Wild Boys: An Interview with Bastille

b>Political uproar, tour craziness, controversial videos filled with nudity and violence – no it’s not the Fine Gael ard fheis, it’s a glimpse inside the world of one of pop’s biggest bands, Bastille. Also on the agenda: artistic reinvention, cult films, classic books – and visiting Nasa.

“We’re all just very, very sad about it. Just… deflated, really.”

Having impressively shifted almost eight million copies of their 2013 debut studio album, Bad Blood, and with its highly anticipated follow-up soon to be released, you’d imagine that the four members of Bastille would have quite a lot to be excited about. This afternoon, however, sitting around in a spacious lounge in London’s Metropolis Studios, the UK indie foursome seem decidedly downcast. In fairness, this is only in response to a Hot Press question…

It’s the end of June, a week after the disastrous Brexit vote, and they’re all still getting their heads around the whole thing.

“We were here in the UK when it happened,” recalls animated frontman Dan Smith. “It was last Thursday, and we all voted and then got in a bus to go to Glastonbury, which is our favourite festival in the world. I tried to get some sleep before our show, but I remember at 5.30 in the morning just looking at my phone and seeing the result and being gutted.”

The 30-year-old singer shakes his head wearily. “I think it’s difficult to talk about these kind of things when you’re in a band because you just sound like a twat. But our feelings were that we wanted to remain, and we felt that the campaign which was led to leave [the EU] was quite a negative and divisive one. It’s really sad.”

His three bandmates – Chris Wood (drums), Will Farquarson (guitars) and Kyle Simmons (keyboards) – all heavily sigh their agreement. “It’s crazy, really,” adds Kyle. “Hard to believe it went that way.”

Of course, we’re not actually meeting to discuss UK politics. So Hot Press swiftly changes the subject from tit politicians to… female nipples. Bastille have just released the video for ‘Good Grief’, the first cut from sophomore album Wild World. A highly entertaining and wonderfully shot piece of film, it features decapitated heads, a full-on bank robbery and some very tasteful shots of a naked female. Curiously, her nipples haven’t been airbrushed out.

“Free the nipple!” laughs Will, punching a fist.

Will that not cause problems in terms of having the video shown?

“Yeah, massively,” says Chris. “It’s got an age restriction on YouTube and stuff like that.”

Not that they’re particularly bothered…

“We wanted to make something mad and surreal and different, and the kind of thing that we’d want to see from a band,” explains Dan, earnestly. “I find it interesting that the nudity, rather than the violence, is the issue in the video; that says a lot about Western society and culture. It’s so funny. I think in America you can have real violence and it will be rated R, but the smallest hint of sex in a film and it gets made NC17.”

“Yeah,” Chris laughs. “It’s mad but when you watch films on television, particularly in America, they dub out all the swearing… but then the scenes of massacres are left in. I don’t think our video is particularly sexualised anyway.”

Dan nods. “It’s artistic, it’s a surrealist dream sequence, you know, and actually what’s been brilliant is that it’s only been brought up a couple of times because people are going, ‘The video’s just fucking mental and mad!’ And that’s the point.”

They actually seem to be a jovial, tight-knit bunch (at least once we’ve moved off Brexit), but for the most part Dan does the talking. Which is fair enough, given that Bastille – so named because he was born on Bastille Day (July 14) – was originally his solo project.

The South Londoner started off alone in his bedroom, self-releasing 300 copies of Bastille’s debut single in 2010. Regular gigging in small venues, genuine word of mouth and some brilliantly curated mixtapes led to a gradual expansion of operations. Within three years, Chris, Will and Kyle had joined the line-up, and their debut Bad Blood was a massive hit.

Make that a seriously massive hit. With over a billion Spotify streams between them, their hit singles ‘Pompeii’, ‘Laura Palmer’, ‘Flaws’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ quickly propelled Bastille into a global phenomenon. Mega platinum sales aside, they won British Breakthrough at the following year’s Brit Awards, and were nominated for two Grammys.

So… no pressure on Wild World then?

"The reaction to Bad Blood took us by total surprise,” Dan reflects. “We thought, ‘Oh, we’ll do a couple of small tours of the UK and then potentially go around Europe.’ Genuinely, that’s as much as we let ourselves imagine. So suddenly finding ourselves in the US, South America and South Africa and all these amazing places was crazy.”

Currently not short on air-miles, Bastille have reportedly clocked up around 450 gigs worldwide in the last three years.

“That sounds about right, yeah,” laughs Dan. “Which was incredible, you know, we’re so lucky. But because of the way that we work, we never stopped recording. When it came to making the next one, it wasn’t like, ‘Right, let’s go in and write some songs and book two weeks in a studio and record it.’ We’ve never worked like that anyway, we do everything ourselves. We write and produce with our friend Mark [Crew, producer], so I suppose it was kind of a never-ending process.

“I think what’s interesting with this album is that it’s taken us through loads of moods. It’s taken us from that point where we were taken aback by the sudden lack of control in our lives, when you’re touring so much and you’re suddenly like, ‘Wow, fuck!’ That whole mad mood of travelling, which I’m sure a lot of people in bands can relate to… and everyone else is like, ‘Fuck off, you egotistical pricks!’ But equally it took us through periods of being at home.”

It might have been written and recorded in fits and starts, but Wild World is still an eclectically cohesive collection of songs. “What I loved with this album, talking about it now, is that you can trace it back,” says Dan. “There are songs that happened in three hours in a tour bus in a rainy park in Germany somewhere two years ago, and other ones were written in the studio where we made the first record, just down the road from where we live in London. It’s a bit of a mad patchwork of everything.

“Our first album was predominantly made on my laptop, then we worked with Mark to make it sound like a proper album. And that hasn’t really changed. I mean, I guess the main obstacle was motivation, really. And obviously we all love making music, but I think when you’re playing shows every night and travelling loads, it was about finding the time and the headspace to motivate yourself. You have to lock yourself away in a hotel room, or in the bus, and get an iPad and literally start producing a song. And sometimes you’re completely in the mood for that and obsess over it, and other times you just want to read a book or hang out with someone and get away from music for a minute. So I guess that was an obstacle. But because it was a constant process, it never felt forced.”

Wild World/i>’s cover features a striking photograph of two young men balanced precariously on the ledge of a tall building overlooking an impressive cityscape. Apparently it isn’t a Photoshopped image…

“The party line is that we found it online, and we’re not really supposed to talk about it,” says Kyle. “We found them online and licensed them, but had nothing to do with their creation.” Then he gleefully ups his thumbs and gives a slow and wildly exaggerated wink.

“It’s an interesting thing,” says Dan. “You obviously really want to talk about it but, as Kyle said, we found them online and we licensed them. I’m obsessed with the image, I think it’s beautiful. I wanted it to be like our first album cover (a running man illuminated by a chasing car’s headlights – OT), in that you can impose your own narrative on it. “And for me it’s about friendship in the context of the mad fucking vast crazy world that we’ve all made… and then it’s about existing within a space, and it’s not Photoshopped at all. It’s 100% real, which is something special. In the age in which we live, it’s pretty much the norm of things to be touched up in Photoshop. You know, images like that can exist within seconds in an editing suite in London. It happens to be real, and that means so much more to us as well.”

Musically, Wild World is essentially a pop album – albeit one that makes much inventive use of horns, keys and strings. They’ve also added guitars into the mix (their debut was unusual in that it featured no guitars whatsoever).

“One of the tracks feature what was a very rough demo of a guitar solo,” laughs Will. “The party line is that we couldn’t recreate the magic. I was supposed to go away and learn how to play it properly, and then didn’t, and then we were in the studio and I hadn’t and I was like, ‘No, no, no – this sounds really good!’ (laughs)

“But we played quite a lot of bass on the first album and we suddenly realised we had no guitars and I play both… but we didn’t need any guitars, so once we realised that we’d done half an album, we just decided, ‘Well, let’s do it without them.’ Then there were some interesting songs where parts were definitely guitar parts. I was going back to playing them on the bass as high up the neck as I could get.”

Dan: “I suppose on the first album it became some sort of sonic challenge for us. Like Kyle and I are very much keyboard based. We thought it would be fun to fill that space without using guitars. But the new album is filled with guitars. Anything and everything. I think we don’t really care about genres or labelling, and we don’t really see ourselves as one thing and we never have, so I think with this album we wanted to wear our influences way more obviously. We treated it like a mixtape – it can be quite disorientating and go from stories about one thing to stories about another.”

For the most part, Wild World was recorded in the same tiny London studio where Bastille laid down their debut.

“We spent some time in a studio called The Pool in south London,” says Dan. “And that was the first time we as a band had gone to a studio with our producer and laid down the instruments. We even at one point got two backing singers in and they didn’t really make the album, but we were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s try it!’

“But then ultimately where we found our groove was in coming back in the first two or three months of this year, going back into Mark’s studio which is basically a tiny window in his basement in South London underneath a council estate in some community space. So you go down this network of corridors, and it’s one of the little ones with concrete squares in the middle between where they make school dinners for the local primary and a furniture workshop and a hair salon, and it’s just this mad little place we call home.”

Given the commercial success of Bad Blood, were you not tempted to opt for somewhere a little more plush?

“This is what’s ridiculous about being here,” laughs Kyle, indicating our luxurious Metropolis surroundings. “We’re doing interviews in a place that’s like…”

Dan interrupts him, “...fifty times the size of the studio where we made our actual album, which is surreal but there’s something to be said for going back to the place where we feel comfortable. You know, it kinda fits in with our whole ethos of us wanting the album to feel different for the sounds and the songs to evolve, but for us to stay the same. And I think that’s been a real preoccupation of ours, when we’re not on tour and we’re not lucky enough to be travelling, we like to just come home and go back to normal.”

If the songs on Bad Blood were influenced by Roman history (‘Pompeii’), Greek mythology (‘Icarus’) and cult TV (‘Laura Palmer’), the ones on Wild World seem much more rooted in the here and now. Dan is singing about love, loss and grief, but also about the sheer craziness of the world we live in and the way the media prisms it.

On standout track ‘Power’ he appears to be addressing an old lover who didn’t treat him too well. To this writer’s ears, it’s a song about falling out of an obsessive unrequited love.

“I think with all of our songs it’s important to leave them open to interpretation, and I’m really bad at this,” he smiles, self-consciously. “I’ll say like, ‘I don’t want to talk about what they’re about’ and then… I’ll start talking about what they’re about! I will try and retain some mystery, but I think that song could be about anything. It could be about relationships.

“But you know we’ve all been in those relationships, be they romantic ones or whatever, where you end up doing things that you wouldn’t normally do and you get drawn into… I don’t know, other people can be absolutely amazing and they can bring the best out of you, and they can bring the worst out of you. That’s just the complexity of human relationships and I think the whole album is sort of about – loosely - that feeling of watching this news and how fucked-up everything can seem, particularly the way the media presents it.

“But also about how, within that, relationships, be they friendships or romantic whatever or family or whatever, are the things that can make life amazing and complicated, and can make you laugh.”

He throws his arms up in the air. “Fucking life is complicated as hell, isn’t it? So that’s kind of the loose theme of the album.”

Electro-soaked ballad ‘Four Walls’ was written in response to Dan’s reading of Truman Capote’s 1966 true-crime classic In Cold Blood.

“I read that book on tour,” he explains. “I found it fascinating and that song is kind of an imagined thought process between Capote and Perry Smith, the guy on death row. You know, you do something that horrific and you carry it with you forever. Capital punishment is now what you’re facing, but there’s two wrongs here. What the fuck is going on? I think, like, a lot of our stuff is just a reaction to things around us or things that we find interesting.” ‘Good Grief’ opens with a sample of Kelly Le Brock from 1985 sci-fi comedy Weird Science, but they’ve used samples from other older and more obscure movies to segue between some of the tracks. Unfortunately, some of the quotes they wanted to use proved impossible to get permission for.

Dan was dismayed. “So there was one from a film, a ‘70s sci-fi film, that it turns out the version that we had was English-American, but the actual film is Italian – it had been dubbed – so we had to find someone from the Italian film company that shut down and try to get somebody to go knock on the door and see if we could get it.”

It was a long and complicated process. Although Bastille had freely used samples on their early mixtapes, they couldn’t do the same thing again now that they’re worth suing.

“It was such a long process and we’ve made mixtapes before. We just did them for fun, you know, we put them online for free and so we never thought about that and law-suits and threats – as you would predict if you weren’t idiots like us. And for this time round we were like, ‘Oh fuck, we’re signed to a major label, we have to do everything above board.’ So we tried to clear everything and unfortunately some of those things just didn’t work out. But the process of recreating them and finding new ones was interesting.

“You know, a whole other side to the album is that we were lucky enough to make songs that also would work closely enough with the videos and the visuals – every single little element. Everything that goes up online has gone through us, and the quotes were just another one of those interesting tangents that this mad job we have allowed us to go down.”

Any others?

“You know, going to meet with the FI and talking to them about their film archive, and speaking to the film company in Italy – or trying to speak to them, at least. Particularly talking to someone like Kelly le Brock and having her blessing to use her voice in one of our songs. She was like, ‘If you ever want me to come and play it live with you, I’m around.’ We were like… what? This isn’t real! So many mad moments.”

What has been the maddest one?

“I think Glastonbury,” says Will. “It was the first time we heard our new single live, and it was like pushing the button on us coming back. It was a real feeling when we were playing of just… the people were so excited about us. It being Glastonbury, we had a perfect slot and the sun was going down. I remember being on the stage and going, ‘This must be one of our favourite gigs’, which I’ve never thought before.

“I’ve never tried to think about what my favourite shows had ever been, but everything came together at once. I think it might have been my favourite gig, so that was such a big thing. The response we got.”

A SF fan from childhood, Dan’s biggest moment came when NASA got in touch. “Yeah, this engineer from NASA, who engineered the parachutes which are bringing capsules back into the atmosphere, got in touch with us and said, ‘I’m a massive fan’, and asked if we wanted to come have a private tour of Houston [Space Centre]. And we were like, ‘Yes, please!’

“And so we kinda struck up a relationship with NASA where we’ve just been to visit and we’ve been on tours and spoken to astronauts. You know, those are the kind of things where we’re like, ‘Fuck, as a kid in a science museum, the thought that would happen to you ever is insane.’”

Kyle: “We’re so lucky. As much as it’s a cliché, there’s been so many enormous, life-changing, unfathomable things happening to us. It’s really hard to pick just one.”

As ever, Dan Smith has the last word. “Particularly in the last three years, we’ve been so fortunate that things were happening to us quite frequently that in themselves would have been quite earth shattering before. We’re just so lucky. So that’s the thing with Wild World, we’re going into it with no idea how it’s going to do. We’re really proud of it and we want people to hear it… but we’re also kind of like, ‘Let’s just see what happens’.”

Let’s just see what happens, indeed. Watch this (outer) space…