Rooftops, Before Everything

In 2006 Rooftops was just a good rock single. Lostprophets were doing this thing where nu-metal blurred into post-hardcore blurred into something more stadium-sized, and Ian Watkins had the voice for it—broad, committed, a little theatrical. The hook didn’t apologize for being a hook. That was the whole pitch, and it worked.

Impossible to write about them now without the thing that came after. In 2013 Watkins pleaded guilty to a string of child sexual abuse offenses—among the most serious of any case heard in a UK court in living memory. The band dissolved. The music sat in a contaminated archive. All of it: the records, the tours, the goodwill, reduced to a particular kind of wreckage.

You wonder what the right relationship is to the catalog. Some people decided the songs still exist separately from what he did; others decided they didn’t want to test that theory. I’m not sure I’ve resolved it. What I know is that in June 2006 I was recommending a single to the internet, and it felt clean then. It doesn’t feel like anything now.