I was lucky enough to grab a quick interview with BASTILLE‘s lovely frontman Dan Smith. I really urge you if you aren’t already familiar with their music to head to their Youtube, Twitter or Facebook page. Their first E.P (Laura Palmer) was released at the end of last year and is fantastic! They hope to be releasing their first album sometime this year.
So can you tell us a little about yourself?
My name’s Dan and I sing and record with Bastille. We live in London and have been around for about a year doing gigs and making songs.
And a little brief history on how BASTILLE got started?
Throughout 2010 I had been writing and recording a bit, working on demos I’d made in my room with a friend of mine who’s a producer. At the end of 2010 I got Woody, Kyle and Will involved and we started rehearsing these recordings and making a live band out of them. At the same time I made a video for one of the songs, ‘Flaws’, which I put online at the beginning of 2011 and luckily people seemed to stumble upon it and share it around. We played our first proper gig at The Great Escape festival in about April of 2011 and luckily had quite a busy year from there.
How has the response been to the Laura Palmer E.P? (we loved it by the way!)
Glad you guys liked it. I’m not sure what the response was like. For me, I’d only had a couple of songs online for quite a while so I guess amongst people who like our music there was a bit of an appetite to hear more. On that level it was quite satisfying putting out a whole bunch of songs that I see as quite varies all at once. I hope it showed some of the different kinds of things we want to do.
Any big tours happening this year?
We should be doing a tour in April which I’m pretty excited about, and then hopefully a bunch of festivals followed by another tour towards the end of the year.
We heard you are in the process of recording an album, how is that going for you?
It has been really fun thanks and we’re about halfway through it now. Annoyingly I’ve got glandular fever at the moment so it’s all on hold for a bit, but hopefully my rubbish immune system will kick in at some point and we can get back to finishing it as soon as possible.
And how long till I can own my very own hard copy?
I think the album will be out sometime in the Summer? I’m not completely sure. I know that we’re going to be doing a bunch of different releases before then, so there should be quite a fair bit of music out before the album itself.
How does it feel to have your own fans?
It’s awesome, though I still find it mildly hard to believe and it’s not something I ever really imagined actually happening. It’s great knowing that, however many there actually are, there are complete strangers who seem to like the music we’re making.
Where did the triangle come from?
Me and my friend were trying out different ways of writing BASTILLE and I really liked the ∆. It just kind of stuck and seems to have grown from there. People seem to have their own interpretations of it.
If you weren’t pursuing the musical career what do you think you would be doing?
I’d hopefully have been a journalist. I very nearly did an MA in Journalism but I put it off to concentrate on my incredibly boring, menial jobs (and trying to make music).
Any good tour experiences/stories?
When we toured at the end of last year we had literally no money at all and we had to borrow my friend’s Mum’s people carrier to get us and our kit round the country. It was a really fun month, though it involved a shitload of driving (Kyle and Will can’t drive which was handy). We actually missed quite a big gig in Manchester because the tyre blew on the motorway and we didn’t have a spare. We sat by the side of the road in the rain watching as our set time passed by. God, I’m making it sound like an incredibly depressing tour… it was actually really fun, and it was awesome to meet and drink with lots of complete strangers who had somehow heard of our music.
And the final question, how do you keep your hair so… styled?
I rub it with a towel…
