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Guardian UK Interview - 11.4.10


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Paramore: 'We're not just teenybopper superstars'

Noisy guitars, angsty lyrics, inter-band romance, a little light rebellion – it's a formula that has made Paramore huge. Paul Lester meets their star singer Hayley Williams

 

The faces of the shoppers in the lift are a picture. They recognise the tiny girl with the neon orange-and-yellow hair who has just got in at level three of the mall in West Hollywood but, this being LA, they have to be cool. They can't let on that it's Hayley Williams! Of Paramore! The rock band from Franklin, Tennessee who have, since their inception in 2004, sold 4m albums! Finally, one of them, a surfer dude – all baggy shorts and goatee – can no longer contain himself and he starts furiously composing a text, one that you can just imagine is about to be sent from his phone to Facebook's entire Californian emo contingent.

 

Williams hardly notices the blur of fingers across keypad – she's used to excited reactions. Only sometimes do they frighten her. Such as the ones four weeks earlier at the Reading festival, where Paramore supported Blink-182 on the Sunday night. There, from the side of the stage, I got a band's-eye view of the furore as the four Paramore boys went through their paces and Williams stalked the stage, a small yet commanding presence. I saw the lengths their fans would go to touch their heroes – there was a constant procession of kids being stretchered out by security, as though it was their duty to brave the crush.

 

"There's an intense, crazy amount of energy being exchanged," she says as we depart the lift and head towards her favourite health-food restaurant – she shares her time between Franklin and Los Angeles, where her boyfriend Chad Gilbert, of the pop-punk band New Found Glory, lives. What happens when it gets too much? "It's kind of empowering to stop everything and go: 'This show is totally insane right now, but I have to stop it because you guys are hurting each other. It's a little bit too nuts.'"

 

This heightened sense of jeopardy is part of the thrill for Paramore's followers. Williams – who has just come from the chiropractor because, as she explains, "I head-bang so much I've kinda messed up my back and neck" – appreciates that the band offer a lifeline. "We get notes like: 'Two weeks ago I tried to kill myself, then I heard your song and it made me feel like I don't have to give up yet.'" Once, a girl sent two bracelets to their fanclub, one of which she had been using to cover the scars where she cut herself – until she discovered Paramore's perfect storm of serrated riffs and pain-wracked lyrics. That's quite a responsibility, isn't it? "It is," she agrees, "but it also makes you feel like, if music is that powerful, why would you ever want to do anything else?"

 

Still only 21 years old, Williams has been doing this since she was 15, when she met brothers Josh (guitar, 23) and Zac Farro (drums, 20). With Jeremy Davis (bass, 25), on board (a fifth member, guitarist Taylor York, also 20, has been in place since 2007), Paramore were signed (to Fueled By Ramen, the emo Motown) and ready to go. It has been a successful six years, with three hit albums and a reputation earned as one of the world's leading purveyors of dark-lite angst rock.

 

But it's been tumultuous as well: the brothers' parents divorced, Williams and Josh had a relationship then broke up, and band relations soured to the point where, in 2008, they almost split up. Indeed, their most recent album, 2009's Brand New Eyes, has been compared to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours: a document of a group falling apart, only instead of airbrushed AOR, it's full of sound and fury signifying loathing.

 

"The entire record concerns not just my dating relationship with Josh, but the relationships between all of us," she says brightly, chewing on a piece of tofu. "It's about the ways the other guys reacted to me and Josh, and to me. I definitely felt very secluded." For two albums, Farro had been not just her partner but her musical foil; for Brand New Eyes she was still writing songs with him, only now they were about him. She felt vulnerable, exposed. "It was more embarrassing after the split," she reveals. "We'd get into arguments and he'd be like, 'Why can't you write in front of me? It shouldn't be that big of a deal, you know me … "

 

The difference was, they were no longer on the same side: Paramore against the world. This was Hayley v Josh. "Before, he felt a part of the lyrics, when we were hitting everyone else head on. Now," she says, "we were colliding." Did he feel as though you, as the lyricist, had the final word? "I was the one with the real weapon, I guess," she concedes. "But he had the guitar, right? When he writes an angsty riff, like Ignorance, well, I definitely felt the emotion from that."

 

Ignorance was the track that Williams was most nervous about presenting to the others. "I tried to mumble all the way through," she laughs, "but Taylor was right next to the speaker and heard every word. He gave me this fierce look – I thought he was going to kill me – and said, 'So do you want to tell me about those lyrics?' I ran into the bathroom, I was so nervous. But we talked for two hours and reconciled a lot of tough, heavy things. That song saved our band.

 

"It can be a little hateful, but very hopeful as well, and that's the important message. It shows we're not just teenybop superstars."

 

Williams isn't entirely comfortable with the idea of Paramore as more Partridge Family than Pantera – their image is as the cute kids of punk/metal, known for not swearing, drinking or drugging, and for their (whisper it) Christian faith. "We hated [that reputation]," she says. "We'd go out and do these interviews and we'd be like, 'Oh, we're the family band, brothers and sisters, perfect,' but really we've always been into dark, heavy and angry or sad music, and that's the stuff we wanted to write." And yet she accepts that Paramore's music, helmed on Brand New Eyes by Green Day producer Rob Cavallo, has become "poppier and catchier", and doesn't recoil when I suggest she is closer to Miley Cyrus (a friend from back home in Franklin) on the rock bad-girl scale than she is to Courtney Love.

 

"People perceive punk rock in the sense of Sid Vicious, all strung-out, crazy and insane," she reasons. "I enjoy punk, the attitude as well as the music, but I don't feel like I have to be a carbon copy of it and invite all this controversy, just to be punk rock." She takes another mouthful of something green, then continues, unapologetically: "We're not trying to bang chicks – or guys in my case – after the show, and you're not going to see us in the newspaper arrested for snorting cocaine in some bathroom."

 

It's a question of perspective: they might appear lightweight to raddled rockers, but probably to the Miley crowd they're outrageously rebellious. "I think about that sometimes," she says. "The NME or Kerrang! will come to a show and they'll be, like, 'Yes, but she didn't say any curse words,' as if that needs to happen – you know," – she adopts a sarcastic one – "that's when you're a real badass, when you throw in a couple of f-bombs. But Miley or Justin Bieber maybe look at me and think, 'God, Hayley is so punk rock', just because I'm not hell-bound by some contract saying I have to do a TV show."

 

Not that Williams – whose earliest memory is "holding my parents apart when they were fighting" – feels obliged to justify her position. She was mortified when, recently, someone hacked into her mobile, found a topless picture of her, and telegraphed it across the net via Twitter, but that was less about prudishness than her privacy being invaded. "That wasn't for anyone to see," she says. "That was my business."

 

If anything, it made her more determined to be herself. "I'm not sorry for who I am," she declares. "I'm not particularly hard-ass, but I'm not clean-cut, either. I definitely have a dark sense of humour and a dirty mind when I'm with my friends. But I'm from the South, where I was taught that if you want to say 'shit', you go and say it in your room." She thinks about it for a moment. "Just because I like to wear underwear onstage doesn't mean I wouldn't hang out with someone who doesn't! It's just, I like to know that I'm in control – that's why I don't do drugs or drink. I did drink for a while growing up, until I realised I was doing it to be cool." For Williams – who respects Joan Jett "to the moon and back" yet resents the level of input manager Kim Fowley had in the Runaways' career – control is key. "I want everything I say or write to come from the heart, not a pill or a pipe."

 

Something about Paramore – perhaps their very imperviousness to rock mores, or their resilience – has connected with swarms of teenagers and young adults, because their music is everywhere right now: the use of their track Decode on the Twilight soundtrack has made them a ubiquitous element of that phenomenon's cultural baggage. Williams was No 1 earlier this year as guest singer on rapper B.o.B.'s Airplanes, positing Paramore as a sort of latterday No Doubt, with Williams as the new Gwen Stefani, able to flit between projects and across genres, while The Only Exception (a ballad from Brand New Eyes) was performed on an episode of Glee. Pink even stopped Williams at an awards ceremony to tell her: "In a non-bullshit, MTV, we-have-to-get-along way, you guys are awesome."

 

Even Lady Gaga has got in on the act and confessed to being a fan – Williams would like it on record that it was Gaga who approached her at the 2010 VMAs and not vice versa: "Just remember who came up to who," she says, poker-faced. They didn't swap numbers, though. "I'm not that business chick, like, 'Oh, let me get your digits, we'll do a project,'" she says. She'd rather "bro down" with her assistant, Kim, who has been sitting at the next table during the interview, or maybe reminisce about the old days: she is "super-nostalgic" for the pre-fame era, "before the platinum records and the red carpets and photo shoots", when it was all splitter vans and "eating at 7-11s for free because we told them we were Nickelback". She is addicted to YouTube footage of Paramore circa 2004-6.

 

She is also prone to self-doubt ("It's constantly raining inside my head"), but more positively she knows sign language and can whistle entire conversations on show days when she has to rest her voice. Oh, and she collects Barbie dolls. "Journalists always want to find out something gross," complains Kim as Williams gets up to talk to a tattooed rocker friend she's seen by the entrance. "But they really are a nice band. Not that she's not afraid of …" But before she can finish the sentence, Williams comes bounding back to the table. "What am I not afraid of?" she wonders breezily. "Nothing," replies Kim. That suits Williams just fine. "Awesome," she says, heading off to stun another lift-full of shoppers.

 

The single Playing God is released on 15 November. Paramore play Nottingham Arena, on 8 November, then tour.

 

 

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