There's Always Room To Be Better For Royal Blood

Royal Blood

Royal Blood are getting pretty used to this whole ‘international touring’ thing. It’s been about two years since things really kicked into gear for the buzzworthy British blues-rockers, and when The Music catches up with Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher at Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival ahead of their trip to Australia to perform at Splendour In The Grass, despite having already been away from home for nine weeks, both musicians are relaxed and showing no signs of stress.

Then again, if you’ve been enjoying the band’s acclaimed self-titled album and are jazzed to see them play, it’s probably a good thing they’re spending so much time on the road.

"I think the more creative we get with our live show, the more creative we’ll become on the road.”

“I guess the kind of ethos of touring, for us, is really to get better at playing live,” Kerr says. “To us, there’s two options: you either grit your teeth and get on with it and get to the end of the tour, or you can try to get something out of it, and to us, that seems like the most fun thing to achieve, to try and improve our live show, and amongst that as well we want to be writing more, so I guess, yeah, I think the two come hand-in-hand as well: I think the more creative we get with our live show, the more creative we’ll become on the road.”

In at least one regard, they’ve been tangibly successful; they have been writing, starting to put pen to paper on their eagerly awaited second full-length — but it’s too early in the process — which, according to Kerr, is presently “like tethering lightning” in terms of being struck by inspiration — for either he or Thatcher to offer much to report. “It’s a bit of an abstract question at the moment, but it will be great, I assure you,” Kerr laughs, while Thatcher adds that things are coming along “really well”. However, on the live front, the band is definitely putting in the hard yards for their stage performances.

“We find room to improve every single show.” Kerr says. “There’s room for… well, improvisation’s the wrong word, but there’s definitely room for, like, sporadic moments and extended sections and things we can do on stage that can make the show more exciting. It just happens in the moment — I didn’t know Ben was gonna do this certain thing, and he did, and I was like, ‘That was really cool,’ so we’ll do that today… we’re forever trying to push it and improve in that way.” 

One hopes that, by the time they take the stage for their slot at the North Byron Parklands, they’ve achieved at least some of their performance goals, because, like pretty much everything else Kerr and Thatcher do, the game they talk is pretty big.

“Come watch us at Splendour,” Kerr concludes, “‘cause we’ll be better than all the other bands there!”