ROYAL BLOOD
The Brighton duo whose dirty, bluesy brand of rock’n’roll went stratospheric.
New rock groups aren’t supposed to blow up. Not seriously, in this day and age, with the final guitar wave of the early 00s swiftly becoming a distant memory. But Royal Blood did. Within a year of their formation they’d become the coolest band in Britain.
When asked to pinpoint the moment when the duo’s sudden ascent to the public eye began, frontman/bassist Mike Kerr says, with evident disbelief: “As soon as our first record came out it went mental.” .
Formed by Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher in Brighton in 2013, Royal Blood released their self-titled debut album in 2014. The rock world reacted with huge enthusiasm for their combination of catchy choruses, Led Zeppelin-style riffs and raw blues aggression that nodded to The White Stripes but had meatier grooves. The album went to No.1 in the UK, and a slew of industry awards, festival appearances and magazine coverage followed.
By the time their 2017 album How Did We Get So Dark? was released, Royal Blood had built an impressive international following. How did they get so huge in such a short time?
“I honestly don’t know,” Kerr says. “Outsiders have theories about it. At the time we came out we were probably the only rock band that were writing pop tunes, maybe people were psyched that there were two of us… I don’t know. It’s hard to tell, really. It’s a mixture of being ready for it and being in the right place at the right time. And it must be something to do with the songs being good. I think the songwriting is what we value the most, really. That’s the most important thing to us.”
Kerr started playing bass thanks to Thatcher having joined a punk band as a session drummer. One day the band needed a bass player. “It was a bit of paid work, but I didn’t play the bass at the time,” Kerr says. “So they sent me the songs, and they were beginners’ kind of bass lines, so I just picked a bass up. I was probably twenty-one at the time.”
Kerr, still only 29, has kept the secret to the equipment side of his guitar-mimicking formula (created using only a four-string bass and a mysterious pedal board) under wraps. He doesn’t want anybody to know how he creates enough musical thunder to equal two or even three players. “I’m not gonna talk about my gear,” he says firmly. “I don’t talk about my pedals, ever.”
Cynical eyes might be tempted to view the whole thing as some deliberate, zeitgeistchasing mission. Not so, says Kerr.
“When we started jamming together in 2013, if we’d wanted to be successful we wouldn’t have formed a two-piece dirty rock’n’roll band,” he reasons. “We would have tried to emulate someone who was experiencing success. We were just doing what we wanted to do.”