The former Lostprophets label owner has opened up about the ‘absolutely catastrophic’ fallout from frontman Ian Watkins’ sex offence conviction.
The disgraced singer, 47, was convicted of 13 child sexual offences in December 2013 – including conspiring to rape a child and three counts of sexual assault involving children – by Cardiff Crown Court after pleading guilty.
He has served just over a decade of his 29-year prison sentence with a further six years on licence.
The heinous crimes first came to light earlier the same year and, much like his bandmates, were a total shock to label manager Julie Weir.
She had signed the Welsh rock band – also made up of co-founder Lee Gaze, Mike Lewis, Stuart Richardson, Richard J Oliver and Luke Johnson – onto her record label Visible Noise over a decade earlier.
In a new interview the music manager revealed she found out the news over a phone call with her manager and could ‘tell it wasn’t good’.
‘We were just about to start a big project with the band and then things spiralled from that. It was a long process really,’ she continued.
According to Weir, a lot of things had been ‘happening without anyone knowing’ and up until then she had seen everyone in the band as a ‘really straight down-the-line person’.
She added on the UPRAWR Podcast: ‘Out of all the things that could have happened, I never thought it would have been that to happen. It’s a real shame because it was one of the biggest bands of that era.’
The band sold 3.5million albums worldwide and had garnered a large fanbase.
Reflecting on how it has affected ‘lots of people’s lives’ she pointed to the band-themed tattoos people are still walking around with and the regular Reddit and YouTube content that pops up on her feed.
‘For the label, it was absolutely catastrophic,’ she admitted. The indie label, founded in 1998, also had clients such as Bullet For My Valentine and Bring Me the Horizon.
Weir said: ‘I spent nearly half my life on the label and working with them and it was just really hard to have everything taken away. Those people had wives and kids and it was a good living for them but it was taken away in one go.
‘Mad things happened. It was insane and brilliant but the world has changed. That world is gone.
Despite the many good memories amind the bad, the record label became defunct in 2016, just three years after Watkins’ conviction and Lostprophet’s decision to disband.
‘We just couldn’t afford to sign another artist. It just wasn’t able to happen anymore so that was really sad, to be honest,’ the businesswoman added, saying the shutdown ‘left a scar’ on her.
‘I had a bit of a wobble because I thought people were looking at me. I had a crisis of consciousness because I was attacked for all of it as well.
‘I was getting a lot of flack off the internet, messages to the office and photos of the office door – that was the scary one.’ Weir is now director of Music For Nations, a subsidiary of Sony.
The former bandmates relaunched their musical careers in 2014 with a new band called No Devotion. At the time they confirmed they had no idea about Ian’s crimes in an interview with BBC Newsbeat.
‘How could you know? How would you know? 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,’ guitarist Gaze said the time.
In 2017, Watkins was found to be grooming a young mother from behind bars in HMP Wakefield which resulted in her toddler being taken into care.
In August 2023, the convicted paedophile was attacked by three inmates and found by officers being ‘held hostage and battered’. Details later emerged that he was stabbed with a ‘sharpened toilet brush’ due to a drug debt.
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