Black to back

Sean Smith of The Blackout, before a recent stage appearance

TO CALL Sean Smith a rock star is perhaps doing the man a disservice.

“What are you doing right now, Sean?” It seems like a reasonable question. The vocalist and focal point of The Blackout is riding something of the crest of the wave at present, having recently signed to American label Epitaph. In alternative rock circles, the imprint is well respected, so it might be expected that Sean is enjoying this significant triumph. But no.

“I’m sitting in my parents’ house in Merthyr Tydfil.”

As respected as the old iron town may be, this is hardly Fear and Loathing… But then Sean isn’t that way inclined. He’s affable, bubbly and approachable, even if he now gets recognised regularly and featured on the covers of magazines across the world.

The band are in a buoyant mood. They’re pleased with the signing, even though Epitaph were in competition with a larger major label. This is because, as Sean says: “Epitaph our type of people. They understood what we wanted.”

He adds: “It wasn’t about money or trying to make us famous, it was about getting the record out there to the right audience, pushing it and letting us play and do our own thing. We made a very good choice they’ve been nothing short of fabulous so far.”

With their nascent Transatlantic success and boyish good looks, fellow Merthyr band Lostprophets comes to mind. It’s not lost on or indeed shied away from by Smith. “They have been possibly our biggest influence and the best of friends. We started the band because we saw them live and they were amazing. If we make a band even a quarter as good as they were we’d be over the moon.”

There can be little doubt that having Lostprophets offer The Blackout the support slot on tours helped to build the band’s profile, but that it was only steps along a very long and hard road for the band. There was a time when they were playing Ton Pentre Social Club (then called Ten Minute Preview), and were allowed to grow up in a place necessarily receptive to heavy rock music.

Although Merthyr Tydfil’s Midasuno has already gained national attention, they were widely regarded as a hard rocking, hard drinking, hard living band. The Blackout featured straight-edge, fashion conscious and – dare we say it? – sensitive souls within their ranks. Merthyr rugby and drinking culture stereotypes this is not. Pondering on his now-famous peroxide blond locks, he said: “I can’t sing properly now – God help if the mighty locks went.” It’s a flash of his trademark humour for which he has become well known. “I dyed my hair brown for a week about two years ago – I wasn’t feeling it. So for the near future, every two months, I will be burning my scalp with peroxide.”

Smith believed that the attitude The Blackout helped to create was a phase that “would pass, and I’d give up and jump on the next bandwagon. So for a while things were a bit weird, but I think most of them got over it and are now spending their weekends gurning their faces off in the local nightclubs enjoying Scooter.” Indeed, The Blackout’s success has helped highlight the diversity of many Valleys communities, challenging the stereotype of those places in the process.

This doesn’t mean that Smith harbours any animosity towards the place in which he grew up. In fact, there is a campaign to make Sean the mayor of the town (with promises to build a Hard Rock Café and ‘bring a beach to Merthyr’). He’s still proud of the praise that the band receives locally, adding: “We’ve had some awesome support from a lot of people in the town, including the local paper, The Merthyr Express. It’s nice to see some people are now happy for us to be doing quite well and getting out there”.

Smith’s self effacing manner, mostly likely born out of shyness, is in sharp contrast to his giddy and infectious stage presence. He says that he had to “try to learn how to sing”, and that he still cannot sing now, but he’s very much a star in the internet age, with his personal profile recently featured on MySpace worldwide, alongside Kayne West and Rhianna. Despite his shy manner, a steely self-belief that often springs from a Valleys upbringing is often very much in evidence. He sums up his country of birth and what it means to him as “Home, love, friends.”

He signs off by wondering where it will all end. The answer is perhaps expectedly modest. “On my tombstone, I’d have ‘Here lies Sean Smith – he wasn’t THAT bad’.”