We were told to stop making pop music

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 are simply one other rap posse. Billie Eilish’s vocal supply is so distinctive she will swap genres with out dropping her essence.

For Clear Bandit, their signature sound is an easy, however efficient, combination of chamber music and dance beats.

It’s a system they got here up with at college. Cellist Grace Chatto was relationship structure scholar Jack Patterson, who began splicing samples of her string quartet into his instrumentals.

It wasn’t precisely a brand new thought. In 1986, 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 Fashionable Fashion, that took Ravel, Vivaldi and Handel to an all-night rave.

However Clear Bandit weren’t keen on remixes. They wrote massive pop hits like Solo and Rockabye, utilizing their classical chops to present the songs emotional heft.

“It’s a fragile stability,” says Patterson. “In case you added a sax solo, for instance, it’d be one ingredient too far. You may as effectively placed on a waistcoat and go residence.”

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 file label informed them to ditch it.

“There was a push for us to cease having strings in our music,” grimaces Chatto.

“We have been informed to cease making pop music, as effectively,” says Patterson.

“We have been despatched dance music playlists on Spotify and informed, ‘Your music has to sit down 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 folks”.

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 have been informed, ‘You don’t have a face, you might want to make membership music,’” recollects Patterson.

The calls for have 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 deal with 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 have been like, ‘We would moderately launch one thing than nothing’,” says Chatto.

“However the music didn’t really feel like our music. Our followers have been feeling it. We have been feeling it.

“Ultimately, we have been like, ‘What is the level in doing something?’

Ultimately, 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 resulted in a greater approach,” says Chatto.

“We’re nonetheless buddies with these folks… I simply assume the extra success we had, the extra stress they felt. Their jobs have been on the road.”

The band jumped over to the Sony Music label B1, whose head honcho is Wolfgang Boss – one of many first folks 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 tune. 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 looks like a comeback,” says Chatto.

It’s not simply the music. The band bought again into the behavior of directing and filming their very own movies – one thing they’d not performed for a few years.

For Cry Child, they dreamt up an epic storyline, by which Anne-Marie flees her disloyal accomplice on an extended distance luxurious practice. However after they introduced the storyboards to manufacturing firms, they turned it down.

“They mentioned it could value not less than 1 / 4 of one million 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 thought to place sliding doorways on the platform of the Jubilee line,” says Patterson).

And so Ricky Chatto discovered himself developing a whole eating automotive and sleeper carriage inside Clear Bandit’s studio in Finsbury Park.

“He didn’t realise what we have been letting him in for,” laughs Chatto. “We tried about one million totally different varnishes. It was epic.”

Patterson directed and edited the video, which additionally includes a horseback-riding stuntman who dives by a practice 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 might not) see the sunshine of day.

They’ve additionally been spreading their wings, collaborating with artists from South America, Jamaica and Africa on quite a lot of spontaneous classes earlier this 12 months.

Unexpectedly, these classes have 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 supplied 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 will have whole 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 have 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 creative freedom, the brewery had signed separate contracts with their collaborators, forcing them to make use of the corporate’s slogan of their lyrics.

‘We have been like, ‘Hold on, that’s the Tuborg strapline. Why are you writing that within the refrain?’” Patterson recollects.

“And so they’re like, ‘Oh, we now have to. If we do not try this, we do not receives a commission’.”

The entire expertise was a “devastating waste of power”, 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 have been doing this on our personal phrases, it could be a improbable option to reside – simply going world wide, making music.”

That’s what they did at the beginning of 2024, with writing classes in Miami, Lagos and Jamaica which have produced “two complete data” of fabric.

A few of these songs have already come out – together with the elegant 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 at all times 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 gentle on our toes and work anyplace on the planet.”

That’s the place Clear Bandit see their future: Concentrating on high quality, moderately 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 world wide and reached lots of people.”

In different phrases: There’s no place they’d moderately be.