Q&A: Bastille’s Dan Smith On Looking To The Future, His Favorite Films And More

Bastille frontman Dan Smith was highly cognizant of the incredible reliance we, as a society, had on technology when he set out to work on the band’s stunning and compelling new album, Give Me The Future.

That was, as he explains pre-COVID. But, when the world shut down and everything went remote, including making much of the album, the record became a much more pronounced soundtrack for the insanity of the last two years.

Having crafted a brilliant allegory for the state of the world in 2022, one that is smart and can make you dance, Smith has a lot to say. I spoke to him about the future, his love of sci-fi, the film club he started in COVID, the wide musical influences — from Daft Punk to Paul Simon – and much more.

Steve Baltin: As I’ve asked every one of the interviews I’ve done in the last couple of years, was this a COVID baby or no?

Dan Smith: No, it wasn’t. It was conceived before COVID and before lockdowns. We’d begun it, and we’d been recording a bunch of music when COVID hit the UK and we all went into lockdown. But I think the ideas around escapism and around how we escape and the ways we use technology definitely were exacerbated and heightened by the world that we all just lived through for the last two years. We already lived in a time where technology was kind of inter-stitched into pretty much everything that we do. And then having obviously lived inside for the better part of a year and a half, two years, that only became more heightened and more developed. And that would have been impossible to ignore. But the ideas of science fiction, the ideas of using humanity and its bizarre connection with technology to try and talk about the present day and myself, those aren’t new ideas, those things have been around for a long time pre-pandemic. So I guess it was just quite fun and liberating citing that it was gonna be sci-fi and what that meant for the sonics of the album and the ideas and the themes. It meant that I just got to spend a lot of time over the last couple of years reading and watching a lot of sci-fi and listening to a lot of podcasts about the future and about the past. It’s quite nice when an album can double up as a research project. It’s something that you’re already interested in. But obviously we made it in the context of lockdown, and I guess it’s fitting for what the album’s about. It’s fitting that we made it over screens and over Zoom and remotely. But then there were those amazing joyous moments where we got to all be in a room together and actually make music as human beings in the same space. And so getting to have the best and worst of both worlds was f**king awesome and hopefully made this album all the better for it. It ironically is our most collaborative album yet, despite the fact that we were all more isolated than ever, so yeah.

Baltin: Did you miss being on stage when it was taken away from you? Or was it something that you enjoyed the break?  And in the same way, did you miss having that human interaction time or were you comfortable with the downtime?

Smith: Yeah, I felt hugely grateful to be able to do the thing that I love, which is writing songs from my bedroom in the same way that I always have done with our band. There are certainly people out there who weren’t able to do their jobs or the things that they love doing in their free time. So in that sense, I felt hugely grateful. I weirdly didn’t miss touring at all, because I think for me, I love writing songs and I love making songs. And taking them out on the road is obviously fun in a lot of ways and it can be amazing in a lot of ways, it’s also a huge amount of your life that is taken up by this one thing. And so for me, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with touring, where I love our crew and I love the band, and I love the family that we have, and I love how privileged we are to get to see the world and play to people who give a shit about music. This was a two-year opportunity for me to distract myself in a very strange series of events, to distract myself with just writing an absolute f**k load of music, this album, other albums, EPs, projects for other people, songs for other people. Writing songs for the sake of it. I loved it. Running a film club, all the things to distract from the apocalyptic anxiety that we were all going through, and how much we were missing people. There was definitely a calm in being forced to stop for a minute and knowing that everyone in some sense had been forced to stop. But then you speak to your friend who’s a doctor and they’re having the worst time in the entire world, and it’s traumatic on a daily basis.

Baltin: I love the fact that there are two songs on the album named from movies, and it’s funny because Back To The Future, is an obvious one, but Thelma And Louise doesn’t necessarily fit the rest of the motif of the album.

Smith: There are two songs on the album, “Thelma And Louise” and “Club 57” are both supposing if you can kind of put this headset on and go anywhere and do anything and be anyone. “Thelma And Louise” was like, “Well, if you’re looking to escape and run away from your life, why wouldn’t you be Thelma and/or Louise, sitting in a top-down car, in a thunderbird, flying down the highway as an empowered woman running away from the life that you’ve just rejected?” And it’s such a kind of iconic visual for freedom and liberation and escape. And I f**king love that film, so it was a really nice excuse to watch it a few times and there were a million different verses. It’s such an iconic piece of pop culture but I love using imagery from things that I’m a fan of to try and tell another story, and so it became, in the album, this moment of complete freedom and retro futuristic liberation in a way. And yeah, with “Club 57″ it’s like,” Oh, if you could time travel anywhere, why wouldn’t you go to the ’80s club scene in New York and be Keith Haring in Paradise Garage, doing some amazing nuanced paintings all over the body of somebody else?” That’s a kind of era and an art scene that I’m really interested in. And I guess those are the two kind of time traveling moments in the album where we go back to Thelma and then we go to the future again. The album finishes on another track called “Future Holds,” which is meant to kind of, ironically, undermine all of the fears and worries and conversations that happen throughout the whole album. It’s meant to be kind of jokingly skewed by this person that’s next to you being like, “Mate, chill the f**k out. Stop worrying about the future and just try and enjoy what you’ve got right now.” It’s definitely something that I could do with telling myself a little bit more.

Baltin: So what else was in your film club?

Smith: Oh man, we looked at Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and spoke to Ellen Kuras, who was the director of photography on that film. Which was amazing. We went from country to country, so we went to New Zealand with one of Taika Waititi’s films, Hunt For The Wilderpeople, and we got to speak to Taika. And the whole point of the club was to watch a film from a different country every week. Then I’d gather questions from film fans and film club fans who would send in their thoughts or their questions on the film. And I’d collate hundreds, sometimes thousands of questions, and then pick however many, 10 or 20, and then put them to the director or an actor or someone involved in making the film. So, for me, it was a real lockdown opportunity to have conversations with people that I admire and get to be a film geek and a nerd. But the most important thing was empowering other film fans to be able to have a direct line to these people who they probably, otherwise, wouldn’t ever get to speak too. So yeah, it was really fun. It was a really nice unpretentious community that we built. My film taste is often quite left field and odd, and I was trying to also be mindful of the fact that people just wanted a bit of distraction, we didn’t all want to be dragged through the psycho-sexual dramas of Hollywood in a David Lynch film (chuckle). I f**king love his films, but week four of lockdown, it’s probably not what lots of people need to be watching.

Baltin: If you could live in any two films what two films would you live in?

Smith: Ooh, that’s such a good question. All the films that I love are so dark. Thinking of it like a mainstream sci-fi, like Fifth Element would have been quite a fun universe to exist within. Or like a mad animated film. Definitely, I wouldn’t live in Wall-E ’cause that would be depressing as f**k [chuckle]. Like I said, the films that I love the most, they have such depressing, complicated environments. I directed a video for one of the songs on this album called “No Bad Days,” and that for me was a really fun opportunity to finally get to direct properly. And we were referencing a lot of science fiction, but also I love the cinematography of Darren Aronofsky, and what he did in Requiem For A Dream. When I was growing up, I used to really love that film, I think it’s incredibly haunting and dark, and it’s not one that you would necessarily want to revisit for the “lols,” but it’s beautifully shot, and I love the split screen and the micro-macro filming and the time lapse shots and everything about his cinematography there. And Clint Mansell’s score as well. I’m not answering your question, I’m just talking about films (chuckles).

Baltin: So do you feel like you’re drawn to the future because, as you say, it’s a message you need to give to yourself, especially during this time?

Smith: Well, I think that was the point of this album and why it’s like each of the songs are a different meditation on our relationship with the future, is because we live in a time where we’re so constantly confronted by what the future looks like. The last couple of years have meant that it’s totally uncertain what life from month to month, year to year, will look like from now on, it’s all completely unknown. Plus, as you said, climate change. We are every day confronted in the news by the differing ways in which climate change has confronted communities all over the world. And it looks pretty bleak, the potential future that we collectively have. But also we’re surrounded by people who are working their a**es off as activists or scientists or researchers or whatever to try and steer this planetary ship into somewhere a little bit more livable and more favorable for everybody. And so we are on a daily basis confronted with different versions of what the future might be. And not to mention with new technologies that are popping up left, right and center all the time that are constantly changing and adapting how we live our lives and how we interact with each other and how we view ourselves. And that’s really mad and it’s really fascinating, and it’s not necessarily all awful. Like there’s some really interesting, inspiring stuff within that. That’s just the reality we live in. And as someone that loves pop culture, you can go back and watch films from not that long ago that we as a society have surpassed in terms of what we have achieved. I think of a film like Minority Report that imagined driver-less cars and targeted advertising, which at the time felt a fair way off. And now we’re way beyond that. That’s more than part of a lot of people’s everyday life, so that’s just the surreal-ness of living in such a rapidly accelerating world. And so, I guess we’re willing to make an album that lives that and holds a mirror up to it, and kind of pokes fun at it too, and pokes fun at ourselves. But also tries to have a look at, what does our humanity mean in and amongst all that stuff, whilst also just being hopefully a kind of banging half hour fun futuristic pop album.

Baltin: Sonically, when you go back and listen to this, are there elements that you hear from other artists?

Smith: Yeah, there were lots of cultural touch stones, we wanted to use a lot of electronic instruments just to imply the future and imply futurism. But also a lot of retro futuristic sounds nodding to these films from the past that we look to as the cultural touchstones of sci-fi that have informed the life that we live now in the world that we live in. But it was also a chance to explore music from the ’80s that maybe I hadn’t listened to in so much detail. We nod heavily towards Bruce Hornsby in the piano solo in “No Bad Days,” and Paul Simon, Graceland was an album that I listened to. It was on in our house constantly growing up. So being able to nod towards that in a few moments, and Quincy Jones’ horn production, elements of Genesis and Phil Collins. But as well as more modern futuristic sounding artists, like M83 and Kavinsky, and we use a lot of Harmony Engine and vocal effects, inspired by artists like Bon Iver that I love and I guess we wanted it to pull in loads of different things from music that we love. Daft Punk, Prince, so many amazing artists. And I guess we just immersed ourselves in that musically and cinematically and in terms of literature and all of this stuff, and emerged from it with this album.