BastilleIt's typical for British musicians to suffer at the hands of their country's notoriously vicious media culture. You have to especially feel for Dan Smith, though. He was a musician of singularly unremarkable ambition. Studying film at university, Smith made bedroom recordings for fun and friends. One such friend, armed with said recordings, entered him in a band competition. Now - he's famous.
“Everything and nothing is a bit of a nice surprise at the moment,” Smith says. “You know, we weren't really expecting anything to happen in the UK when we released our album. So, the idea of me talking to someone in Australia about shows we're going to do on the other side of the world is quite humbling and strange. In a good way, though. Really, we just wanted to be in a position to make another album.”
Well - not famous. He's hardly celebrity. Still, his band Bastille's debut album Bad Blood did debut at number one on the UK album charts. They've delivered multiple charting singles, supported Muse and Emeli Sande and performed at Reading and Leeds festivals. Smith may not be celebrity - but, for a musician who never intended to leave his bedroom, he's a lot closer to it than he ever expected or desired.
“We were really kind of naive about it, I think,” the frontman reflects. “You know, when we released the album, we just wanted to be able to make another one. If I'm being perfectly honest, we would have absolutely loved to have had an album in the Top 20. We'd have loved to have played a festival or two. Really, though. We just wanted to be in the position to make a second record.”
“I think, being in a band, you can never spend too much time thinking about the future,” he continues. “Nothing is ever certain. You know, before you get signed, after you get signed. There are so many bands that don't even last long enough to make an album. There are so many bands that get to make their first album but don't make it to their second. So, I think we've never really planned more than two or three months in advance.”
He's certainly notorious enough as to experience the flipside of the band's success. Like many successful outfits, Bastille's increased profile has prompted an equivalent proportion of vocal detractors. Smith bears the brunt of criticisms. His earnest vocal presence and hairstyle are both popular targets. The band themselves merely have to deal with an endless array of Coldplay comparisons - echoed even by the band's supporters.
“I think it's a lazy comparison, personally. I think it comes down to the fact that they sometimes do really big songs with really big choruses and we sometimes do really big songs with really big choruses,” Smith muses. “I think we've always suffered at the hand of critics because we've never been that interested in defining what we do as a band. What we want to be and what we want to sound like.”
“You know, we've never called ourselves a pop band or an indie band or an electronic band. That's not to say we're doing anything pioneering - because we're not - but we don't sit comfortably within a genre. You know, we get all kinds of comparisons and descriptions thrown at us. Some cooler bands, some less cool bands,” he says. “A lot of people seem to think that I'm really heavily into eighties music or something.”
It's an odd array of criticisms that largely seem rooted in the idea that Bastille are in some way contrived or market-driven. Which is obviously a complete fallacy. As established, Smith has never been a musician with a plan. Externally, it may seem like the band's trajectory has been a consistent escalation of acclaim from the outset - but it's more chaotic than that. It took the band nearly a year to record their debut album.
“We spent most of 2012 making the album. We recorded it in our friend's little studio. Dip in and then come back,” Smith says. “Sometimes we'd work on it for three weeks and then duck out. Sometimes we'd work on it for a couple of days. By the end of the year, we'd finally got down to the fun stuff of mastering and finalising the artwork. So, yeah, it took us a full year to get the whole thing together.”
“Like a lot of debut albums, I think it's kind of a culmination of everything we've done as a band to date, though,” he clarifies. “Like, we first started playing gigs nearly three years ago. It's got songs we released when we first started out and songs that were only written right towards the end of the process. You know, it took us the full course of the year but a lot of the songs are even older than that.”
To his credit, Smith has yet to succumb to the bitterness that tends to hit bands so rapidly introduced to his success bracket. In a similar coup, he's relatively untroubled about maintaining Bastille's winning streak. There's a certain philosophical bent to his outlook. He doesn't think much on the band's next album. The frontman is confident that, even if they discard their accepted sound of synth-heavy anthems, Bastille will be okay.
“I've got some ideas of stuff I'd like to explore on the next record. I've been thinking about getting guitars in and guitar sounds that would work with our songs. There are a couple of sketches of songs that I'd like to explore,” he allows. “But, past a certain point, there just isn't much to say about the next album because that's so far into the future. I don't think we're really scared of following up the success of Bad Blood.”
“In my mind, we can kind of do whatever we want, really. On our album, we've done indie tracks. On our mixtapes and stuff, we've done electronic and hip hop tracks. I think we've left ourselves with a lot of room to move. I don't think people really care what the music sounds like as long as the songs are good - which, hopefully, they will be. Financially, the album will do what it will do.”
“You know, this album has done so, so, so much better than anything we ever dreamed of,” the frontman laughs. “If this is as far as we get or as good as it gets, I think we'll be alright. We've still achieved a lot more than we ever thought we would.”
