![]() He lost 70lbs, and even introduced the Insanity workout to the rest of the band. As the name suggests, the workout was punishing and relentless, but for Smith – who was handed boxing gloves at the age of 10 by his father, who told him, “I don’t ever want it to come to this, but you need to learn how to fight” – something clicked. With encouragement from his bandmates, he stopped drinking, began eating healthily and purchased a workout DVD by ‘fitness motivator’ Shaun T, titled Insanity. It took an appearance on daytime TV show The View, in which the female host mockingly compared him to Meat Loaf, to snap him out of it. He successfully quit both after he began to struggle with live shows, only to replace drugs with another addition – alcohol and sugar. During the band’s early years, Smith’s addiction to cocaine and Ox圜ontin – the latter a heavy-duty painkiller usually prescribed to cancer patients – pushed the band to the edge. “And we don’t make records real quick, we take care over it.”īut it hasn’t been a smooth path. ![]() “The one thing we have been able to do consciously is play live, a lot,” Smith tells us, when we meet at London’s Holborn Studios. They did it the old fashioned way: hard graft and earnest, impassioned tunes. They’re part of the last generation of bands who broke big without the help of relentless online hype or viral campaigns (or much in the way of mainstream media coverage for that matter). Shinedown date from a pre-YouTube, pre-social media era. ![]() “That whole, ‘It’s all rainbows and puppy dogs!’ outlook. “Coming from Amaryllis, that over-positive terminology gets really old,” adds Smith, rolling his eyes (or at least he seems to – it’s hard to be sure what he’s doing behind those Ray-Bans).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |