I think we raised about 20,000 pounds. There was a live performance thing so we thought we'd donate the equipment for an online charity in Britain. I hated to part with my guitar, but it was for such a great cause.
Dan Hawkins
When I need to nail that riff to the cross, Marshall will always provide the hammer!
When we started off it was all nervous energy and we probably played everything twice as fast as we do now.
We've got a long career ahead of us and it's going to be great. Trust me.
I knew from an early age exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a musician and that was it. It made life a lot easier knowing what I was aiming for.
Loads of computer graphics equals a terrible video in my book.
I can't wait to start something up myself that is actually about giving unsigned bands the exposure they deserve, especially when they travel so far to play the smallest gig they've ever played in their lives.
You have to keep going. The main attention is for us to stay alive and stay a band. You only really become very successful when you stick together. Just keep going and reaching bigger and better.
I taught myself how to play the guitar. I never studied music.
After school I moved to London to get involved in music. I took the whole thing very seriously.
As far as the live shows go, we're not leapfrogging all the smaller venues. We would have bypassed these kind of shows and gone straight to the Arena shows, but we didn't want to.
I can't wait until we get to the stage where we don't have to explain anymore.
In a strange kind of way I know were really popular and probably the biggest band in the country at the moment, but at the same time there is this real cult thing going on.
My favorite is still the one that I started off with, which is a Les Paul Standard. I've played that at every gig I've ever had. And that's my starting point in the studio.
The bigger we get, I think the more it's changing things, which is great, but we didn't set out to do that. We just wanted to be as big as we possibly could be.
There's a lot of people out there who have seen us once somewhere in a pub or heard our songs late night on radio. We'd done four years of it before we'd even released a single. It's put us in good stead.
We still haven't played Madison Square Garden. That's a benchmark. Something will have gone seriously wrong if we don't play Madison Square Garden for this album.
We're real people and we're a band that's been playing on the scene for a long time. We've made a lot of friends, and one enemy we've always had was the NME. They've always basically slated us and they've basically never ever written about the music.
We've had a number 1 album in the UK and that was a really big thing for me. So now all we've got to do is do it in America and that will have the domino effect of doing it across the rest of the world.
You can muck around with different guitars for certain bits, but you have to have your own sound. That's your benchmark, that's your sound. I also play a Black Beauty. It sounds amazing.
