Hot Press Meets Bastille

“It’s like calling yourself Christmas!”

This was the reaction of a Parisian journalist last week when chart-conquering pop rockers Bastille found themselves in the French capital for a festival, just days before the country’s famous fête nationale kicked off.
Of course, the piss-taking hack was very much on the money; the yearly Bastille Day celebrations are a pretty big deal for our Gallic cousins, so it’s a bit unusual that four Londoners with little-to-no connection to the country itself would choose it as their moniker. In this case, the blame must fall on front man Dan Smith, whose birthday falls on July 14.
“It is a bit, like, embarrassingly egocentric,” Smith laughs. “And, not to impose any weirdness on it, but it’s strange that this week, which is Bastille Day, we were in Paris and we were in Pompeii (the name of the epic lead track from debut album Bad Blood) for the first time ever. We felt quite cheesy!”
Of course, the French will have to forgive Bastille for stealing their thunder, not only because, along with most of Europe, they can’t get enough of the band’s skyscraping, hook-led synthpop, but because, in all fairness, Smith never thought anyone outside London would ever hear the name in the first place.
“I never wanted to be in a band when I was younger,” he explains. “Obviously I’m happy and it’s crazy that it’s happened and we have this opportunity to do it as our jobs, but I wanted to write about films, I wanted to be a film journalist. I’d always just done music for fun, as a hobby, although it feels weird calling it that now!”
The absence of any lofty aspirations on Smith’s part makes some of the band’s recent achievements even more remarkable; they scored a UK No. 1 and Irish No. 5 with Bad Blood back in March, based largely on word-of-mouth promotion, and made history just last month when their Glastonbury show attracted more fans than the John Peel Stage has seen in its entire eight-year history.
“I guess it is quite strange,” he muses. “We always hoped that the band would do well enough for us to keep going with it, but we never had ambitions of chart things or anything like that, so it’s very surreal.
“And also, we’re pretty boring! We don’t have any aspirations to be massively famous or anything. There’s a lot of people around who love that and that’s their motivation for being in a band but it’s not really a priority for us. We’re lucky and it’s ridiculous that we’re getting to do this with our lives at the moment, so we’re just… I dunno, trying to make the most of it I guess? Yeah!”
Smith and company reached another milestone - although, granted, not one they share with most bands - when they released their own brand of hot sauce.
“We’re all a bit obsessed with Mexican food,” Smith enthuses, “so we were joking about creating our own hot sauce and it somehow became a reality! We kind of wanted to take the piss out of ourselves. I think merch can be really boring, just album artwork on a t-shirt, and I never wanted it to be like that, so we thought we’d do something a bit different and funny.”
That’s all well and good, Dan, but how does it taste?
“Quite hot!” he laughs. “We tried a few different spiciness levels and had to rein it in quite a bit! It could have been a lot worse. Hopefully it’s not completely face-numbing. The two things on our rider are whiskey and hot sauce, we always ask whoever’s doing the rider to find the hottest or most interesting hot sauce.”
Organisers of Indiependence, consider yourselves challenged! But before Bastille can wrap their taste buds around Cork’s finest condiments, there’s the little matter of Dan’s 26th birthday, which he’ll be celebrating onstage at T In The Park in Scotland.
“It’s going to be quite strange being so far away from home,” he reflects, “but some of my best friends are in the band and I’m sure it’ll be lots of fun. I hope there’s no embarrassing Happy Birthday things on stage, actually…”
What, no cringeworthy blowing out of candles or birthday bumps?
“Oh, God, I desperately hope that doesn’t happen. I may jump on a chair or something really awkward! It was Woody’s (drummer Chris Wood) birthday last week and I made the whole crowd sing to him and sprayed him with some fizzy wine just to make him feel as awkward as possible… and special, obviously.”
In the meantime, Smith has already received a pre-birthday gift that will put all other offerings to shame.
“Without me knowing, loads of our fans all got to know each other on the internet and got in touch with my housemate and sent me an original Mulholland Drive script signed by David Lynch. How nice is that? They managed to track down some of my friends and ask them what they thought of the idea. They also gave me the script of Lost Highway as well, which was insanely generous.”
The name of latest single ‘Laura Palmer’ may have inspired the best fan-to-frontman gift ever, but it also made creating the accompanying music video a bit of a head-scratcher.
“The obvious thing to do would be something really Lynchian and Twin Peaks-esque, but the people who love it would automatically think we’d done a bad job and the people who hadn’t heard of it wouldn’t get the reference! With that video the idea is that we’re making the kind of video that we’d never want to make, like a big pop video with lazers and stuff, and then completely subverting it by having me kidnapped and tortured.”
The resulting short certainly won’t be mistaken for Pitbull’s latest offering, and Dan is determined to keep it that way.
“I think if it was up to our label, we’d definitely be doing stuff like that!” he laughs. “But we’re lucky with the people at the label because they all accept that we’re not into all that.”
It’s safe to assume that the biggest cheer of Bastille’s Indiependence set will be prompted by the unstoppable ‘Pompeii’, a track that finds Smith pondering his very existence and asking, ‘How am I gonna be an optimist about this?’ Given the band’s dizzying success, I imagine the crooner is finding it quite easy to be an optimist these days.
“Ooh, I dunno,” he hesitates. “I think the interesting thing about what we’re doing at the moment is that, with every new thing that happens, there’s always the next thing to be pessimistic about! I’d like to think that there’ll never be an end to my pessimism! I keep calling myself a pessimist but it doesn’t bother me at all because I kind of feel like every time something nice happens, we’re not really expecting it.
“Like the Glastonbury crowd. We were genuinely, genuinely worried. We were clashing with Alt. J and I was like, ‘I really just don’t know if anyone’s going to come!’ so to be told that after the gig was just such a nice thing. I think it’s much nicer to be pleasantly surprised than let down.”