aidenfansforever

On September 7Th 2006, wiL Francis will have been clean and sober for seven full years. At this precise second he has his head tilted to his left, and is craning his neck at a 35- degree angle and looking straight into his past. We’re in Seattle, Washington, on the Pacific Coast; a beautiful Saturday lunchtime a fabulous city. Across a road and up a banking stands the Mona Vista apartment building, on Melrose Avenue. It was here that wiL Francis used to come and smoke crack, or crystal meth or inject heroin, or cocaine, or speed. There used to be a whole crew of faces up there; hanging around hopelessly high.
“The thing about junkies,” says Francis “Is that its drugs that connect you to one another. Oh, you like to get high? Man I like to get high too! Your friendships are based on one thing: getting loaded. You’re friends with people u wouldn’t normally be friends with: people you might not even like.”
The Mona Vista building looks nice, considering one of its residences used to be a crack house. Or at least a crack flat. It’s the top left balcony as you look at it , four floors up. The people who lived there were two “rich hoity toity kids” who had taken their money and their private education to become crackheads. Their parents paid the rent, wiL got to know them through his dealer, Vince. “Vince used to operate a few blocks from here. You’d ring him up and he’d deliver.” As for the rich kids they’ve since been busted. wiL doesn’t know if they’re in jail. Or dead.
Anyway, this is where he used to hang, like an unclean smell. He’d buy his drugs here. If he were using speed, he’d only need to spend 20 dollars or so. If it were heroin he’d need to be shelling out about 80 bucks. This was his daily rate, by the way. If he was using cocaine – well cocaine was 80 dollars a gram, wiL would want 5 grams of the stuff. You add it up. And don’t bother asking for a receipt.
One day he was up at the Monte Vista apartment block, smoking crack. As misfortune would have it, Layne Staley, Former singer of Alice In Chains, was also in the room. “He looked awful,” recalls wiL, “he was fucked up. He had sunken cheekbones, he had hollowed out eyes. He got loaded a lot.”
Was he friendly?
“Yeah he was friendly. But in that way I was talking about, one junkie talking to another junkie. What was weird was that to me Layne Staley was a rock star. And here I was smoking crack with him.”
Did you think, I want to be a singer, a rock star? But I might be looking at my future here?
“Not Really. Because by that point all I was interested in was drugs, and getting fucked up. I didn’t care about music, I didn’t care about writing. I had lost all hopes and aspirations. It was just a question waking up, and wondering how I was going to get loaded, and who I was going to fuck over to get that way.”
Just for the sake of argument, consider this. Say that talking about drugs have given you a thirst, and you want to get hold of some. How long would it take you to score?
wiL Francis looks away from the Monte Vista apartment buildings, and looks to his right. Without thinking for a single second he says: “Ten minutes.”

At ten past nine the next morning, a Sunday, wiL Francis comes trundling up Aurora Avenue North, a busy road in central Seattle and pulls his ride up outside the Quality Inn. In the week or so he plans to spend in the city – his home of sorts, in a few days per year Aiden spend not touring – he has almost not a moment to spare. He and the band which comprises Jake D. on drums, Nick on bass, as well as guitarists Angel and Jake W. – are working on “Rain In Hell”, their forthcoming Halloween EP. In little over an hour, he has to go and put in a 12 hour shift in the recording booth. Of this he’ll say, “ It’s like cramming three weeks’ work into a few days.” He would also like to catch up with friends, people he rarely gets to see. “Everyone wants to hang out,” he says, “And I want to hang out too. It can be hard.”
It’s been 16 months since wiL Francis had an apartment, or even a room, that he could call home. He calculates that in that time he and his band have only spent between 15 and 25 days in the city of Seattle. Given this, paying rent is “like taking money and setting fire to it”. So he sleeps on floors at friends’ apartments and houses. Whoever’s in town. At 2 pm yesterday afternoon Francis had no idea where he was going to sleep that night.
As it turns out, he laid his head just down the street a couple blocks thataway. This was handy because the only way he could accommodate this interview was to schedule it for nine o’ clock in the morning. As he opens the right hand door to allow his passenger in, wiL has the appearance of a man who has just emerged from a coma. “Morning,” he says, as if trying to construct a sentence in Russian. He’s wearing black jeans that hugs like mascara, above is in a t- shirt that features an image of Blondie’s Debbie Harry on the front. He’s rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. His black hair looks like an explosion in a candy floss factory. His crimson nail varnish is chipped something nasty.
Morning, indeed.
If wiL Francis doesn’t smell then his van does. He’s driving a grey 2004 Ford Econoline. This is Aiden’s tour wagon. They bought it new for $15,000 and are still paying it off month by month. It’s probably worth five thousand bucks now, they reckon. After all it’s got 156,000 miles on the clock. Which is more than five times around the world.
Imagine that. In a van.
“It’s what I love doing,” says Francis. “I didn’t get into this for the the gold records. What I want to do or want to achieve has nothing to do with MTV awards or ant of that bullshit. The point of what I do is to connect with people. People who are having problems. I want them to listen to our music and feel safe. I want them to feel they have a place to go.”
This does not make sense. Aiden are convincing outsiders. Francis has scar tissue. The band looks like it smells. You can’t see any of its members making the football team, or even making the football team laugh. But you can see why someone who is overweight, or underweight, or who has acne, or bad skin, or a stutter, or who harms themselves, or who is lonely might respond to this band.
Do you see yourself as a spokesperson for people who believe themselves to be fucked up?
“Yeah. I definitely feel like that.”
Like what? A spokesperson?
“Yeah,” says wiL, “I feel like I’m a spokesperson for the underdog. I feel like I can relate to kids who feel that way, because I was fucking right there. And it was only five years ago. I was the one listening to a song and believing that song was the only thing keeping me alive. Music can save lives. It always has been able to, and I hope it will always be able to.”
Do you consider Aiden to be a gang?
Like a shot: “Definitely.”
People in groups tend to say that, though, and two years later one of them is playing bass in Evanescence and three of them are on the ---.
“I know. But thing is there isn’t one member of this band who wouldn’t take a bullet for one of the other members.”
Could Aiden carry on if one of the members left?
“I don’t think that would happen. If it did happen? Well, then we’d have to see. But I really doubt it would happen.”
Could Aiden continue if you left?
“No.”
So is it your band?
“No, it belongs to all of us.”
But you write the songs so you get paid more than the other members. Surely.
“ No, I don’t,” says wiL, a bit serious now. “We all get paid the same. We all share things. That’s what I mean when I say we’re a gang. I’m not just saying that because it sounds cool. We’ve gone around the world together. We’ve toured pretty much non-stop for the past 16 months. Can you imagine doing that? Try hanging out with your best friend for 4 days, without taking a break. See how you feel about each other then. But we’ve been on the road for 16 months, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. We’ve not had a break from each other, we’ve not been away from each other. And not only are we still friends, but we’re better friends than before we set out, because we know each other better. So, yeah, damn right we’re a gang.”

He can be a serious man, wiL Francis. It’s now a quarter to 10 on the morning of Sunday, August 20. He’s sat there in the corner of a downtown coffee house drinking a 12 ounce café lattte and eating a blueberry and cinnamon donut. Seattleites gather to eat breakfast and read the book reviews in the Sunday papers. It’s that kind of place. The only time Francis laughs between the hours of nine and ten is when he’s asked this:
Is it true you’re dating Hayley Williams from Paramore?
And now he’s laughing. Really laughing. “No!! Where did you hear that? That’s crazy. And it’s not true, I’m not dating Hayley.”
Have you ever slept with her?
“No! She’s only 17! She’s a Christian as well. She’d never date a guy like me.”
He was born just up the street from here, at the Virginia Manson Medical Center up on 14th and Summit. This was on January 8, 1982. By 1993 he’d try his first drink, a 20 ounce slug of Ice 800 which he describes as “ghetto shit, the shittiest ghetto beer you can buy”. Within a month he was combining that with pot, heading off into the woods to smoke and drink. This was his life for the next six months and wiL Francis describes himself as being an alcoholic “from the moment I took my first drink”. Things took a sharp if predictable turn when he was 13, when he tried cocaine. This was supplied by an older brother of a friend. In time, and not much time either his drug use had come to include heroin, crystal meth, crack, LSD, you name it. The only drug Francis claims not to have tried are Quaaludes , a prescription downer.
“I was never the guy who said, ‘No, that’s bad.”
So, by 15, 16, 17, he’s out stealing cars, nicking guitars. Anything. Because if you hang out with junkies and dealers then you have to know people who buy and sell stolen goods”. Which is why by September 1999 he’d been to King County Youth Correctional facility 20 times that year. Which is why stern faced detectives came to visit him to tell him that when he turned 18 at the start of the second week ok of 2000, he might well be facing jail. Grown ups’ jail. Which is why the most important woman in his life is a woman named Laura Inveen . this is the judge who despite having had disastrous dealings with wiL for years, gave him one more chance and sent him on an intensive six month drug and alcohol rehabilitation course.
“She looked me straight in the eye,” he says, “and asked me why she should believe that this time was different? It was a good question.”
He had a good answer. Because this time was different. He was going to get clean. He was going to join a band. The band would record an album, “Nightmare Anatomy”, which would sell 130,000 copies [to date] around the world. With the departure of Hawthorne Height, they’d be the darlings of the Victory Records roster. Major labels such as Sony/ BMG and Virgin Records would court them, although as yet “ not with any serious offers.” And they would perform throughout the UK in September and October, as the headliners of the most keenly awaited tour of the season.
The day before our interview, Francis takes us to a neighbourhood of Seattle called “The U”, so named because it’s where the University Of Washington is located. It was here on a street known as “The Ave” that he planned to murder as many people as he could shoot before turning his gun on himself. He planned to do this on New Year’s Eve 1999. He swears he had the will, because he “did feel that hollow and lonely and violent”. He promises he had the means, in the form of “a backpack full of guns”.
Instead wiL Francis was detained in a juvenile hall. And this pretty little street a few miles from the skyscrapers and ocean and fish markets and left wing bookshops and sports stadia of Seattle never came to be known as the setting for a millennial massacre. Looking around, Francis gets into the van and starts the engine, to begin his drive to the Robert Lang Recording Studio. On his way he asks if I want to hear a tape of the new Aiden song. “ It’s called ‘The Suffering’,” he says, but it isn’t finished. In fact it’s just a drum and bass track – a high-tempo blueprint for a song. It’s difficult to imagine how it will sound when it’s finished. Realizing this, he asks if I’d like him to sing it to me? What, now? “Sure,” he says. “The lyrics aren’t finished, but I’ll give you an idea of what it sounds like.” So he starts the track again, and, turning it up, he begins to sing, at full volume, a fabulous and catchy melody. He sings if without embarrassment or self consciousness. All the while, he’s driving through Seattle, the windows open, the sun in his face.
“There are some terrible things in this world.” Is his opinion, “But there are some beautiful things too. Turn off the TV, get off the internet. Go outside and see what life is like. See what it can offer you.”
From addiction and bloody thoughts of savage murder to this, to music. As the Aiden van rounds the corner and wiL Francis’ voice dies to meet the chorus, it’s impossible to miss the meaning of his words.

Piczo