Discovering a signature sound is the holy grail of pop music.
There’s no Pink Floyd with out David Gilmour’s sweeping guitar strains. Take away Dr Dre’s incendiary manufacturing, and NWA’s lyrics lose a few of their efficiency. Billie Eilish’s vocal supply is so distinctive she will soar between genres with out dropping her essence.
For Clear Bandit, their signature sound is a straightforward, however efficient, combination of chamber music and dance beats.
It’s a method they got here up with at college. Cellist Grace Chatto was courting structure scholar Jack Patterson, who began splicing samples of her string quartet into his instrumentals.
It wasn’t precisely a brand new concept. In 1976, Walter Murphy turned Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 right into a thumping disco observe; and in 1995, Madonna’s producer William Orbit made an album, Items In A Trendy Type, that took Ravel, Vivaldi and Handel to an all-night rave.
However Clear Bandit weren’t taken with remixes. They wrote massive pop hits like Solo and Rockabye, utilizing their classical chops to provide the songs emotional heft.
“It’s a fragile stability,” says Patterson. “In the event you added a sax solo, for instance, it’d be one ingredient too far. You may as effectively placed on a waistcoat and go dwelling.”
However when it really works, it really works.
Clear Bandit’s trademark sound earned them 4 UK primary singles, two Ivor Novello songwriting awards and a Grammy.
Then, with grim inevitability, their report label advised them to ditch it.
“There was a push for us to cease having strings in our music,” grimaces Chatto.
“We had been advised to cease making pop music, as effectively,” says Patterson.
“We had been despatched dance music playlists on Spotify and advised ‘your music has to take a seat on right here – solely Harry Types could make pop music’.”
A part of the priority was that the band are, in their very own phrases, “shy and unassuming individuals”.
Their songs are fronted by pop titans from Demi Lovato and Ellie Goulding to Charli XCX and Lizzo – however the trio (accomplished by Jack’s brother Luke) can nonetheless catch the Tube with out being bothered.
“We had been advised ‘you don’t have a face, you might want to make membership music’,” recollects Patterson.
The calls for had been so frequent and insistent that the band started to distrust their instincts. They erased the violins and went for a darker sound, extra indebted to accommodate than pop.
It didn’t go effectively: Since 2020, none of their data has made the highest 10.
“We allowed it to occur as a result of we had been like, ‘We’d somewhat launch one thing than nothing’,” says Chatto.
“However the music didn’t really feel like our music. Our followers had been feeling it. We had been feeling it.
“Ultimately, we had been like, what’s the purpose in doing something?’
Finally, they negotiated an “amicable” exit from Atlantic Data that allowed them to retain the rights to all of their unreleased songs.
“It couldn’t have led to a greater method,” says Chatto.
“We’re nonetheless mates with these individuals… I simply assume the extra success we had, the extra stress they felt. Their jobs had been on the road.”
The band jumped over to the Sony Music label B1/Ministry of Sound, whose head honcho is Wolfgang Boss – one of many first individuals to champion Clear Bandit again within the 2010s.
He inspired them to launch Cry Child – a collaboration with Anne-Marie and David Guetta that they’d been sitting on for 4 years after Atlantic rejected it.
From the opening bars, it’s undeniably a Clear Bandit track. Chatto whistles a Spaghetti Western hook over sweeping strings, earlier than Anne-Marie delivers a salty lyric a couple of dishonest boyfriend over a breezy, tropical beat .
“It appears like a comeback,” says Chatto.
It’s not simply the music. The band received again into the behavior of directing and filming their very own movies – one thing they’d not executed for a few years.
For Cry Child, they dreamt up an epic storyline, wherein Anne-Marie flees her disloyal associate on an extended distance luxurious prepare. However once they introduced the storyboards to manufacturing firms, they turned it down.
“They mentioned it will price no less than 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 kilos,” says Chatto, “so I ended up producing it myself, which is a primary.”
That meant commissioning and constructing the units at their very own expense.
Fortunately, Chatto’s father is a carpenter, who not solely constructed her first cello, but additionally occurs to work on the London Underground (“It was his concept to place sliding doorways on the platform of the Jubilee line,” says Patterson).
And so Ricky Chatto discovered himself setting up a whole eating automobile and sleeper carriage inside Clear Bandit’s studio in Finsbury Park.
“He didn’t realise what we had been letting him in for,” laughs Chatto. “We tried about 1,000,000 completely different varnishes. It was epic.”
Patterson directed and edited the video, which additionally contains a horseback-riding stuntman who dives by means of a prepare window; and a near-death expertise for David Guetta, after a contraption that was imagined to simulate tears malfunctioned whereas strapped to his face.
Undeterred, the group are planning a good greater shoot for his or her subsequent single, which sees them reunite with Swedish pop star Zara Larsson.
“Zara’s been studying to fly helicopters,” reveals Patterson. “So we’re devising a narrative the place she works for the RAF search and rescue as a helicopter pilot.”
The band appear creatively reinvigorated after a interval they politely describe as “fairly difficult”. They’ve two albums-worth of fabric able to go, together with unreleased collaborations with Elton John and Raye that will (or could not) see the sunshine of day.
They’ve additionally been spreading their wings, collaborating with artists from South America, Jamaica and Africa on a lot of spontaneous classes earlier this yr.
Unexpectedly, these classes had been impressed by one other teeth-grinding setback the band endured in 2019.
It began when the band signed a take care of a significant beer firm, who provided to sponsor the band as they travelled to China, Russia, Nepal, India and Vietnam, making new songs with native artists.
“They approached us and mentioned ‘you’ve got complete artistic freedom’,” says Patterson. “So long as you drink a little bit of the beer within the studio, we’ll pay for all of it and movie it.”
“It felt prefer it was going to be a very artistic factor – however we’d been tricked,” provides Chatto.
The penny didn’t drop till their third recording session, when the band had been handed a translation of the lyrics by Vietnamese singers JustaTee and Phương Ly.
“I used to be like ‘that’s bizarre, the refrain says “open to extra” once more’,” recollects Patterson.
It transpired that, though Clear Bandit had been given inventive freedom, the brewery had signed separate contracts with their collaborators, forcing them to make use of the corporate’s slogan of their lyrics.
‘We had been like, ‘grasp on, that’s the Tuborg strapline, why are you writing that within the refrain?’” Patterson recollects.
“They usually’re like, ‘oh, we have now to. If we don’t do this, we don’t receives a commission’.”
The entire expertise was a “devastating waste of vitality”, he says. The songs basically vanished, unable to be performed on radio stations the place they’d be thought-about in breach of promoting tips.
However, says Chatto, “it made us realise that if we had been doing this on our personal phrases, it will be a unbelievable method to reside – simply going all over the world, making music.”
That’s what they did initially of 2024, with writing classes in Miami, Lagos and Jamaica which have produced “two total data” of fabric.
A few of these songs have already come out – together with the chic summer time jam Mar Azul, written with Colombian pop group Piso 21.
“I hate to maintain coming again to it, however our earlier label was primarily based within the UK,” says Patterson, “so their precedence was all the time what would work over right here.
“If it wasn’t going to be performed on Capital [Radio], they weren’t .
“Now, if we work with somebody in Mumbai, that’s okay. The truth that we don’t have a singer means we might be mild on our ft and work anyplace on the planet.”
That’s the place Clear Bandit see their future: Concentrating on high quality, somewhat than the calls for of streaming algorithms, within the hope their followers will comply with them.
“That’s the hope,” says Chatto. “As a result of it’s already been the case that our songs have gone all over the world and reached lots of people.”
In different phrases: There’s no place they’d somewhat be.