Some years ago, a teenage Dan Smith was sitting in his bedroom in south London, recording songs on his laptop.
He was mostly making music for himself, barely sharing it with anyone, until finally a friend convinced him to enter a talent competition. Flash-forward countless international shows, a couple of platinum singles, a BRIT Award win and two Grammy nominations, and Bastille, the now four-piece led by Smith, has received international recognition. But despite their success, Smith says they definitely don’t live a “famous lifestyle” – and that’s the way they like it.
“We all just lead absolutely normal lives in London, and we’re quite happy with that,” he says. “When we go home, it’s this weird double life of going off on tour and playing shows to a lot of people and then going home and just hanging out with our friends and going to the pub. We get back into normality, get the bus everywhere, get the tube.”
For Smith, touring doesn’t simply mean playing shows: he also spends his time furiously writing. Bastille’s new record Wild World was mostly penned in backstage rooms and hotel suites on Smith’s laptop, and unlike many artists he doesn’t see the touring and writing processes as separate.
Wild World represents a step in a new direction for the band: it’s a mish-mash of different styles, an experiment touching on everything from hip hop production values, brutal guitar work, “Tarantino-esque” minimal tracks and the usual orchestral, cinematic Bastille songs. But one thing Smith has really kept in mind throughout is the desire to link Wild World to the movies. “We wanted it to seem like another film in this series that we’re making,” he explains. “It’s the same directors, but a different genre.”
It’s no secret that Smith is a huge film fan: he studied English literature at Leeds University and dreamed of becoming a film journalist. It’s easy to see such an influence on his work: he famously sampled lines from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho for his mash-up of TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ and The XX’s ‘Angels’, and two of the singles Bastille has already released from the new record feature snippets of movie dialogue. Smith says that sampling plays a particularly big role in his process, helping to give the works a “mixtape feel”.
“I love sampling music,” he says. “I think it can be really evocative. With our songs we really try and create a little world and make it as atmospheric as possible. The thing with the quotes is it’s not about them being famous, and it’s not about them being necessarily recognisable. It’s more helping to tell this weird 45-minute story.”
Nonetheless, using samples is a process that comes with its own share of headaches, and the band often had difficulty clearing the rights and getting access to the audio they needed. In one instance they were even forced to send a member of their team across the country to track down the owners of an old film company because they were so driven to source a particular samples. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get it done in time, so it wasn’t meant to be.
“There was one sample in a song on the album called ‘Send Them Off’. The sample was from this old ’70s B-movie sci-fi film that has like one-and-a-half stars out of ten on IMDb, but it’s got these amazing, dramatic, braggy quotes. And it’s brilliant! It’s well ahead of its time … But because we couldn’t get the sample, in the end we had to just rewrite it and recreate it. The spirit of the film is still there, but that was a shame.”
In general, the band’s sound is a lot bolder on Wild World; they seem more brazen, more intense. Their single ‘Good Grief’ has already garnered a lot of attention, particularly for its accompanying clip, a collaboration between the band and the Spanish collective NYSU. The resulting video provoked a strong reaction for its extreme female nudity – though Smith has astutely noted that no-one has pointed out the gun violence in the video.
“There’re a lot of countries in mainland Europe where nudity is not meant to be heavily sexualised,” he explains. “For artists, it’s just another part of life. It was so interesting to see it in different places. For some people the nudity either means nothing at all, or people are kind of provoked by it!”
The album isn’t all big tunes and bold sounds: one song that Smith has a particularly strong connection to is ‘Two Evils’, a tune on which he pulled things right back. “I’d started thinking about Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang’ when writing it. I wanted it to be really atmospheric and eerie; I wanted to just tell a story with just a guitar on one side and a vocal on the other.”
According to Smith, the title of Wild World is very much a reference to how difficult it can be to make sense of the world; how difficult reality can be to engage with. But despite the hardships he faced writing the record, he’s looking forward to sharing it with the world. “Ultimately, people and friendships and human relationships are awesome, and that’s what makes things OK,” he says. “I guess it’s quite a weird album, and it’ll be interesting to hear what people think.”
Bastille’sWild World is out Friday September 9 through EMI.
