It’s a hot, sticky summer’s night in London, where a crammed Mean Fiddler (formerly the Astoria 2) is lapping up Papa Roach’s fusion of rap ‘n’ riffs, with the emphasis firmly on the latter. There have been more power chords than the average night in the downstairs bar in Bruxelle’s, and the back half of the sweaty venue is starting to look like an audition area to find the world’s leading air guitarist. Towards the stage, they’ve turned the audience into a seething, crowdsurfing mass of arms, legs and black t-shirts, not to mention copious gallons of sweat. And then it happens.

Frontman Jacoby Shaddix (the man formerly known as Coby Dick) is centre stage, between songs, and he demands everyone’s attention, even the skinny kid in the Weezer t-shirt making the standard rock-devil sign at the back. Admitting that this is something they stole from Belgian band, Sick Of It All, Shaddix refuses to continue until the audience co-operate with his request for what Papa Roach call ‘The Braveheart’.

He insists that the audience form a six-foot gap right down the middle, neatly halving the crowd. Then, on the count of three, both sets of fans are to charge at each other, turning the entire venue into one big, heaving mosh pit. It’s some spectacle, albeit one that I would prefer to watch from the comfort of the balcony.

“We’re gonna have to tell Jacoby that he can’t do that in the arena shows in the US because that is big lawsuit territory,” muses guitarist Jerry Horton the following morning. “Over here, it’s not that big of a deal because people aren’t sue-happy like they are in America. When kids see us, they see dollar signs, ‘He’s got money: I want some of it’. Any excuse to be able to sue and they’re on it.”

We’re sitting in a trendy London hotel which is the band’s base for this European press trip. Journalists from all over the continent were flown in for last night’s show, which saw Papa Roach previewing tracks from their forthcoming album, Lovehatetragedy, the follow-up to the multi-million selling Infest.

The new album is less nu and more metal than its predecessor: more straight ahead, balls-to-the-wall rock. Seeing as how Horton comes from a very rawk background, having initially picked up a guitar with the purpose of learning to play Metallica songs, I presumed that he must be more pleased than most with the results of the new album?

“Rock comes in all forms. It has a lot of different influences,” he muses. “I was happy with what we were doing before. Since I’ve been in the band, I have taken more influence from punk rock, stuff like Fugazi, Bad Religion, The Pixies. I still like metal but I’m more of a punk rock guy now. All those kinds of music could be defined as rock. We try to include our different influences. We wanted to focus more but also to widen the range.”

He continues, “As far as the vocals are concerned, Jacoby felt that the music was really good, the melodies were a little more intricate, so he wanted to accent that with more melody as opposed to just rap.” Jacoby Shaddix, the band’s heavily tattooed frontman, used to be called Coby Dick, but he has reverted to his “birth name”, allegedly due to the fact that he was sick of seeing himself referred to as ‘Dick’ in publications like NME.

I put it to Horton that the previous night’s gig highlighted a noticeable difference between the new and old songs, primarily because of the lack of loops, rap and hip-hop vocal stylings on the more recent compositions.

“We were kinda going in that direction before,” he sighs. “If you listen to the EP before Infest, which is called Let ‘Em Know, a lot of those songs are straight-ahead rock songs. In fact, one of the songs from that EP is on this record. We just wanted to do a more subtle change this time around that last time, where we felt a backlash from our fans.”

When I suggest that Lovehatetragedy perhaps doesn’t have as many potential hit singles as Infest, the generally amiable guitarist seems peeved.

“Actually, I think that there are five or six singles on this record,” he argues, before proceeding to name the songs he sees as potential chart-toppers, from ‘She Loves Me Not’, the first single to be culled from the album (released June 17th), to the taut, angry rifferama that is ‘Born With Nothing, Die With Everything’.

“They are a little more complicated, but at the same time the vocals are fairly simple and that melody is really what people pay attention to the most and that will carry over, I think,” Horton insists.

Horton’s life has changed rather dramatically over the course of the last couple of years, along with the other three members of Papa Roach. One minute they were just another struggling rock band, then April 2000 sees the launch of Infest. Immediately, songs like ‘Dead Cell’ and ‘Last Resort’ strike a chord with America’s disaffected youth, hungry for heroes in the post-Cobain rockscape. Their lives must be very different these days.

“It has changed,” Horton says after a slight pause, “in the way that everybody wants to be my friend now. I don’t mean to be bitter about it. There are a lot of things about my life now that are so much better. Obviously, I don’t have to worry about money, but then again, having more money brings more problems.

“There is a good side and a bad side to everything. The good parts are that I’ve been able to see the world, to see places that most people only see in pictures. I get to meet new people all the time. I have a job that I don’t have to wake up at six o’clock in the morning and go somewhere that I don’t wanna be. Sometimes, I wish I was at home, because being in this business, you are gone all the time. But that is just something that you have to do.“

Even when things started to take off, the band were in the womblike surrounds of the tourbus, where there is always another gig, another town, so perhaps it is difficult to actually take in just how big things are getting.

“I think that’s good, because we don’t want to sit there and be baffled by what is going on,” Horton explains. “We don’t want to believe our own hype. We tell people that work around us we don’t want ‘yes men’: we don’t want people to tell us that we’re great. We want people to tell us that we’re idiots, so that we don’t become your typical, self-absorbed rock star.”

The next year is going to be spent on the road, including the high profile Anger Management Tour in the US, alongside Eminem and Ludakris, before returning to Europe in the autumn. I wondered if they were looking forward to touring with the Real Slim Shady.

“We did the Anger Management Tour last year with him and Limp Bizkit,” Horton drawls. “He’s a great guy. He really is. Some of the guys in Bizkit were cool, some of them weren’t. But Eminem is just a regular guy: he is in more of a situation that we are but he seems to hold everything together.”

Is it difficult when on a tour like Anger Management, with a variety of bands on the bill, in terms of ego clashes etc?

“Yes and no,” he opines. “We don’t really pay attention to that kind of stuff. We just concentrate on rocking for the kids.”