Royal Blood drummer Ben Thatcher has recently spoken to musicradar.com about the band’s incredible rise to stardom. The conversation took place two months after the release of the duo’s latest studio effort titled How Did We Get So Dark?, which is a follow-up to the hugely successful self-titled debut album. Below, you will find some excerpts from the interview, which shed some light on a number of the Ben Thatcher and Mike Kerr‘s decisions and actions we have seen in the last few years.
“I worked in a bar and I was teaching drums in a school. I was playing weddings at weekends. I didn’t enjoy teaching. I loved the people I taught but I don’t have the patience for it. I just want to go wild and play, so teaching wasn’t my thing even though it was rewarding and I got to hang out with people who were into drums.
Mike and I have been in so many bands. I have played drums in wedding bands with nine people. You have to accommodate everyone and you play differently. When it came to Royal Blood we just wanted to have fun and write some songs. At that time I was consumed with wedding music. I loved doing that, it was a way to get paid as a drummer. Royal Blood was a way for me to be creative again and write drum parts.
It was a quick rise [with Royal Blood] but when you’re living it every day it feels like a gradual thing that just happened for us a little bit quicker than it does for most. But we still played all of those small venues and toured in a minibus with just me, Mike and one other guy.
We were on a roll [after the release of the debut album]. We had just done the Foo Fighters tour. We had been on tour for three years because we were touring before the album came out. We did ACL [Festival in 2015] and I saw a glint in Mike’s eye and I knew he was done. That was the end. At the end of the set he broke his bass in half, he slammed it down. It wasn’t a rock ’n’ roll thing, it was more a symbol of we were done with this album, let’s get onto the next one.
We wanted to keep on going but we knew we couldn’t do any more on the 10 songs that we had. We had grown so quickly and were playing big venues and people are expecting a longer set. We were like, ‘Well, we can’t. We only have 10 songs and we don’t even play one of those live!’ We went straight into the rehearsal space and we were on fire. Looking back, we could have and maybe should have taken some time just to calculate what had happened to us. We didn’t do that. We went straight in because we were buzzed.”
You can find the entire article HERE.
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