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. Remove 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 shedding her essence.

For Clean Bandit, their signature sound is a straightforward, however efficient, combination of chamber music and dance beats.

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

It wasn’t precisely a brand new concept. In 1986, Walter Murphy turned Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 right into a thumping disco monitor; and in 1995, Madonna’s producer William Orbit made an album, Pieces In A Modern Style, that took Ravel, Vivaldi and Handel to an all-night rave.

But Clean Bandit weren’t fascinated by remixes. They wrote large pop hits like Solo and Rockabye, utilizing their classical chops to present the songs emotional heft.

“It’s a fragile steadiness,” says Patterson. “If you added a sax solo, for instance, it’d be one component too far. You may as effectively placed on a waistcoat and go dwelling.”

But when it really works, it really works.

Clean Bandit’s trademark sound earned them 4 UK primary singles, two Ivor Novello songwriting awards and a Grammy.

Then, with grim inevitability, their report label informed them to ditch it.

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

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

“We had been despatched dance music playlists on Spotify and informed, ‘Your music has to take a seat on right here. Only Harry Styles could make pop music’.”

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 had been informed, ‘You don’t have a face, it’s good to make membership music,’” remembers Patterson.

The calls for had 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 accommodate than pop.

It didn’t go effectively: Since 2020, none of their information has made the highest 10.

“We allowed it to occur as a result of we had been like, ‘We’d reasonably launch one thing than nothing’,” says Chatto.

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

“In the top, we had been like, ‘What’s the purpose in doing something?’

Eventually, they negotiated an “amicable” exit from Atlantic Records that allowed them to retain the rights to all of their unreleased songs.

“It couldn’t have led to a greater means,” says Chatto.

“We’re nonetheless associates with these folks… I simply suppose the extra success we had, the extra stress they felt. Their jobs had 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 Clean Bandit again within the 2010s.

He inspired them to launch Cry Baby – 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 Clean Bandit tune. Chatto whistles a Spaghetti Western hook over sweeping strings, earlier than Anne-Marie delivers a salty lyric a few dishonest boyfriend over a breezy, tropical beat .

“It appears 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 accomplished for a few years.

For Cry Baby, they dreamt up an epic storyline, through which Anne-Marie flees her disloyal companion on a protracted distance luxurious practice. But once they introduced the storyboards to manufacturing firms, they turned it down.

“They mentioned it could price at the least 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.

Luckily, Chatto’s father is a carpenter, who not solely constructed her first cello, but in addition occurs to work on the London Underground (“It was his concept to place sliding doorways on the platform of the Jubilee line,” says Patterson).

And so Ricky Chatto discovered himself developing an entire eating automotive and sleeper carriage inside Clean Bandit’s studio in Finsbury Park.

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

Patterson directed and edited the video, which additionally contains a horseback-riding stuntman who dives by means of 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 fair 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 have 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 periods earlier this yr.

Unexpectedly, these periods had been impressed by one other teeth-grinding setback the band endured in 2019.

It all began when the band signed a cope with a serious 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 have whole artistic freedom’,” says Patterson. “As lengthy 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 had 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’,” remembers Patterson.

It transpired that, though Clean Bandit had been given inventive freedom, the brewery had signed separate contracts with their collaborators, forcing them to make use of the corporate’s slogan of their lyrics.

‘We had been like, ‘Hang on, that’s the Tuborg strapline. Why are you writing that within the refrain?’” Patterson remembers.

“And they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve 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 primarily vanished, unable to be performed on radio stations the place they’d be thought-about in breach of promoting pointers.

But, says Chatto, “it made us realise that if we had been doing this on our personal phrases, it could be a unbelievable approach to dwell – simply going all over the world, making music.”

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

Some of these songs have already come out – together with the chic summer season jam Mar Azul, written with Colombian pop group Piso 21.

“I hate to maintain coming again to it, however our earlier label was based mostly 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 incontrovertible fact that we don’t have a singer means we might be gentle on our ft and work wherever on the planet.”

That’s the place Clean Bandit see their future: Concentrating on high quality, reasonably than the calls for of streaming algorithms, within the hope their followers will comply with them.

“That’s the hope,” says Chatto. “Because it’s already been the case that our songs have gone all over the world and reached lots of people.”

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