“Eh eh oh eh oh” – in 2013, hardly anyone could resist the echoing chorus with which Bastille opened their hit “Pompeii”. To date, the song is by far the best known of the British indie band. For frontman and songwriter Dan Smith, who suffers from impostor syndrome and didn’t want to become famous under any circumstances, the success was confusing and embarrassing at first, as he keeps telling. During the first performances he had to drink a lot of alcohol to dare to go on stage. That is no longer the case today, but the 36-year-old is still far from routine. “I get really nervous and a good 40 or 50 percent of the gigs are like a mild or intense panic for me,” he revealed.Rolling Stone” last year. Some things never seem to change – including the unmistakable sound of Bastille.
“We don’t want to reinvent the Bastille sound” – but still surprise
The band was formed in 2010. Dan, whose full name is Daniel Campbell, met drummer Chris “Woody” Wood in a pub. A little later William “Will” Farquarson (bass and guitar) and Kyle Simmons (keyboard player) joined them. The four have always been good friends. The sudden success caught them unprepared – and welded them together. “We stumbled through it together,” the frontman recalled in one podcast-Interview. After the breakthrough, the band toured around the world. Meanwhile she was working on the second album. At the time, Dan Smith said the BBC: “We don’t want to reinvent the Bastille sound, but we don’t want to repeat ourselves either.” A motto that has run through the entire history of the band ever since.
Each of the four albums is characterized by the band’s characteristic sound: the combination of pop beats and melancholic lyrics. Songs that “feel uplifting but explore darker themes,” as the frontman put it in 2016’s “Rolling StoneThe influence of the film industry also runs through the music of the British band. Not only do the album covers look like film posters, the lyrics are peppered with quotes from or references to well-known films. This is because Dan Smith is, as he himself puts it, “a real nerdy movie buff” While the first album was themed around the works of David Lynch (the song “Laura Palmer” for example pays homage to a character from the series “Twin Peaks” ), science fiction strips like “back to the future” set the theme on the fourth album.
Mixtapes and orchestra tour
But because the musicians like to experiment and always want to surprise, there are countless influences from other musical genres spread over the albums. At one point there is suddenly a rock song, at another point a sonic excursion into the 80s or a rap part. Parallel to the albums, which are all self-contained and each follow a theme or tell a story, the quartet released a series of mixtapes called “Other Peoples Heartache”. Covers and mash-ups of various songs from throughout music history can be heard on the records. Classics like “Would I lie to you?” ended up in the remixes. as well as current tracks by Lana del Rey or Taylor Swift.
Dan Smith performing on the “ReOrchestrated” tour. Despite being acclaimed by thousands of fans, the musician suffers from massive self-doubt and describes himself as a very cynical person. “I’m my own and our biggest critic,” he said in a podcast interview.
© POP-EYE / Imago Images
Probably the biggest surprise the band has put together was the “ReOrechestrated” project, in which Bastille reinterpreted their previous hits as orchestral versions with classical musicians. The one of the same name documentary tells the story behind the lavish tour and looks at what it takes to keep a band exciting. “How can we surprise even our most loyal hardcore fans?” is the question that makes the busy Bastille frontman rush from one project to the next. He wants to constantly show the audience new sides, he says in the documentary. Unfortunately, some of it is lost: “We occasionally have moments in the mainstream, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of all our work.” The most important and interesting projects often don’t make it to the surface, he regrets.
You can’t say that about “Pompeii”. The song has now become a timeless song – and was already a TikTok trend. A song like “Pompeii” doesn’t necessarily age because it sounds just as unique today as it did back then, concluded Mark Crew, a music producer who has worked with Bastille from the start, at the end of a recent release MTV contribution. A music expert at the station already describes the song, a “hit single that you can play until the end of your days”, as the group’s legacy. Pompeii will survive Bastille – no matter what the next ten years of band history bring.
Sources: BBC, MTV, ReOrchestrated“Rolling Stone” (I), “Rolling Stone” (II), Straight up podcast