Royal Blood reflect on controversy, Glastonbury, and their new album: “The flame of rock ‘n’ roll is flickering, but she’s still burning”

Stood in a field in Glastonbury, straddling two pints between my legs like a dog guarding a bone, I peered over my burrito and realised not everyone in the sea of people was as preoccupied as me. It was the hushed interim period between sets on the Pyramid Stage where a densely concentrated plenitude of absolutely nothing takes place. However, there was an implacable aura of trepidation, people gazed at the vacant stage in the same way a farmer might scrutinise the clouds in the distance ahead of harvest. A slightly grimaced head atop a Royal Blood shirt revealed the root of the strange aura: people were wondering anxiously, ‘Will this be a car crash?’

Royal Blood’s last big show had been at Radio One’s Big Weekend. Amid war and recession, that set usurped the headlines in a big, inexplicable way, all thanks to a few middle fingers flipped in the audience’s direction from the band as they bemoaned the noticeable lack of rock energy amongst the sedate masses watching on. The furore might have died down since then, but with the Brighton band second from top ahead of their old pals, the Arctic Monkeys’ headline slot, a caginess was taking over the crowd as the band might implode and simply spend an hour berating us all individually; quite why that was the case is a matter for psychological professionals.

But the band themselves were, indeed, understandably feeling the pinch. “Glastonbury is such a daunting prospect,“ frontman Mike Kerr tells me, reflecting on what turned out to be a triumphant set. “I think there is always a moment in that set towards the end that you realise you’ve survived it and you’ve done what you set out to do. It’s not just the pressure of the day before, it starts the moment you agree to do it, which is usually a year before that show. So, there is this kind of wild, acute pressure that is always building up towards that one hour of your life. So, for us, it was just the glory of: ‘We did it’.”

That fist-pumped profundity was palpable. The effortless victory of the show and subsequent wellspring of love from the crowd diminished the memory of the Big Weekend hubbub down to a long-forgotten oddity of the internet age, and suddenly, a noticeable fork in the diegesis of Royal Blood seemed to arise. They had left the doldrums of backlash behind them, and it seemed that they had solidified their status as an ‘established’ act in the process. Fittingly, the Arctic Monkeys delivered what Mike deemed an “unbelievable” and “amazing” show, having been the band who introduced many people to Royal Blood on that very stage in the first place after Matt Helders donned their band T-shirt during their last headline set, a new lease appeared to have been salvaged by Mike and Ben Thatcher.

Thus, Mike now reclines with a bit of a laugh: “I think it was the first time a lot of people were introduced to us,“ he says, looking back at the frenzied controversy. “It is a big world out there, and even though we have an amazingly loyal and large fanbase now, there are always more people that don’t know about you than do. So, you could say it was defining in a sense because it was so behemoth in terms of the media. But the media is a very fast-moving world, and it is an algorithm; it just happened to pick up on that.“

He pulls the face that resides as the international symbol for ‘I’m trying to remember it now myself’, but weirdly, it is as though it happened to someone else, and he somewhat distantly continues: “It was more of a viral moment for a video rather than anything substantially of interest in terms of the reality of what was actually happening. It was here today, gone tomorrow. We don’t see it as defining in any sense of what actually happened. We’re just still in amazement that that was the most important thing that was going on in the world at that point.“

He adds wryly: “That says it all for the world, really.”

Alas, now the dust has settled, has the old adage that ‘all publicity is good publicity’ reared its head? “Probably. We certainly wouldn’t go looking for that kind of attention in that way. But when something gets to that size, you’re probably going to experience some silver lining, I’m sure,” Mike admits. And even though their latest album, Back to the Water Below, was already finished before the controversy even arose, mystically, the record feels like it was prognostically recorded in a haze of reconciliation.

Acknowledging this, Mike even chuckles, “There are a few song titles and lyrics now that do seem funny looking back at that.” There is still a frenzy of rock instrumentation, but this is the gin to the tonic of vulnerable lines like: “Want the truth? I need you / To pull me through”. Likewise, titles such as ’The Firing Line’ seem oddly apt. And perhaps this is the prognosis of this whole chapter for the band. Maybe the outburst was borne from a bit of burn-out as much as it was from an apathetic crowd.

This is something that has been addressed in every way on the record. Tonally, it has tapered the distortion, and thematically, it might not be as blunt as Typhoons, but it does earnestly look to reconcile hardships through the medium of cathartic creativity. That will always be the crux of the band, after all: cutting loose with a friend. As Mike explains: ”I think one thing that is important for us is that it is just Ben and I, and we’re creating music that the both of us love mutually the same amount. That is all there is to it: it is a very simple ethos.”

This time, they were in the studio alone, bar their engineer, Pete Hutchins. “It is just a small affair. That is all we know at this stage,“ Mike adds. And they extended that isolation even down to trying to shed external influences for the most part. “When we made the record, I felt so zeroed in on it that we didn’t really listen to much other music. I find that can be unhelpful sometimes. Blocking it out allows you to be that bit more immersive in what you are doing. There are so many influences that have probably bled into this record – more so on a song-by-song basis – but if I had to think, I’d say there is probably a lot more David Bowie, T. Rex and Elton John this time,” he cautiously posits.

In fact, even though the album might be emotionally tortuous, even that impetus is distanced from the creative bubble the duo hope to harness in the studio. “With the exception of about three songs on the record, I’m not usually in the headspace that I’m writing about, because a lot of them are quite debilitating ones and mentally burnt-out ones. That doesn’t really serve being creative or proactive,“ Mike honestly declares. “Usually, I’m looking back. They might focus on periods of mental difficulty, but that is separated.”

But how, exactly, do you go about parking your daemons so that you can situate them in amber and write about them? The fact that this is a mystery to Mike once more adds to the notion that Royal Blood itself, as an entity, is a place for open expression, and for Mike and Ben, knuckling down to work is like erasing the etch-a-sketch of life’s malingering bygones. “I think it is just like waiting for a storm to pass really,“ Mike muses when he considers how he shakes off problems to allow himself space to write. “So much of that seems out of control. I guess there are tactics that you can use, but it is about writing from a clear-headed space.”

This time out, they were poised to allow themselves distance. The groovy, spacious songs themselves evoke that. As Mike explains regarding the essence of Back to the Water Below: “It feels very song-led; not that we haven’t aspired to write great songs in the past, it is just that this one feels much more grounded in traditional songwriting. I think the fact I wrote the majority of these songs on piano lends itself to that. I have played piano since I was really young – it was my first instrument. So, it has always been a tool I have used, but on this record, it feels like the process is much more revealed. The piano is really glueing it all together.”

These were then rolled into the studio, and the exultancy of revelling in the creative balm with a friend took hold of the tracks and had free rein with them. “I never know where anything is going to go,“ Mike says of the songwriting process. “It is very lawless. Creativity is a free-for-all, and putting expectations or direction onto something before it has even begun is usually a bad idea; it never ends well. So, it is just about being open and allowing yourself to see where the inspiration led us.”

Now, the focus is, as it always has been, taking that inspiration out onto the road and ensuring people have a good time with it. Lessons learnt for their headline-hitting spat? Hardly, it is all still quite incredulous to the band. “I felt that my actions were just so incredibly tame and tongue-in-cheek, so God knows what the reaction would’ve been if it was actually malicious or something dividing,“ Mike says. Perhaps, as their new record proves, it was all just rock ‘n’ roll.

As he concludes: ”But hey, this is where we are at: the flame of rock ‘n’ roll is flickering, but she’s still burning.”

Royal Blood will be coaxing that flickering flame into a roaring furness near you soon, as they take Back to the Water Below out on the road. “It is always an exciting time. A lot of work goes into making a record. For us, as well, there are a lot of songs on this record that we’ve been pining to play live and put into our set, so it feels like an official greenlight to go and do that,” he says. “Touring is ultimately why we do this. That’s the fun bit.“