Ian Watkins left his bandmates’ lives in tatters when his sickening crimes came to light, but the other members of Lostprophets had grown to ‘hate’ the disgraced star long before they were told of his crimes
They were one of the biggest rockbands in the UK and sold millions of albums worldwide, but Lostprophets turned to dust overnight when the darkest secret that anyone could keep was suddenly exposed.
Ian Watkins, the infamous frontman of the Welsh group, turned out to be a dangerous paedophile. In 2013, the depraved singer was jailed for 29 years for 13 horrific sex offences, including the attempted rape and sexual assault of children under the age of 13. One of the infants was just 10 months old. Watkins used his frenzied fan base of young women to gain access to children, including babies.
The “determined” sex offender had a collection of child abuse photos and films almost five times the size of the police force that arrested him. A total of 27 terabytes of data storage from computers and devices found in Watkins’ possession. His heinous online library was encrypted, and the sick pervert used a reference to child abuse as his password.
For the other five members of the band, Watkins’ crimes came as a horrendous shock and the aftermath turned their lives upside down. Lostprophets parted ways immediately after their former lead singer was found guilty and for years, the betrayal was too unbearable to speak about for many of the musicians – now they refuse to utter his name.
The disgraced singer was allegedly killed in his jail cell at HMP Wakefield on Saturday after narrowly surviving other earlier prison attacks. Two inmates have been charged with his murder.
Once Watkins was put in cuffs in 2012, some fans asked how the other band members couldn’t have known something was going on. “How could you know? How would you know?” Lee Gaze, former guitarist and joint-founder of the band, said at the time.
“Who would disclose such a thing to five people, who between them have eight children? You just wouldn’t because they would be killed on the spot.”
While no-one in the band could have known the depths of depravity that Watkins sunk into, destroying multiple lives in the process, the group had become disturbed by his increasingly erratic behaviour long before his unthinkable crimes came to light.
Ian Windwood, a music journalist and friend of the band, spent time with Lostprophets just months before the sex offender’s arrest. And he says other members of the band “had grown to hate him”.
Watkins was a prolific drug user at this stage – police only discovered his horrific sex offences while on a drug raid in his home – and the band tried to call an intervention.
When the frontman failed to turn up for a concert in Pittsburgh during their North America tour that year, he was replaced with keyboardist Jamie Oliver on vocals. Tensions boiled over after the gig, the Telegraph reports, and the band’s bassist Stuart Richardson “punched Watkins in the face for what seemed like five minutes”.
“Some of the guys came on the bus and pulled me off him, but the next day his face looked like the Elephant Man,” he told Windwood, who wrote a book about the music industry. The band had reportedly already found and chucked out crystal meth in Watkins’ bag.
The bassist told the author that Watkins “bawled his eyes out” the next day and kept saying sorry. “I told him that I was sorry about what had happened afterwards,” Richardson said. “But he just kept saying it: ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ At the time I thought, ‘What the f— is that all about?’ Now I think it was the closest he came with us to an admission of guilt.”
The ex band members have also previously revealed how before Watkins committed his crimes, he was becoming increasingly distant from the band.
“He was doing his own thing,” Gaze told Newsbeat. “That just grew worse over the years, the more he was using drugs. He could be in the same city as me and I wouldn’t hang out with him, even if we weren’t playing shows.”
The back-up singer was left devastated when Lostprophets were forced to disband in the wake of Watkins’s heinous crimes. Earlier this year, he took to X to share his heartbreak.
He wrote in July: “It’s been 13 years since my band ended in the most unimaginable circumstances and it’s still painful to think about. Things could’ve been so different.
Source: Mirror
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