Lacuna Coil is a band whose profile has been growing considerably over the last couple of years. Single successes like Swamped from their Comalies album, and most recently Our Truth, Enjoy The Silence and Closer from their latest album Karmacode has meant that their popularity continues to grow as does the number of people they play to. One of the biggest shows this year, as last, was Download at Donington in July, and the band were now back to do their own headline tour of the UK. Andy Brailsford had the chance to speak to guitarist Cristiano Migliore and started by asking about that appearance.

When I spoke to Cristina last year, I spoke to her about playing Download and she said you were very excited about it because it was a big thing. You've done it again this year but this time on the main stage, so were you as nervous as the first time, or had you come to terms with it?

We were a lot more nervous actually with playing the main stage at 3.30 in the afternoon. That's a big thing. I think when we played there were about 65 thousand people or something. It's not bad. We went on right after In Flames and they are already a great live band. So we were like "lets see how the people react when we go on." It was amazing. We even got a DVD after the show of when we were on stage. So as soon as we got home the next day, we put it on just to see because we thought that it was a good show but nothing great from our part. The crowd was amazing but we felt that we didn't give one hundred percent. So before we went to bed – we couldn't sleep at all – we put the DVD in and we see it and it was amazing. We thought "wow". You could see all the crowd jumping.

Having said that you watched it and you thought it was great are you the sort that thinks, "I don't want to watch that?"

It depends. When I see our early shows, it's terrible. I have to turn it off. But now we have reached a certain standard. Even when we are really tired, we go on stage and always try to do the same movements, try to give a lot. It is also a relationship between the band and the crowd. If they react in a certain way, they can actually make the night great or really bad depending on the reaction. Even if you're tired but the crowd is great, like last night in Glasgow, we were not totally there but as soon as we went on stage, the crowd pumped us up and it turned out to be one of the best shows of the whole tour. It's like that. You don't realise when you are on stage but then you see yourself on TV or whatever, and it looks a lot different than you thought. You miss everything. You don't see the lights or what the others do and you don't see the whole picture like somebody from the crowd can see. It is completely different. It is one of the things we will always miss unless you see it on TV but it's not the same thing.

Your US tour was cancelled. Do you class the US as your second home because that is where your biggest market is, and what happened to the tour?

There are two things in a band's career. There are the record sales and then there is the live performances. In Europe we started almost ten years ago. We started tours with Wolfsbane with the Gathering and all these bands helped us establish a certain level. In America these things never really happened. We started touring there only three years ago. The record started selling a lot because of the radio promotion and we did a lot of really big tours that were really well promoted like White Zombie P.O.D. or Ozzfest but then when you go and try to do a headline, people really don't know you for what you are like because they have only seen you with someone else. If they see you as a headline, they maybe expect something or maybe they think that they can see us on the next Metallica tour or that they have just seen us on the Ozzfest tour. So it takes longer to reach that level with tours. You have to start from the beginning again. You do small gigs like three or four hundred people then next time go for eight hundred then twelve hundred people. Last time we came here to the UK, we played in small clubs and yesterday we played in Glasgow and played in front of fourteen, almost fifteen hundred. So it takes all this touring and touring and going back. And not just supporting because supporting is always aimed to people that don't know you. You play for your fans but mostly you play for the other people who will listen to your music. We are not the kind of band that comes out with one album and then right after that plays stadiums. Our record company is not a major; we don't have so much money that we can be pushed into it. So we need to do it in a different way. We need to do more including support tours with other bands that have got so big that just by selling records the promoters have put up a lot of money in them because, hopefully, draw a lot of people. For us, we always have to demonstrate what we can do by going there and selling out small places first and then a little bit bigger and so on. It's a completely different way of doing these kinds of things. We know that we need to keep being on the road if we want to get somewhere. It's not like by staying home or hoping that we will sell a lot of records that we will get somewhere because for us, it doesn't work like that for us. I can see that by doing Download two years ago and then the tour last year, everything is so much better in just one year.

Are you scared that things will take off too quickly?

Too quickly? After ten years, it doesn't seem too quick to me. It has always gone gradually. It started small selling fifteen thousand, maybe ten thousand, for the first EP. Then we‘ve sold twenty thousand then thirty thousand. With each album we have seen an improvement. It has all lead to this and I don't see why, if we keep on doing it, it can't go somewhere else, like bigger. Most of the time we don't even know what we have done. We just did what we basically felt like doing. It's not like we asked someone to write us a song to get into the charts. We just read the music that we liked and people must like what we do or we wouldn't be here.

Do you class the album as a concept album or not?

Not really, because I think a concept album is something that talks about the same topic the whole time or it is a story and each song is a chapter of the story. But we never really did a concept album because, maybe the songs and the lyrics can all be related to certain topics like they have something in common, but it's not really a proper concept album. The album probably has a main concept behind the whole thing but it is not really done on purpose. We, as the title says Karmacode is karma is a very spiritual word and then you have code, which is completely the opposite – makes you think of technology and machines. We tried to talk about the contrast between the spirituality of men and the machines and the modern times we are living in today. But that's about it. It's not that the songs are completely connected to each other.

So how do you write songs? Do you all get together in a room and see what comes out?

It's usually Marco the bass player and Maus the other guitarist that come up with the music. They usually sit at home, in front of a computer with Pro Tools or Cubase and we then get together and try to rehearse the parts and put them together as a band. We change structures and create arrangements for it and Andrea and Cristina come at a later time with lyrics and vocal line. So basically we create the music first and then we go to the lyrics.

So you don't specifically build things with the two singers in mind?

No, that's what we have always done. It's weird because our music is based a lot on the vocals, having two singers. But, that's the thing, if you listen to the music, you find out that it is more complicated than it sounds on the first listening. That's the thing, because we always start from the music and then we build stuff on top of it. The vocals are part of this music. We try to make them sound as if they are really connected to the rest of it. It's not just the guitar and the vocals on top of it.

So is it that "that's the song"?

No, we always change it. We come with ideas when most of the song is there with some kind of structure and then we try to create the vocal lines and put them together with the music and then if something doesn't really work, we change it around until we find something that works better. It's always a constant work of arranging and changing and stuff. It takes a long time. For Karmacode, it took us about one year to finish everything. You listen to one thing a week later and then you think it doesn't sound that good anymore. Then you change it and listen to it and then think that it actually sounded better before.

On your website I read that you featured on a soundtrack for a TV show.

Yeah, I've heard that too, but I'm not sure about that because sometimes I'm not even aware of that but I don't really keep track of it. We're getting a lot of that lately.

Also on your website, I was looking at your hobbies, cinema, video games and sex – would you like to explain that?

(Laughs). I think it's the three perfect answers. Some may disagree with the video games but still. I think the other two are something we all share. I don't know if we can call sex a hobby but it's enjoyable and usually a hobby is something that you enjoy.

When I heard Enjoy the Silence, I thought "I know that" but I couldn't figure out what it was but after listening to it for a few times, Depeche Mode came into my head. I hated that kind of stuff but I listened to it and thought "that's bloody good" and the fact that it was in my head, it made me realise that it was a quite a nice chord sequence and was cleverly written even though I didn't like it the first time round. I assume, as they are one of Cristina's favourite bands, it was her suggestion to do it?

No, it wasn't actually hers. Depeche Mode is one of those bands that we all liked because we grew up listening to this kind of music. During the 80's I was listening to Guns and Roses and Whitesnake but also the music you had on TV and radio were like Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. So growing up, at the time I hated it, but this is part of my childhood, lets call it. So they became one of my favourite bands too and we share the same passion for this kind of music. We didn't really have an idea of which band we wanted to cover. Depeche Mode was one of them. We thought about Some Gardens; we wanted to try to make Black Hole Sun or Duran Duran's Say a Prayer. We tried a lot of different songs but in the end we were like "if we have to record a cover, why do we have to go and pick one of the most not famous songs, just because everybody else covered it. So we all liked Enjoy the Silence. We think it's a great song. We just do it in our own style and I think it fits very well with the rest of the album and some people won't even realise it is a Depeche Mode. At least that's what a lot of people ask us. They say "that song is really great, who wrote it?"

When did you first start thinking seriously about playing music?

I started playing guitar when I was fifteen but it was more of a hobby than anything else. I never really got into music because I wasn't really interested. But then MTV started showing on TV and stuff and I started watching all the time because I was a teenager and then I saw a video by Dire Straits – Money for Nothing – and I thought that was cool and I wanted to play guitar. I started listening to that then I moved more towards bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica and all my parents old albums from the 70's like Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Eagles.

Would you have liked to experience that time?

I think it would have been cool, but it's something I'll never know anyway and besides, what I am doing now is kind of a continuation of what started then. I don't think it's changed so much.

We then spoke briefly about how things have changed in the record buying world, and that singles are no longer the mainstay of the industry, albums being the things that people consider more and that music doesn't sell the same amount to achieve a gold disc award.

Now with the Internet, TV and radio and everything, it's a lot different. Also the fact that there is so much piracy around, people don't buy so many records, also because they cost more. It's a chain. They are all connected and if something doesn't change, it will always be like that. Then in the end, you can't expect to sell as many records as they did in the 70's because then that was the only way people could actually get the music. Nowadays you can get it in so many different ways.

So when you've finished doing what you are doing with this album, how long do you think it will take to do the next one?

It's hard to say. We don't want to wait for another three years before we put out a new album. The reason we did that with Comalise and Karmacode was just because we started touring so late in the US and the album exploded after we did the first tour with Opeth. So we had to keep touring even though the album had already been out for a year. We had to keep going because the songs were picked up by radios, people were asking for them and we had to keep going and going to this thing building up so it took us away from song writing because we're not the kind of band that write songs on the road. We need to be home like relaxed completely and focused. When we are on tour, it's not really that easy. At a certain point after we did the Ozzfest in 2004, we decided that this is it. We've got to stop. We are just going to play a few festivals and a few shows but that's going to be it. We're going to stop and concentrate on writing new songs because otherwise we'll never have a new album out and that's what we did. This time I hope that this life cycle with Karmacode we have will be at the most two years before we can write again. That is what we are aiming for.