kind of producer I love, which wasn’t about how to play or changing songs.
He loved the songs, but it was mentally.
I’d never been in a situation where somebody would talk to me for two hours about what the song meant, get into that world and then go, now record it.
He wanted Mark on the drums to be thinking about what I’d worked like.
It was just music to my ears.
It was like really, okay, this is what a good producer is.
They’re not dialing it in.
They want to understand what you’re feeling, and they want the guitar to feel like that.
They want it all to be like that.
I remember on that song Vesuvius, the riff was so fast.
I reckon we did an hour of playing that riff so slow, and he would just every so often tell us to increase the speed, and he kept doing it, and it was kind of agony.
When we got up to speed, he then went, record, and we just played the song better, because it was one of those riffs where if you’re a guitar player, probably when you play it live, you’re not playing it right once, because it’s so fast and there’s always weird pull-offs on it.
But he got us playing the riff so tight, and it’s a three piece, which is awesome.
When you’re locked in, you are locked in, but there’s also nowhere to hide.
Yeah, and then on the Dan Weller record, we’re managed by the same manager, there’s a guy called Ante Shakari, who we’ve toured with, an awesome band.
They’d worked with Dan a lot and recommended him.
So we did that record with him, and again, Dan’s awesome.
I feel like I give a lot of credit, and when if you look on like Spotify, the credits, there’s no credit ever for mixer, you can’t actually add that.
But the guy who mixed it with me was called Adam Noble.
And I actually added him into the credits of producer, so his name was on it, because we recorded that album quite fast with Dan, and it was me and Adam that put it together, because that record, I was obsessed with the musical Les Mis, and it’s like a rock musical.
There were like hard drives full of 400 vocal harmonies per song.
And it was really Adam and me.
I was saying, Dan recorded it, and Adam and me put this ridiculous record together in his studio, because when he got the hard drives, he was just like, what?
And this guy works with like McCartney.
He’s done all the recent Biffy Clyro records.
He’s a real top producer as well as mixer.
He’s produced a mix of the last two Placebo records, and he’s mixed the recent LostAlone record and all the singles we do.
So the evolution now is that I realized, as long as I’ve got good engineers, so the producer role that I’ve finally given myself is, we’ve been paying a producer to record and definitely to get a vibe and everything, but now it’s like, I know what I want.
It’s the mixing where I’m not the guy that can actualize the final thing.
I don’t have that talent.
So, yeah, Adam’s become the kind of partner in crime where we will get everything recorded and then send it to him, and he will then work on it and send back.
And that’s the difference for me, because I used to want to attend every mix, whereas I trust Adam enough that I send him extensive notes and I enjoy now getting a mix back that surprises me.
And then I make more notes, whereas before I’d be in the room already making points before it was done.
Simon
That’s quite an evolution.
Do you find yourself getting involved in the tech regarding guitars and amps and pedals?
Steven
I’d say that I am obsessed with gear and my gear, but I’m not a tech guy.
You know, I do things like I woke up the other morning and I had a two and a half thousand pound Fender Strat in my basket on fender.com because I had an email saying, do you still want to buy it?
I had no recollection in the middle of the night.
I’d done that.
I definitely couldn’t afford it.
And I was like, what?
I’d obviously been dreaming of a Strat because I’ve never owned it.
I’m like a more of a Gibson guy.
I played Strat on records, but I’ve never owned one.
I must have just been in the middle of the night.
I knew the Strat.
But yeah, my gear is a real vintage gear guy.
I use a 1974 Marshall JMP on top of either my like, I don’t know, like early 90s, just to be very standard Marshall cab.
I’ve got an 8×10 red 1970s Marshall cab with a beautiful mesh.
So I’ve got that.
And I always have two amps running.
And I’ve got an early 90s Mesa Boogie dual rectifier, which is the Mesa before.
Like a dual rectifier now has about 10,000 knobs on it.
Mine’s still the one way.
It was like, it’s just, you know, it’s gain, presence, base, middle, treble.
I have that.
That’s my amp setup.
It always has been, they both run all the time together.
I’m just turning the clean and the distortion on and off on the Mesa.
But the JMP is constantly running.
My main guitar is this one, which is a 1965 SG Junior.
I picked up in like 2000.
When we did our first album, I must give huge credit actually to Matt, the guy who I said didn’t really produce the first LostAlone record.
When we went to the studio, he seen us live.
He went, you are awesome, but your gear is all wrong.
Anyway, what you need is an SG, and you need to stop using that high-gain, like quite tinny sounding Laney.
And Laney are awesome now, but the way I was using it was wrong.
And he said, what you need is a JMP, and you need a high-gain amp together.
So I did not know this.
And we went to Doncaster Music, and I played about, no joke, there must have been in that shop that day.
There must have been about 12 of these.
Mostly looked the same.
One of them was white.
Most looked like this.
But I played this one, and like we were talking about, something just went, oh wow, that’s my guitar.
And so this is the guitar that’s been on every LostAlone recording.
It has toured, it’s toured the world, and then I was lucky enough to, I’ve got an awesome like these two luthiers in Leicester, who I actually damaged this guitar in Germany.
And I was just heartbroken, like a little chunk came out of it on the fretboard here.
I think I was doing press ups on it, something had happened, so it’s stupid on stage.
We found like the nearest luthiers to Derby, which is where, I’m in London now, but that’s where Derby is like my home, I still call Derby my home.
And we went there and this bond was formed with them, where they fixed this guitar and these would never know.
And then they said, why don’t we make you a couple of exact copies of this, so you don’t have to have this one, you know, touring.
And I’ve never really been that kind of guy, because I feel like I don’t want to have a guitar that just sits at home.
So I had these couple of guitars made as spares, because you always need a backup for street breakers or just tunings.
But then, and I still kept touring this, but then as touring went on, and these other guitars were so perfect, and one of them was actually became the main guitar, because they made me one with two pickups.
It was a little bit, I don’t have that here, because it’s okay that I’ll rehearse with him, but that my front house guy said, that one’s actually like way better for live.
So we actually kind of retired this to more of a studio guitar, and what I used to write on every day.
It’s mine.
So I have this, I have two guitars identical to it, but they’ve been kind of built to be identical.
I have, I don’t have it here, which is such a shame, but you can definitely see photos of it online.
I have a custom made guitar for one song.
It’s a song called Crusaders, which is like this shape, but it also has a neck coming out here, which has one string on it, and the pick up goes that way up the neck.
And I’ll send you like a link where you can see what I do.
It enables me to, I play a chord, because I’m singing and playing at the same time.
And in the chorus, I’ll play a chord through the guitar, and I can also hit the other string and bring this hand over while the chord’s still on, play a riff there without losing the chord.
That was the reason.
But then I also do a weird riff where on this string I go, do-do, and I switch between the necks quite fast.
So, that is a weird guitar that I use for one song, which the people who like my music just love that guitar.
I also have a baritone for one song as well, which is ridiculous.
My baritone has been, this is the most stupid thing I did, but it’s effectively a baritone guitar, which I put all the LostAlones in E flat, but I needed a B on the low string, and a normal guitar wouldn’t stay nice like that.
So, I got a baritone, but the baritone is actually in E flat, but then the low string is tuned down.
So, it’s affecting all the strings at different gauges because the baritone strings, I couldn’t bend the G note.
So, it’s again, just for one song, which is just stupid.
But luckily, I have like a…
When you’re touring and stuff, like you kind of get a little relationships like Fender or Gibson.
So, I get like a little kind of endorse thing with both of them, where you get like a discount.
So, I’m not like spending all this money on like, guitars for one song, but I got the barratone off Fender for like a really cool price.
And yeah, and then I have…
Just other guitars that I use on records, like I’ve got this cool Gordon Smith, it’s a really nice…
This was like my E guitar for a while, that I tuned in E.
And I’ve also got this amazing Les Paul from a German company from the 70s called Hoyer.
And there are…
It’s as for me, I’ve used it over Les…
actual Gibson Les Pauls on tracks.
It’s so heavy.
It’s just an amazing guitar.
And that’s a 70s…
It’s a early 70s German brand.
Then I’ve just got like all my guitars up in Derby.
They’re all…
They’re mainly kind of custom made things by these guys in Leicester that are kind of for gigging.
They’re all for touring.
The problem with touring, and if you want to do it properly, is if you have guitars for specific sounds, you need to have two.
Yes.
Because if it’s a song that everyone’s expecting, and if something happens to it mid-song, you need that on the guitar.
The reason for multiple guitars for me is not to go…
I try and take as few on tour as possible, but you end up, I think I take nine guitars on tour.
But that’s all just because you need…
Your guitar tech needs to be able to give you the right guitar at the right moment, you know.
Yeah.
Pedal wise…
Simon
Yeah, I was gonna say, I really want to ask you about pedals.
Steven
I’ve used every pedal on the planet probably.
I’ve been so lucky.
Like some of the people we’ve worked with, they’ve just got awesome collections.
My actual own pedal board, there’s a feature on this pedal board in Total Guitar Magazine, because weirdly, all my pedals are custom made, one of a kind Star Wars pedals.
They had to actually put a thing, they had to put a thing in Total Guitar, like a disclaimer that said, like George Lucas does not authorize these, and they’re not for sale.
But it was a, I had a pedal board full of like, I had a Russian Big Muff, and I had all your very standard, like, cool pedals.
And then my friend who’s my guitar tech, he’s just one of these guys who just makes things.
He started making guitar pedals, and we both love Star Wars.
And one day, we were probably quite early on in Lost Alone, we were doing demos, and we just started coming up with names, like R2EQ, and things like that.
We were like, oh, that’s a cool pedal.
So he just went away and started making them, and he made them so high quality.
The only other people that have them on the planet are Ray from My Chemical Romance, because he’d seen it when we toured with them and gone, oh, can I get one of them?
And also because it sounds amazing.
So that was the Han Solo pedal.
And Ray thought, like I did, it was the best boost pedal he’d ever heard.
And all it was doing was boosting my signal.
We just had something about it.
And the pleasure of pressing these pedals is, and Jimmy’s attention to detail is, when he pressed the Han Solo, which is just a boost pedal, but it’s solo for the guitar solo, his blaster fires.
And that’s the LED.
I have to remind myself of what they all are, but I’ll send you some photos.
I’ll send you a total guitar magazine thing.
Yeah, that would be great, actually, thank you.
All these pedals, to get down to what they actually are, Jimmy’s done a lot of mods on them, but they’re all my first pedal board.
Okay, it’d be cool to have that.
So they’re all mods on like existing pedals.
We’ve not really created new stuff because I liked what I was using.
And I was using like a Big Muff, I was using a Rat Pedal, I was using like the DS-1, I was using the DD-6, I think, and the Delay Pedal.
We didn’t make a lot of like crazy fuzz things that were just usable on record and then live.
Our front of the house would just be like, yeah, Keyless never use that again.
Like it just makes the sound that for so bad.
I’m sure it sounds good like on the controlled mix of a record, but like he was like, all that does is mean I can’t do anything for you.
So yeah, the pedals are all these kind of really cool, like custom pedals really.
I never thought it was a unique thing.
And you might tell me it’s not, but I always have two boss tuners.
And every time I play a show, support bands or the crew would go, why have you got two?
And for me, it was, I’ve got one, it’s obviously just the silent tuning.
The other one that is running while I’m playing.
I always felt that was like, because we’re a three piece.
The luxury of being a three piece is like, I could always like in the middle of like a crazy instrumental, if I felt something that was off, I could do a cheeky live tune or check it in the middle of something that people have thought, oh, he’s crazy, he’s going to move.
I found like that was really useful to just get the guitar.
Because especially more in the early days, I used to put the guitar on the stage a lot.
And like get the crowd going.
And I never had the foresight to go, I could just have a stand there and put it on that.
I just like shook it down, it would go out.
And I didn’t ever want to, I never wanted to like, I never wanted to like have it go silent in the middle of a song.
So, yeah, so I basically have two boss tuners is the thing.
And then my very trusty, the actual pedal that came with the Mesa Boogie, the change in switch, that’s the thing that if my guitar tech knows, if it’s a festival or so where I’m not even going to go on stage before we play, he, there’s like a mathematical thing of where my mic goes, where the Mesa switches.
If that’s in the right place, I don’t even need to look anywhere.
So that’s kind of my lifeline.
The Mesa Boogie channel changer, if it’s in the right place in relation to where my mic is, and then it’s taped down, I never even glance at my pedalboard, I don’t even see it, because that is where my foot hovers like 99% of the show.
But the way that we’d be always so tight is I’m hitting that from the distortion of that to the clean, every millisecond that there’s a tight silent gap or anything.
It’s a natural thing for me to just hit that.
So the big high gain stuff just drops off for a moment.
I know people use volume pedals and stuff, but I’ve always just been a, you know, a changer like that.
And then I’m very naturally on the guitar as well, which is something weird that people mentioned to you.
I think maybe a lost art or maybe it’s just I grew up watching Brian May.
But like the second the song finishes or even in the middle of a verse where I’m not playing guitar, maybe it’s just bass and drums or so.
I naturally just the volume goes off.
And then the volume comes on like that.
I don’t even know I’m doing it.
If we’re in a rehearsal and we stop in the middle of a song going, the volume gets rolled off.
I’m not even sure I’m doing it.
So that’s a technique of mine.
I didn’t really know I had, but I do as well.
Simon
That must also be great for smaller venues where you’ve got inherent feedback problems.
Steven
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that’s where it comes from.
And also from our rehearsal room, which we still love our, we don’t have some big rehearsal room.
When you’re in there, all you want when a song finishes is silence.
I’ve been in situations, and we laugh now because when we did these big shows, like after pandemic with My Chemical Romance in stadiums, we actually bought in our friends to play, have an extra guitarist in the band, because I just thought, I need to be able to have a bit more like, you know, going off guitar and have somebody there, which was cool.
The records are so layered.
But instantly with him, it was like, dude, between songs, we don’t start playing Radiohead riffs.
He’s a great friend, so he took it well, but it was like, I think that’s a normal thing in bands where they finish and everyone will start playing their favorite riffs, where we’re like, when you finish a song, that’s silent time where we discuss.
It was like so militant about that.
It’s quite funny.
But yeah, he got told straight away.
And he’s never done it again.
Simon
So am I right in thinking you guys were about to go on tour?
Steven
We are doing a little tour in exactly one month from now.
So it starts on March the 7th. (2024)
And it is like really small, like 300 cap UK venues.
Just, we did the MyCam shows, and then we did the tour of Assembly McFly.
And I just said to our agent, we just want to do like a cool, it’s like two weeks, just get right in those.
I love the sweaty, small venues.
And just like our real hardcore fans, just like hitting them hard.
So yeah, we’re doing that.
And I’m just dead excited to do that, because it’s my favorite thing.
I have no real difference in feelings to play in 200 people, to play in the biggest shows with even MyCam were like 34,000.
So it’s kind of like, I don’t feel differently about either.
I think I do after.
When you play in a stadium and after you kind of go, it’s more when you see the footage after and go, oh, crazy.
You just play in a stadium, you know.
But when you’re just looking forward to play a show, it’s just all the same.
And headline shows as well, because the audience will know your songs and lyrics.
I just love that so much.
Simon
Well, Steven, thanks so much for taking the time out to chat to us.
I hope the tour goes well and the single is enormously successful.
So yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Thanks so much.
Steven
Yeah, I enjoyed chatting, that was really good.
