Interview with our Band Of The Year: Royal Blood

The first few times were weird – as in ‘woah, is this really happening?’ weird. There was the gig in New York where Jimmy Page turned up; the concerts attended by half of Muse and Rage Against The Machine. Oh and the evening Metallica’s Lars Ulrich gate-crashed their dressing-room, offering a tour of Mrs Doubtfire’s House (who knew that was even a THING?).
“Our dressing-room has turned into the apartment from Friends,” laughs Mike Kerr, singer and bassist (there is no guitarist) with Royal Blood, this year’s official Saviours Of Rock. “We’ve had all sorts of people knocking on our door. You never know who is going to show up.”
“There’s no studio audience to applaud – just the two of us,” chimes drummer Ben Thatcher. “Lars Ulrich was a real surprise. I mean he has two legs, and two arms – he’s a regular guy. And really good company. He found out we’d spent our entire day doing press and hadn’t seen anything of San Francisco. He was like ‘guys, I’ve got to give you a tour’. What a gentleman. I have close friends who wouldn’t do that for me.”
In a pokey backstage area, the duo, from Brighton in the south of England, are trying to make sense of a whirlwind 12 months. The recipients of the Hot Press Live Band Of 2014 accolade have, in the space of a year, proceeded from somewhere to the far left of obscurity to proper, Lars Ulrich-wants-to-show-you-Mrs Doubtfire’s-House stardom. Inevitably, the triumph of their old-school, plugged-in blues has seen Royal Blood credited with leading the comeback of no-frills rock – a genre proclaimed dead more often than Roy Keane’s managerial career.
“It’s not down to us whether or not there’s a revival in [rock],” says Kerr, the more stylish of the pair. “It has always been around – to me, it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. Perhaps it is not in the limelight as much recently. We don’t put ourselves into pigeonholes: it’s more that we are fans of good songwriting. To solely focus on one genre is narrow-minded, especially when so many kinds of music are easily accessible.”
If you haven’t had the pleasure, it takes a mental leap to picture how Royal Blood’s unique dynamic can make any kind of sense. The idea of a rock band consisting simply of bass, drums and vocals sounds pointlessly esoteric, mindlessly confrontational and frankly not much fun. Actually, the pair knock out a properly rollicking din, Kerr’s ingenious deployment of FX pedals and multi-tracking whipping up a cacophony that, to the untutored ear, suggests Jimmy Page spliced with Joey Santiago. The bass doesn’t really sound like a bass and it has proved the group’s secret weapon.
They had no expectations when Royal Blood started out a year and a half ago. Kerr was just back from nine months’ backpacking across Australia and America – a holiday booked after the latest of the umpteen bands he'd served time in imploded. When school friend Thatcher collected him from the airport, Kerr had with him a grab-bag of half-finished new songs and an idea: what if they cut the extraneous bullshit and reduced their sound to bass, drum and voice? Twenty-four hours later, Royal Blood played their inaugural gig at a pub in Worthing. Initially the music was rough and ready – a din in search of a reason to exist. Within six months they’d come to the attention of Arctic Monkeys’ management company and demos were soon being shopped to the majors, with Warner first to bite.
The label has been pushing the band hard since the start of 2014, arranging support tours with the aforementioned Monkeys and prominent festival slots at Glastonbury and T In The Park (they also played Marlay Park in Dublin, again with Arctic Monkeys). So there was confidence Royal Blood could go where few British rock acts have ventured lately and enjoy commercial success. Even so, nobody in the group’s orbit believed their self-titled album would top the charts on release, as happened in August.
“Even through the week it came out, we never anticipated that it would happen,” says Kerr. “Even on the Sunday, when the charts are announced, it didn’t enter our mind. Did going to No.1 mean something? Well, it meant a lot for the genre of rock. It’s quite exciting – and maybe speaks to a change that is happening in music. Had it not gone to No.1, we wouldn’t have been devastated. Imagine someone, not that bothered about money, winning the lottery. That’s essentially how we felt.”
If success has caught them unawares, they’ve done an impressive job recalibrating. Ahead of their most recent tour in November, it was quietly suggested they might wish to upgrade to bigger venues, such was the demand for tickets. They demurred and instead booked another, more extensive tour for the new year, which will include two stop-offs at Dublin’s Olympia. Their rationale was admirable: they’ve never played mid-tier rooms such as Dublin’s Academy and would prefer to pay their dues before graduating to the really large spaces.
“There’s an element of not necessarily wanting to adhere to the speed at which things are happening,” Kerr proffers. “We could have upgraded now. We want people to have the chance to see us in venues that are relatively intimate. We’ve never done a tour at this level. Why would we want to miss out on that?”

Seated together, Royal Blood strike you as somewhat of an odd couple. In trucker cap and tatty hipster beard, Thatcher seems a stand-up bloke: grounded, not too concerned about the trappings of indie rock stardom. Kerr is more of a mystery: he wears a perpetual half-smile and has already cultivated that habit, common among actual famous people (which he isn’t, really) of gazing over your shoulder while speaking, as if eye-contact were a grace to be bestowed on the lucky few. He isn’t unfriendly – just curiously otherworldly.
He always had issues fitting in. As a teenager, by all accounts he became devoutly Christian, passing through a variety of churches in the south of England. Then one day, he realised he actually didn’t believe in God at all – a moment of reverse-transcendence which seems to have caused no small amount of trauma and which he addresses in songs such as ‘Figure It Out’ and ‘Out Of The Black’.
Kerr can’t quite articulate what it is about Royal Blood’s music that draws such a response from fans. It is, he suggests, a visceral reaction – the same one he and Thatcher experienced upon plugging in and rocking out for the very first time, all those years (okay months) ago.
“I don’t think I’ve come up with an answer as to what the appeal is,” he reflects. “We were the first fans of our band. We liked what we were doing. I guess other people were inevitably going to like it too. For me, it’s the same as with comedians. A popular comedian will fill a venue with people who find them funny. Those who don’t find them funny aren’t going to watch.
"There’s an element of luck in our story too, I’m sure. Ultimately you can’t break it down. We’re a band, not a business model. There is always going to be a bit of mystery about what we do.”

Royal Blood is out now. The band play the Olympia, Dublin, on March 9 and 10