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 "Pompeii," a haunting and grandiose song of love and loss,
has become London band Bastille's breakout hit, scaling the
Billboard Hot 100 singles chart to a peak of No. 10. The band
most recently performed the song on NBC's comedy sketch show
"Saturday Night Live."
It is also nominated for British single of the year at the
upcoming Brit Awards on February 19, where Bastille leads the
nominees with four nods, including the night's top accolade for
British album of the year for their debut record "Bad Blood."
On a recent trip to Los Angeles, the band — formed by Dan Smith,
Chris Wood, Kyle Simmons and Will Farquarson — sat down with
Reuters at the legendary Capitol Records building to discuss
their breakthrough and genre-defying music.
Q: What were you thinking about when you wrote "Pompeii"?
Smith: It's about two ashy corpses having a conversation
about the fact that their city has been wiped out by a volcano,
and they're slightly bored because they're stuck next to each
other forever. But put across in a slightly more ambiguous way.
I love that the fact that we get to play it at festivals all
over the world to people who are drunk and joking about and
smiling, and they're singing a song about two fictional dead
people. I want the song to reflect the situation and to feel
quite epic on some ways, and kind of sad and optimistic.
Ultimately it is quite tongue-in-cheek.
Q: Did you think "Pompeii" could cross over from the
alt-rock stations and be played among mainstream pop hits?
Smith: Where we maybe saw ourselves as a band and where
we were hoping to go, we weren't thinking of mainstream really.
We wanted to make an album, and for that to do OK so that we
could make another album.
When "Pompeii" in the UK was in a chart battle with One
Direction and Justin Timberlake, for that sentence to possibly
come out of our mouths was so ridiculous.
Q: How would you describe the genre your music falls
into?
Wood: We wanted to put out a collection of songs that we thought
were really strong and that didn't particularly fit into one
genre, because it's such a wide variety of influences.
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 The only thing we tried to maintain for it is not
using guitars, because ... no one can play guitar, and then half way
through it, we thought "let's carry on using this no guitar rule."
We got some marimbas for "These Streets," and I suppose that helped
not having a constant sound, so some are really organic-based and
some are minimal electro.
Q: You've repackaged "Bad Blood" with all
your older material and two new tracks in "All This Bad Blood," that
was released in the U.S. in January. Is there a new musical
direction coming with the new tracks?
Smith: The new tracks are potentially early versions, they
might turn into something else. We just wanted to make two new songs
that solidly gesture towards where we might go. "The Draw" has
become one of my favorites to play live, and it's entirely
guitar-led and it goes quite heavy at the end, which for us is kind
of a departure but I think it still really feels like us. On the
other hand, we have "Skulls," which is, in my mind, garage-inspired
but it probably doesn't sound like that to anyone else, and that's
more electronic.
Q: You're off on tour in Europe and North America from
February 26. What's the biggest difference you've picked up on
between the UK and U.S. audiences?
Smith: There's a quite nice lack of cynicism here. We made
the comment that in UK or London, if you meet someone in a bar who
asks what you do and you say you're in a band, you almost have to
apologize. Our experience of coming here early on, especially when no
one had any idea who we were, and still don't know who we are, if
you say you're in a band, they say, "Cool, that's really
interesting."
I think we've had a really nicely skewed perception of the American
music industry because we've been lucky to come and play gigs to
people. I thought we were going to come to America and drive for
weeks and weeks and play to empty rooms, I think that's where our
expectations lay, so we've been pleasantly surprised.
(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; editing by
Mary Milliken and Marguerita Choy)
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