Neil Mccormick on Royal Blood – Britain’s most exciting duo
After a career-making set at this summer’s Glastonbury, British rock duo Royal Blood tell Neil Mccormick about their annus mirabilis
Royal Blood are the most exciting rock band in Britain right now. A duo from West Sussex, they make more noise than seems possible for just two people – especially considering that they have dispensed with rock’s most iconic instrument: the lead guitar. The band’s line-up features just drums and bass. “It doesn’t matter how many strings you’ve got,” insists singing bassist Mike Kerr. “It’s about what you do with them.”
They absolutely stormed the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury Festival this year, with a wild, thunderous, celebratory and rapturously received set. “It took about two weeks to get our heart rates back to normal after that,” recalls Kerr. “The energy was ridiculous. A lot of stars aligned for us that day. I think it’s the best show we have ever done.”
News came through in the middle of their set that Royal Blood’s second album, When Did We Get So Dark, had just gone to number one in the UK charts. They celebrated by popping champagne in the middle of a long, delirious, improvised jam that saw them practically destroy their instruments, stalking off in triumph with feedback still howling over the Somerset fields. “It got pretty nuts,” ssays Kerr. “I think so much had been going on in the news, so much stress and worry, Glastonbury was a huge relief for everyone to get together and just switch off the world and have a good time. Something profound and euphoric and pretty magical happened. It was like we were playing beyond ourselves.”
Kerr, 28, and drummer Ben Thatcher, 27, became friends as teenagers, playing in various bands with Kerr on keyboards – he had played piano his whole life, and only took up bass in 2013, just to try something different. “I’ve never considered myself a bass player,” he says. “I see it as a tool that helps make the sound I want to make. At the end of the day, it’s a bit of wood with wires on it. The initial excitement was that I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was about using my ear rather than my brain. So it’s like you’re trying to find the music inside you.” The band emerged from Kerr and Thatcher jamming together for fun. “Some people play squash at the weekends, we’d get in a room and rock out.”
Signed to Warner Bros in the same year they formed, they rose up very fast, with intense, energetic songs fired up with dirty riffs and overlaid with sweet pop melodies. Championed by the Arctic Monkeys, they featured on the BBC Sound of 2014 poll, before their self-titled album became the fastest selling British rock debut of the decade. “Ironically, rock is probably the music we listen to least, but it’s the most exciting to play,” says Kerr. Their youth and vitality has seen them acclaimed as potential saviours of an increasingly moribund genre, drawing praise from such iconic American rock bands as Metallica, Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age.
“We’re songwriters,” says Kerr. “It just so happens that we’ve got different weapons in our hands than most of our peers. We don’t have computers. We have real instruments. It’s about making music that is unique and true to us and forward moving rather than a pastiche of something that’s been done before. I mean, there’s always going to be an element of standing on the shoulders of giants. But we can’t just get up there and imitate Led Zeppelin.”
The Led Zeppelin comparison is one frequently bandied about. Jimmy Page has been spotted in the audience at many Royal Blood shows, describing the band as “absolutely riveting” and asserting that they have “taken the genre up a serious few notches… they’re going to take rock into a new realm.”
“They’ve been a massive influence on the way that we play,” admits Kerr. “It’s all sass and soul and feel. The thing I love most about Led Zeppelin is that you can hear four humans, you can hear their chemistry when they’re playing together, it is raw and real. That’s something we cherish in our band. It is about me and Ben playing music together, relating to each other, reacting and interacting, feeding off each other. It’s not the equipment. If we walked offstage and two other guys came on and used our stuff, that doesn’t mean it’d be good.”
Kerr doesn’t consider himself a particularly skilled guitarist. “If you took someone fresh out of music college, they’d probably play better than me,” he admits. Yet the things he does with four strings seem quite extraordinary. Using loop pedals and a wide range of effects, he lays down deep bass notes, grungy distorted riffs, fuzzed-up rhythm and high, intense lead, often at the same time. His singing voice is raw and expressive with a sweet falsetto that adds a slinky seductive quality as required. Thatcher’s drumming, meanwhile, is heavy and groovy, with explosive fills.
“We’re both quite minimalistic when it comes to music,” says Kerr. “It’s about limitation as inspiration. Things get more interesting when you start removing elements.
You can’t play chords really, it’s singular notes. We can’t do a guitar solo so that forces us down a different way of thinking. It’s always fascinated me how you can make something really special out of basic ingredients. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”
He uses the example of The White Stripes riff for Seven Nation Army. “You could teach that to someone as the very first thing they learn on the guitar. Yet every guitarist in the world wishes they wrote it. That’s what turns me on about simplicity.” He paraphrases Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. “It’s not always about outsmarting people. It’s about out-dumbing them.”
Royal Blood have attracted some criticism for dubious sexual politics. The cover art for How Did We Get So Dark? features two naked women in place of the male band members. And throughout the songs, women are characterised as cheaters, heartbreakers, liars, devils and cold-shouldered abusers. “I get it,” says Kerr, reasonably. “Rock ’n’ roll carries some misogynistic baggage. It just so happens that I’m a heterosexual male, and my experience of relationships is only with women. I think if you were to discard any lyric writing where a man is angry at a woman, you’d lose some of the best songs ever written. And likewise, some incredible songs have been written by women who are being equally as scathing of men. It’s just about experience in relationships. How can one person represent an entire gender?”
To give Royal Blood the benefit of the doubt, it is clearly a break-up record, with every song focusing on a disintegrating relationship rife with jealousy, paranoia and betrayal. And the man at its centre isn’t a whole lot easier on himself: “I only lie when I make a sound”, as Kerr sings on I Only Lie When I Love You.
“I actually wanted to make a feel-good album,” says Kerr. “But I had to be honest and say the things I said because that’s what I was feeling.” He won’t be drawn on more detail, except to say that, when he was writing the record, “it was a pretty dark time for me, personally”.
But better may be to come. “This year’s been great, so our next album is going to be pretty upbeat,” he says. “I’m kind of done with writing songs about heartbreak. I’m done with being angry. I wanna write songs about getting f----- up and having a good time. Because that’s what we’re doing every night on stage.”
Royal Blood play Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff tonight (Monday) and then tour until Nov 29; royalbloodband.com
‘I’ve never considered myself a bass player. I see it as a tool that helps make the sound I want to make’