By Kris Harris on behalf of Kerrang!
Since their formation a year ago, Live Youth have had more than their fair share of ups and downs, and lead singer Gemma Maddison (formerly Ferns) faced her biggest challenge of all when her husband was jailed for murder. But after seemingly disappearing from the music world, Live Youth are back, and they're stronger than ever.
"The last few months have been a nightmare," Gemma Maddison explained to us. "Obviously, everybody knows the troubles me and Billy [Maddison - Gemma's rockstar husband] have been through, then we got married, then I got my injury and had to go in for surgery, then before I was even out Billy was arrested. I do feel very guilty because the other guys careers have had to hit the brakes because my personal life veered off, but sometimes things pile up to the point where I felt that if I continued to juggle music with my personal problems, I would have literally gone insane".
"Although it has made for some very interesting music", Dean Keller stated.
There have been many rumours in the last few months that part of the trouble with the band have been in-group arguments between Gemma and Dean, but judging by their displays today, we would disagree. The pair have been best friends since young Gemma was fifteen years old, and South African Dean was a young 19 year old, new to the UK and looking for new opportunities. Over the course of a year, Dean went from Gemma's best friend to her first serious boyfriend, and two years later he became the father to the pairs adoptive son, 3 year old Caleb, before the pair broke up after almost 3 years together. Gemma, on the other hand, saw Dean through a long battle with drugs and alcohol and a coma in which he had to learn how to speak, write, walk, eat and play music all over again. All this before she turned 20. But rather than pushing them apart, their hardships have only made them closer.
"We have arguments, just like anybody else who spend a lot of time together," Dean said, "but we're better for it. If we can get through what we've already been through, we can be through everything. We have a little boy together, we have two bands together and we love each other a lot; nothing will change that. On top of that, we know that there is no way either of us could be a success in music without the other. We bring out the best in each other. That's something special".
Indeed, fans of the pair's previous band, Rebel Uprising, and of Live Youth would agree that the partnership between the two young stars is something special to behold. Their writing techniques mould together to create touching, meaningful, outspoken lyrics which inspires and relates to fans the world over. Their voices fuse together to create a powerful, melodic combination which will haunt the listener long after the CD has been put away and the music in itself is airtight. Looking at the pair now, you can see they live and breathe for each other, they each feed off of each others sentences, listen intently and gain confidence from the other. It's clear that no difference of opinion will ever muscle its way in between these two - a couple that, when you watch them cuddled up together, make you wanna go away and call your best friend because 'its been a while'.
When asked about the reports that state that arguments are causing the band to come close to breaking up, Gemma laughed and said "no, that's not even close to the truth. Dean and I are actually getting on better than ever, as are the rest of the band. In fact, now that my personal issues are sorted out, we've actually started working on some new music. We've been writing constantly since about a week before Billy got released up until now, and this week we got the whole band together to try them out in the recording studio. Yes, a few songs have been committed to CD."
"Our next song, we've agreed on, will be this brand new track called 'Sleeping with the Enemy', which is taking us back to the start of Live Youth, back to high powered, good alternative rock fun. It's a great song to blow off some steam to and is really fun to play because its so fast and pretty complex. It goes high and low, slow and fast, upbeat and serious. We love making songs which can be read in two completely different ways. If you just listen to the music, listen to it in what I call a 'shallow' way, just listening to the tempo and how heavy it is, it just sounds like a good time, let's jump around type track, but when you listen to the lyrics its really about being fucked around not only by the music industry, but life in general, and I think the government and police system. It's about having to play nicey-nice with people you can't fucking stand, who you don't agree with but you have to bow to them to get anywhere, and its unfair. But it happens, as Billy shows."
But what about people that say that musicians should not approach political issues?
"Dean and I have always used our music to share our beliefs, to gain fans of a similar belief... I mean, we've always been very liberal in our music, so to "get us" we'd need pretty liberal listeners and chances are they feel the same way as we do about politics, the law, fox hunting, animal cruelty, homophobia, etc, so why not share that with them? These are issues people feel strongly about and they need an outlet for their anger and frustration, so why not let it out through music? It's how I normally deal with emotions. I think people that don't like it are scared that we're taking pretty strong, angry beliefs to the masses, but we're just telling it how it is," the pretty young brunette told us.
And album plans?
"We do have enough songs for an album, yeah, but we haven't recorded it all yet. We're not quite ready", Dean smiled. "When we do it, we wanna do it right, we want to make sure the songs we use are the right ones, we want the time to be right and we want to make sure it'll be at a time we can go on a world tour to see all our fans straight afterwards. Plus, we want another single out first. We are releasing Sleeping with the Enemy, but we're not sure on the B sides yet. Again, we've been away for a while and we want to make it right. As a band we're so tight right now, we're so happy to be working again and we're really excited about getting our stuff out for the fans again, but we respect our fans. We don't want to release something just because we can. We want to release material when we think its perfect, when its something good enough for our fans to hear. We want to absolutely blow people's minds! We're back and are not going anywhere!"
Edited by user 22 November 2009 02:43:24(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
