FIVE albums in and Pontypridd one-time nu-metallers Lostprophets are back on track with latest album Weapons.
But there’s been a lot of living and playing inbetween.
And with his Scottish roots, keyboardist Jamie Oliver has a great reason for recalling his past – all the way to his boyhood trip to Aviemore for a family holiday.
Jamie opened the interview saying: "I’ve just been reminiscing about the Cairngorms.
"I was looking for a particular reservoir or loch," he said, with perfect pronunciation of "loch".
"I remember it as a child on holiday – we went up there for two weeks when I was 11 and we stayed in a caravan.
"I just found it on the map!"
It turns out that his Scottish background is also the reason why he’s known as Jamie Oliver, though his full name is Richard James Oliver.
He said: "My grandad was from Edinburgh and was in the army, my dad is an engineer.
"I didn’t think there was a lot of music, but it turned out there was.
"My grandad passed away just before I was born, but dad discovered that my grandad was an accomplished accordion player.
"He found some recordings grandad made and songs he had written and he’s converted them to MP3.
"So I’ve got this collection of my grandfather’s tunes, but I can’t listen to them because as soon as I hear the first note, I’m in tears. So I’ve yet to hear the music, but it’s there."
It turns out all the males in the family have "James" somewhere in their first names.
"My Dad has always been known by his second name, Neil. So I started getting called James, but because of my Scottish family it became ‘Jamie’," he said, adding a convincing Scottish accent.
Jamie had a flourishing art career started before getting involved fairly early on with Lostprophets as a friend of the band rather than musician.
Even in his art, the Scottish background played its part.
"I am very influenced by the Scottish Expressionist painters – Peter Howson was a very strong influence," Jamie explained.
"I grew up studying the German expressionists and the Glasgow group were also influenced by the German Expressionists.
"In Wales when I was first painting, everyone was doing nostalgic heritage paintings about the mines.
"I wanted to create a more contemporary view of a Wales struggling to find some sort of outlet as a post-industrial country.
"So I found the way the Scottish Expressionists treated the honesty of society as it was at the time a good vehicle for the way I wanted to present Wales.
"So Scotland, Scotland, Scotland again!"
These days, when you hear the name Jamie Oliver, you can’t help thinking about the celebrity chef.
Lostprophets’ Jamie Oliver laughed remembering how he first came across his namesake.
"My art career was starting to go really well and I was building a reputation, especially in Wales but also in London.
"The newspaper came in one day and my dad started going ‘Oh my God, oh my God! You are in The Independent. Oh, hang on ... this is about cooking’.
"It went from celebration for me to ‘Someone has taken my name and overshadowed me’.
"But I like to separate my work from my role in the band – for my art I’m Richard James Oliver."
There’s a story that Jamie only joined the band after a car journey shared with frontman Ian Watkins, but as Jamie tells it, there was a little more to his becoming a Lostprophet than that.
He’s certainly got all the facts at his fingertips – and explained why.
"I’ve been looking back because I’ve been writing a book for the Welsh Books Council as one of those Quick Reads for people with reading difficulties," he revealed.
"All this is in my book, so it’s really fresh to me."
Jamie was still pursuing his art career when the band found recognition with 2001’s debut album Thefakesoundofprogress.
But it was just after the time when Lostprophets swapped their turntables for keyboards and synths and began to make inroads in America with second album Start Something and later Liberation Transmission, that Jamie joined.
"I was a fan of the band and I used to take all their photographs when they were at the demo stage.
"I was also painting them while working on an art career.
"And I was the only person around the band who had a car," recalled Jamie.
"I remember Ian called me once and asked ‘What are you doing this week, do you want to come to the studio in Birmingham because we are recording a record?’.
"I said ‘Well, yeah, I’m my own boss, I can do that!’ and he asked me to pick him up.
Jamie laughed: "Later I figured that he wasn’t asking me to come but really ‘Can I get a lift so I can get up there!’.
"But I drove them up and stayed the week and we had a lot of fun.
"It was just in casual conversation that Ian said ‘You should come on tour with us in two weeks it will be awesome’.
"And I thought ‘Why not?’.
"But Ian called me the next day and said ‘I spoke to them about you coming on tour with us and taking photographs just as a friend, but they say there’s no room’.
"There were three bands on a bus and the label said there wasn’t room for a friend to come along.
"So we told them I was in the band and that was the way it went.
"Two weeks later I was onstage, so it’s a bit of a funny story."
In April, Lostprophets released album Weapons on label Epic Records, before signing up with label Fearless Records.
Jamie said: "In our career we have gone from being on a major label in the US and an independent label in the UK – to now, on a major label in the UK and an independent in the US.
"We have seen through all of our contracts because we have been doing this for so long and that’s one of these fairytale stories where you actually get to the end of the contract.
"Back in the day when we started, there was a very big difference between the independents and the majors but nowadays it’s completely blurred."
The band is already working on the follow-up to Weapons, though writing can be difficult as they all live in different places – Jamie is now in America.
"I moved to the sunshine – I live over in Los Angeles.
"It was one of those things where we went over there to start writing a record and I just fell in love with the sun," he admitted.
"You only have to look at the band when we first started out, these skater punk kids with the baggy jeans and bleached hair – it was almost as if we were pretending to be a US band, everyone thought we were a US band!"
Later, the band would have a six-year gap from touring the US, only returning earlier this year for the Vans Warped tour – and a heroes’ welcome from fans who had missed them.
Jamie explained: "We had an unfortunate run there with our third album Liberation Transmission.
"It dawned on us that we were spending an awful lot of money and an awful lot of time trying to work the United States which is obviously a huge territory, you have to give a lot of time to break that.
"We did really well at the start and sold a million copies of our first record over there, so it was kind of worth doing then.
"But by the time we went on the Liberation Transmission tour, three or four things happened that kind of broke our spirit a little bit.
"We went out on tour as main support for a band called HIM and they cancelled the tour a week before. But we were already out there – we had jettisoned a lot of money to stay out there."
Label troubles also saw the band deciding to take a back seat on America.
"We thought we should really focus on our core markets – the UK, Australia, Japan and Europe.
"The third thing that basically broke the camel’s back was when we were writing our follow-up record The Betrayed.
"The label sacked everybody and I think they had a new label head three times.
"We sent them some songs that we were really excited about – and our A & R was really excited about – and they came back to us and said ‘I’m not so sure, the songs just sound kind of British’.
"At that point we went ‘Really? You know where we are from?’.
"But we put out the record over there this year and it was incredible to go back – and just incredible to play Warped.
"That was one of those things that could have gone two ways.
"You haven’t been out there for six years, so we were forgotten about.
"What actually happened was there was so much buzz about the band because we hadn’t been there.
"People were like ‘Oh my God, we haven’t seen you for seven years!’. Bands were coming up to us on the tour saying ‘We grew up on your music!’.
"It was just an amazing experience so I would love to go back."
Lostprophets – now signed to Fearless Records in the UK – are still firing on all cylinders with creative maverick mainman Ian Watkins constantly looking for the band to evolve.
Though that can have it challenges too ...
Jamie laughed: "I think the problem with our band – in as good way – is Ian!
"He is incredibly creative and so is constantly wanting to evolve and constantly wanting to change.
"It is one of those things where he gets bored easily.
"So for all our records – up until the last one – we have almost changed our image, the cover, the artwork, the identity, each time.
"The only problem with that is people have a problem putting their finger on the band.
"So on Weapons we made a conscious decision to hit home and unify the idea that is the band."
Thier stage look involved the band wearing uniforms they had designed and coming up with a simple but unique logo involving a circle and a cross.
"We didn’t want to spend lots of money on glitzy backdrops and wanted a way to have a live impact visually.
"We thought it would be great to look like a gang – like the underdog kind of gang – so for the first time in our career we designed a uniform for ourselves.
"And it did have a reallly good visual impact onstage – more than a smoke cannon would have!
"We were throwing around ideas of logos and just needed something really simple.
"And if you look at the new one closely, you can actually make and L and a P out of it."
The band has now been going for 15 years, but, according to Jamie, never take anything for granted.
Jamie said: "Every time I go to the studio and every time we play a show, I genuinely appreciate it.
"Given the climate in the music industry, we are truly humble to still be doing this."
Lostprophets supported by We Are The Ocean and Pure Love play the Ironworks, Inverness, on Tuesday.
