As I waited for Bastille’s tour manager Sam, my nerves were causing me to brick it for about fifteen minutes. In a few hours the venue where I was slowly losing my mind to nerves would later be shaken by the electric performance that Bastille gave that night. But at the moment my mind was occupied with getting through my first ever interview without screwing it up. Eventually Sam comes in and takes me into a smaller part of the venue where I find Dan Smith (lead vocals) and Kyle (keyboardist). They lead me up to a very open student area in the middle of Leeds Uni and as I walk past, the queuing fangirls’ faces drop. When we sat down, relief came when it was apparent that these two guys were one, very humble, and two complete legends.
It’s fair to say that Bastille are relatively new when it comes to commercial success, but on that day they had just secured Number One on the Album Charts and as Dan summed up the band’s feeling by saying that his “mind hadn’t really computed it yet” and that really it just “means so much” to see such appreciation for their album. When asked about the process of the making the album and then seeing it flourish he commented that “essentially you make music kind of for yourself and then for it to sort of translate to something other people like as well is just really… weird, but a nice weird”.
But we can hardly forget that it is not just massive success in the album charts, their live performances are sensational. The Bad Blood Tour sold out nationwide long before they blasted on to the charts with Pompeii. Kyle talked about how surreal it was to be on a proper tour bus for the first time likening it to a “big transformer with loads of beds in” – it dawned on me that their experience of fame and popularity was completely fresh.
I actually told them my bad luck in securing tickets for their Leeds show, and then of my fortune of being given the opportunity to do this interview. Dan revealed that back in his Leeds days he used to work for the student newspaper and have radio show, which in particular gave him the opportunity to interview Regina Specktor. Calling journalism “the easiest way” to getting tickets and meeting bands.
“The first was the worst interview in the world because I was literally like shaking, like I love you (Regina) so much. I felt like such a loser. I didn’t know what to say to her. It was so bad, we couldn’t use it, it was basically a half an hour dialogue – no, monologue – of us telling her how brilliant she was and she just looked terrified.”
Swiftly dropping the fact that I was currently resisting doing so made for good comedy, but this small anecdote was entertaining and humanising. They kept it short and sweet when I tried to extract information about festival prospects this year simply because they didn’t know what they could tell me. Only now after many festivals announcements did we realise that they’re pretty much everywhere this year. They actually recalled the step up that Reading 2012 was, Kyle saying it was “really special” to them and that they “weren’t used to that sort of stage size.”
Dan immediately got up and mimicked himself as he describes how he was “kinda walking around” in a state of shock of how “there’s so much space”. Returning to their humble ways Dan said that “we were just totally blown away by how many people came, we perpetually feel like competition winners.”
This is a near perfect description, Bastille have risen quickly, quickly enough for them to not really realise it. Reading 2012, ‘Pompeii’’s success, their album success and their sell-out tour is only just now giving them clues that they’re more admired than they thought. But still they refuse to let it feed their egos; instead they’re in the music industry because they enjoy making music and entertaining the public
Many Bastille fans will be aware of their highly acclaimed mixtapes titled ‘Other People’s Heartache’. The tracks are so creative that it made compelling conversation as we discussed exactly what it was they were doing when it came to producing these unique pieces. Quite simply Dan summed it up as “just being geeks” seeing it “almost like a college and we could literally use anything we want”.
“We’re not in any way pretentious about the material we use, because we just do it for fun… the attitude is kinda anything goes.” And those words almost seamlessly translate to what they achieved in the mixtapes. They slice in sound bites from Requiem for a Dream and American Beauty in certain songs while covering a range from TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ to Haddaway’s ‘What is Love?’ and all in order to just mess about, to see what they are capable of.
The mixtapes really intrigue, but they do raise the question of Bastille’s influences. From the wide array of tracks that Bastille have already produced it’s hard to categorise into genre, even Dan admitted that he’s “really bad at pinning it down”. We discussed bands like Vampire Weekend among others that he said were the sort of thing he was listening to when making ‘Flaws’. But not just that, he also talked about the influence of hip-hop and electronic music. To him the influence “kind of comes from everywhere” and that instead of trying to conform to a genre, it’s “really important that the song is memorable”. And going by the tracks they’ve released up until now they do share one trait, they are all particularly memorable and unique.
The interview ended on a high with Dan joking about how one of their tracks ended up on Made in Chelsea and how it follows them around like a “fucking bad smell”.
Throughout this interview I got a complete sense of these guys’ grounded personalities, Kyle remarked that they “never really had any sort of expectations” when they started and both comment upon how it’s still surreal to hear their music on the radio and especially weird that they made it on to the FIFA soundtrack. Dan even recalled that when driving, “’Pompeii’ came on and I nearly crashed”.
I cannot wait to hear more from these guys and I wish them all the best on their touring and festival romp this year. They seem genuinely shocked and humbled by their lightening climb to popularity and their journey into the mainstream. If nothing else, that’s what I learned in the interview. Hopefully more than in Dan’s first.