One of the hottest UK acts to emerge in recent years, they’ve established themselves as frontrunners in a renaissance of critically and commercially acclaimed British dance music which has also brought artists like Disclosure, Duke Dumont and Rudimental to the fore.
It’s been a meteoric rise for the foursome, who met right here in Cambridge whilst studying at Jesus College back in 2009. Neil Amin-Smith, a violinist, and Grace Chatto, a cellist, met while playing together in a string quartet – with Chatto’s boyfriend Jack Patterson (bass guitar and keyboards) often recording the quartet’s performances. “Unbeknownst to us he started messing around with the recordings, putting beats under them and kind of chopping them up and sampling them,” recalls Neil when we caught up with him between rehearsals.
“That was how the band came about. He played us what he’d done and a few weeks later we put on a gig with ten songs made in that way and kept going!” Frustrated with Cambridge’s lack of dance music and keen to showcase their own material, the band set up a club night, National Rail Disco, at the now defunct Kambar. “It was somewhere in between dubstep and garage, what was big in UK bass at the time,” Neil says on the music policy of the night. “We had James Blake down before he became a singer-songwriter, as well as Pariah, Deadboy…”
They also gigged at Fez Club, as well as numerous University balls, building up a loyal student following and helping them prepare for the kind of large-scale events that they now frequently perform at. “The May Balls provide an amazing opportunity, playing on huge stages with amazing sound engineering and amazing equipment,” says Neil. “They hire all that stuff to cater for the big acts they get, people like Dizzie Rascal and Calvin Harris.”
From Cambridge, the band went to London, where they have been based for the past year, focusing on their music careers. After completing their degrees, Chatto and Patterson moved to Russia for a year, where Patterson attended a film school in Moscow – acquiring skills that have served the band well (they make all their music videos themselves). This Russian connection, coupled with their intelligent brand of fusion dance music, has seen them dubbed the ‘Dostoyevskys of disco’ (a label which the band love).
It’s a struggle to describe Clean Bandit’s genre-hopping sound; their style eludes traditional definition and their album, New Eyes, flits seamlessly between deep house, garage and synth-pop. The band call themselves an electro-quartet and this probably best describes their dance-meets-classical style, also highlighting the unique fact that the strings heard on their tracks are not sampled or synthesised as in many dance records, but created from scratch by the classically trained band members themselves.
“For me, because there are different vocalists on every song it means that there are really different sounds and genres on each different track,” says Neil when asked to describe Clean Bandit’s style. “I guess the prominent sound is the acoustic violin and cello and the personality of the different parts. There’s definitely something discernible, common to all of our tracks.”
With such a quirky sound, it’s conceivable that the band would have struggled to break into the mainstream, but their recent chart success and flourishing fan base is testament to the ever-growing appeal of dance music in the UK. “Dance music has taken over the pop music world,” agrees Neil. “I guess it’s a good time for us. People like Disclosure being so successful with amazing music. It’s worked out well.”
The trajectory for their success was set when the band released the video for Mozart’s House. At this point they shrugged off the novelty band persona pinned on them by some in the industry, signed a major recording contract and became one of the most talked about dance acts in the UK. Rather Be (featuring Jess Glynne) is the band’s most successful song to date, going straight to number one in January this year and staying there for a total of four weeks; it’s also the fastest selling single of 2014 so far, with over 160,000 copies sold in the first week of release. The song retains Clean Bandit’s distinctive sound, with a strong pop vocal from Jess Glynne and an inescapably catchy melody – it’s a future dance floor classic and is bound to be a radio staple for the rest of the year.
“Getting to number one was amazing!” says Neil. “It was so unexpected. It’s funny, because there is no one moment when you find out you’ve got a number one. By the day it’s finally announced, you knew already, but two weeks before then you had no idea.” In amongst performances at the Isle of Wight Festival, Glastonbury and a US tour, the band are returning to Cambridgeshire this month to play Secret Garden Party, a festival close to their hearts as it was there that they played their festival debut.
“It’s got bigger since we first started, but in the early days it was cool because it was such a small, intimate festival and everyone was on the same wavelength,” Neil says, adding that he hopes to be able to stay and enjoy the whole weekend. The band are also eager to book a homecoming show, so keep an eye out for your chance to catch these Cantabrigians done good as they return to play on home turf in the not too distant future…
