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Rudimental Interview
Drum and Bass | Friday 31st May 2013 | Osh
Smashing the charts with their Number 1 single “Waiting All Night” we chatted with the down to earth Hackney quartet – Leon Rolle, Piers Aggett, Kesi Dryden and Amir Amor. One of the most exciting groups to emerge in electronic music right now, these guys are at the forefront of a new wave of talent. With their new album “Home” dropping last month they represent positivity and bring us a sound that is new and fresh.
So tell me a little bit about your mad last year- as let’s be fair it has been pretty fantastic for you guys?
Piers: Yeah it hasn’t been bad! From our first number one with “Feel The Love” we have been on the road, performing live with our band and doing DJ sets and writing an album so we are having such an amazing time. Like from Jools Holland to Hackney Weekender and travelling to Australia and an American tour we have travelled all over the world so we have been very lucky.
It all kicked off with The Hackney Weekender, how was that for you guys I mean coming from Hackney as well?
Kesi: That was amazing, like me, Piers and Leon grew up playing football on the Hackney Marshes so to be playing music there to like 10,000 people and them all screaming “Feel The Love” back to us was a bit of a moment. I remember us all coming off stage and we were all in a bit of a daze, I don’t think anyone spoke to each other for about half an hour we all just sat there like what just happened! Yeah it was amazing to be like our second ever live show to be that.
Leon: It was good to solidify ourselves in the public eye, as a band coming across and giving that message like this is what we are about. And ever since then we have been able to develop that and progress off that, it has been a really good experience as now we have got a lot of more freedom to express ourselves creatively.
It was like instant for you, like instant feedback it wasn't like months later you gradually come to our attention. It was straight away, so how long have you guys been together and performed?
Amir: Well we had a few singles out before that, we had out “Spoons”, “Deep In The Valley” and a few others that we would probably delete off the face of the earth! Nah just joking! But we were around before that so it wasn’t like the first thing that ever happened for us but it was the first time that we had a massive audience. We come from a pirate radio background, we are used to playing on the radio to a small group of people and DJing but it was the first time we could play live to a really big group of people like Leon said to show people that we come from an electronic background but we are also a band we are musicians and we write music and we play music. In the rehearsal room and studio, that is how we write our songs they don’t always start on a computer. So it was just a matter of having doors open for us, “Feel The Love” was a drum and bass track, a song that had a trumpet solo and guitars on there and at first people were like what are you going to do with this. But thankfully the audience reacted to it and people listened to it and bought it and that meant that we could really freely do what we want now.
Leon: At the end of the day when we all get in the studio together, we create something magical and that’s what we love sharing with everyone else.
You have just got back from Snowbombing where you played after Mistajam. Did you have a good time?
Piers: It was amazing, it was up in the mountains so to play a live gig in that sort of setting in a wood shack in a beautiful setting, and we supported Kasabian there too so it was a really big moment for us. We were playing some tunes off our new album too, the vibe out there is wicked!
Would you like to go back again then?
Amir: Yeah definitely, we might even try skiing this time too!
Can any of you ski?
Leon: (Laughs) Yeah I can ski! I have seen enough James Bond movies to know how to ski!
You have brought out your new album “Home”. What can we expect from this?
Piers: We make festival music, and there is a big Rudimental sound on the album that we can’t wait to show the world. We have got a lot of great vocalists that we have worked with for example Emeli Sande, Sinead Harnett, MNEK who is from Spoons. There are a lot of great collaborators and we have managed to infuse the electronica music that we have grown up listening to in London and infuse that with soul music that is also a big part of our influence.
Leon: The album is called “Home”, and it kind of reflects of how you feel when you are in a festival and you have found a tent that you really, really like and you have lost all your mates and you’re in the middle of nowhere and you’re just scream and shouting hands in the air. And the stranger that was next to you is no longer a stranger and the grass starts feeling like your backyard and it is a good feeling of home. That’s what we are about and we bring our backyard on stage and hopefully that translates onto the audience, and that’s what the album is all about.
Amir: We are a festival act, we make anthems for festivals for 20,000 people to put their hands in the air and that is the kind of music we have on the album.
We love putting our hands up to you, beleive me! In the video “Feel The Love” people are all on horses and the video for “Waiting All Night” is a great concept. Where do you get the ideas for your videos and how much input do you have into the creation process?
Amir: Well we all grew up with our horses in Hackney! Nah just kidding, with “Feel The Love” it is actually Fletching Street Riding Community that is in Philadelphia. Which is a young peoples center for people who had a troubled background. And one of the kids in the video for example her mum got shot in front of her a little while before that. So it is actually a reflection of our influences in terms of Hackney is looked at in a negative way sometimes, but we are from Hackney and we are all really positive so we wanted to show in our videos that there is positivity in dark places and the Fletching Street Riding Community was a good example of that because it is real people there are no actors and rather them riding BMX’s like we would here they are riding horses in the city and it is just striking and it looks amazing. So it is reality and positivity that we are trying to show.
Leon: You could go ahead and do what everyone else is doing in the video but we like to do something different and stand out. Especially with the Olympics games being in London, we undoubtedly had the best Olympics ever and especially the Paralympics and “Waiting All Night” sums up that whole Paralympic feel and it was good to get that from Kurt Yaeger who was the guy who had a car crash in 2006.
Piers: The video is based on a true story of what happened to him. It is something that we are heavily involved with making our videos and we would like to push that theme.
Being such an eclectic group, where do you find your influences from and what would you say your definitive style is?
Amir: We have pirate radio background in our culture and we come from quite a raving club background but we also secretly listened to blues and soul music on our cassette players at school. But when we first got together our influences that really united us was soul music we are a sucker for soulful music. We have just done a tour of America and it is great that we could play stuff that is culturally relevant to us, like we are playing stuff like drum and bass and people are more open to it now. It is like pop music has moved in a way that you can be very creative about what you're doing and not be so restricted anymore which is great for us as we are so eclectic, we got reggae and hip hop in our roots and all of these things which we have mashed up on the album and it all falls together as it is unified with soulfulness and bass.
And it really does appeal to the masses as well. So Skream remixed your “Hell Could Freeze” tune, as well as remixes from Andy C and Lee Foss. So who is next?
Piers: Well maybe we could get a little Pharrell William remix! Well know that we have worked with a few people and we have had a couple of hits under our belt we have got the license to meet people. We met Skream on the Annie Mac tour and that’s how that come about.
Leon: It is probably one of the best remixes we have had to be fair, we have been really lucky with our remixes and we are in a position where people want to come and work with us. We had Andy C too which was really good and Tom Edwards, so all I can say is keep you ears to the ground.
We hear you are to collaborate with Ed Sheeran amongst others, is this one true and what other artists would you like to work with?
Leon: Ed is definitely going to happen along the lines we are all a big fan of his work. I mean the world is our oyster, we are travelling so much and we are off to America so there are loads of great collaborations that could happen there.
Amir: We just come back from a tour in Australia with The Stone Roses and The Prodigy and we were talking about possible collaborations so not to put anything in stone but we would love to work with Ian Brown, The Prodigy there are so many options there now thankfully because of our openness. But we don’t pick people on how successful they are as most of the people on our album are people for example, John Newman we met him in our local pub doing an open mic night and Kesi had already written “Feel The Love” and was singing on it at that point. So it kinda happens that way with us, if we feel that the collaboration would work and we could make some magic with it the we will do it. It is more about that then just picking names.
Your tour is coming up and I know we are exciting about seeing you on stage, but is there anywhere you are looking forward to hitting?
Piers: Everywhere in the UK we are excited about! Places like Manchester, Birmingham, up north in Glasgow and especially London. Everyone in the UK gives us such wicked vibes and because we are from there, you see people really embracing our music. I think every single tour date is going to be amazing because the fans, they don’t actually understand how important they are. They are actually in our album, there was a gig in Creamfields that heard the best rendition of an acapella version of “Feel The Love” we ever heard and we sampled it on our album. They have been such a massive influence on how we made our album, we can’t wait and when we are on stage we feel like we are in the crowd.
Leon: As we said earlier, we bring our backyard on stage and we feel most at home when we are there and we create something special when we are together and we cannot wait to share that with the whole of the UK, especially the UK, because we are from the UK!
Amir: If you listen carefully on “Waiting All Night” you can hear a bit of crowd in the background too, some of the sounds on the records we tweak them when we come off stage and we improve the songs every time we play them based on what we get from the crowd so if you listen quite closely on “Waiting All Night” you might hear a bit of the crowd in there.
Kesi: So for all of those 10,000’s of crowd, you cannot receive royalties on that track! It would be too hard to find out who was actually in the tent!
What do you think about the British music scene at the moment and how it has progressed, as it is massive at the minute?
Leon: Yeah totally, it is the best scene right now. We have been a lot of places in the world and there is good music out there but it just doesn't have that history and bassline where they can search back in their history for, and we have got that and now we are being acknowledged for that which is absolutely amazing. From house to dubstep and drum and bass we are the trendsetters at the moment which is really cool.
Piers: And it is firing that you got guys like Julio Bashmore, Disclosure, Duke Dumont you have this amazing wave of talent that seems to be sweeping the pop charts.
Kesi: A lot of the music that we have just spoken about used to be the underground scene and it seems to now cross over to mainstream charts which is a wicked time for British music.
I know you are London boys, but where do you chill out or go out if you want to listen to some music?
Amir: We have our hub that is our studio in east London and that is where we spend too much of our time there! We live there pretty much, we party there that’s our life at the moment.
Pierce: We spend a lot of time on tour, so hanging out is all the time we used to play football together and we used to hang out then and there are a few keys bars around Dalston and Hackney.
Kesi: We are on tour together so you can imagine guy on tour, we are always playing tricks on each other!
What is the worst trick?
Pierce: Well we are still yet to put toothpaste on someones face whilst sleeping!
Leon: I think the main trick is when someone is walking through the tour bus and you are sleeping on the bunk and someone grabs your leg and you get frightened! But we are having fun! We played a funny trick on Pierce the other day, as he was doing a number 2 in the toilet and and we were in New York and I walked in and I knew he was in there but I was making really creepy noises and sounds through the door.
Piers: I tell ya, I never been that scared! Yeah we do crazy shit like that!
For more information check out www.rudimental.co.uk or follow at @RudimentalUk
Words by Emma Louise Maw
