Rudimental Talk Music Videos, Future Expectations and More [FNT Exclusive]

Posted by on September 11, 2013

Rudimental

Rudimental have taken the world by storm. Their single “Feel The Love” rose to the top of the charts in the UK and became a worldwide phenomenon. They have not stopped there with a host of other chart topping singles like “Not Giving In” and “Waiting All Night”. Their live show is about as energetic and “live” as there is in dance music, bringing what they call “a carnival atmosphere” to every festival and city they visit. The foursome have come a long way with their album “Home”, showing their strong UK dance influences, while keeping it soulful and unique on every track.

We had the chance to chat with them after their show with Emili Sandé two weeks ago in Central Park and talk about their incredible music videos, trying to build on their success and what they have coming up, including tracks with The Game and Ed Shereen. Click past the jump for the full interview, but before you do, watch their video for “Right Here”, it is epic. You can grab their now Platinum selling album “Home” on iTunes here. Big congrats to the guys for that!

FNT: How was the show last night?

Rudimental: The show was amazing man. It was really good to be amongst some new followers basically. They all came to see Emili Sandé and I think we won over the crowd by the end of our show and definitely got a few more followers along this journey in America.

FNT: That is exactly what you want.

Rudimental: Yeah, exactly it was good vibes. As usual when you come to see our live show the carnival atmosphere is there. It is just convincing the crowd that we are something different, but we come with something special.

FNT: Do you guys feel like you guys are not giving the full Rudimental experience when you are doing a Rudimental DJ set?

Rudimental: You know, the DJ set thing is a whole different thing unto itself. We play tracks that we absolutely are in love with at the time and we also play some of our productions that we haven’t released yet. So it gives us a chance us a chance to do it the old-fashioned way. You would produce it, then you would go out and DJ and see what the response is from the crowd. We get to do that and we also bring our trumpet player on for most of our DJ sets, which adds something different to the normal, conventional DJ sort of thing. We do have a little bit of live element there as well. It adds something else and again makes it more special than just a traditional DJ set.

FNT: Your videos are more than just show footage or some random love story. How important are they to you?

Rudimental: Oh the are videos deadly important. You have three to four minutes to document your sound through visuals. It’s really important to do it in a way where people can connect with it on an emotional level, the realness of it, and I think that is something that we have gone out and searched for. For example, “Feel The Love”, we went out to Philadelphia to the Fletcher Street Project where there were real people, doing real things in a community, a horse riding community. We knew immediately that this is going to be amazing to show real elements of people living in an ordinary lives, doing ordinary things. That’s what people can relate to. It’s so easy to make a music video and have your face in there, have some girls, chains, bottles of champagne and whatnot, thats the easy route you see everyday. We want to show the realness of the world. We go around searching for that all the time.

FNT: How involved are you guys in the making of the videos?

Rudimental: Yeah we are quite a bit involved, especially in the planning process and the editing process. We have a vision in our head and we want to create that. For example, if you look at the “Waiting All Night” video that came off of the back of a really good olympics in our hometown, on our doorstep if you like. The Paralympics, in my opinion, were amazing and probably better than the actual Olympics and we wanted to represent that. When we found about Kurt Yaeger’s story [you can read about it in the description of the video], we wanted to include that in a video. Kurt Yaeger went through a hard time, losing his leg and triumphed through that. Then got back on his bike and carried on with his life and hit higher heights.

FNT: Drum n Bass hasn’t always been a very popular sound among dance music as a whole, besides UK in the late 80s and 90s when it was even faster and grimier. Do you see drum n bass becoming more popular in the mainstream dance music conscious with tracks like “Not Giving In”, “Feel The Love” “Waiting All Night”, “Right Here” and if so what do you see your role in that?

Rudimental: Firstly, we’ve grown up with a lot of influences. We came from London [Hackney], and we a part of that new, underground music. We grew up on different types of music like house, garage, jungle, which kind of transformed into drum n bass. We fused all of these influences into our album “Home” and we wanted to show those influence within our album. Whether or not it will become more mainstream or not, I don’t know that down to how people want to perceive music. But for us it is all about showing people our sound and showing them what we’re about, not just a drum n bass group or a drum n bass band; we are a conventional band who like to play a variety of music. That’s what we want to show the world. We’ve done that in the UK, Europe and Australia, but we want to come over to America, where the big dogs are with the music industry and see if we can fit in or squeeze in somehow.

FNT: Labels used to not pay attention to you guys. Are they paying attention now?

Rudimental: Most definitely. A lot of people sort of see Rudimental as a band that sort of popped out of nowhere, which is so far from the truth. We’ve grown up with each other all of our lives and we’ve had a long, hard struggle with music throughout our lives, as well as good times. A lot of labels denied that “Feel The Love” would be a good single. They didn’t understand a drum n bass influenced track with a trumpet solo in the middle of it, with soulful vocals. It wasn’t your conventional pop track and when we signed to a major [Big Beat / Atlantic], we were so grateful. We got there on the back of a label called “Black Butter” [Quality small UK label] and we kind of found our way through them. The labels are there, you know how they are. Once they see someone having success, they want to jump on the bandwagon as well. All respect to our label, they saw our vision from the start and supported us.

FNT: Do you feel pressure to top the success you’ve had with “Home”?

Rudimental: I think there is pressure in everything you do. Whether it be the grind of 9-5 and trying to impress your boss so you can get your promotion, or what we do. Our pressure is just trying to better what we have done in the past. I think if we carry on the same way, stay true to what we believe in and stay stubborn to ourselves, I think we will be fine. There’s four of us, we can share the load of pressure amongst us. We grew up together all of our lives, so we know how to deal with it.

FNT: Something people would not expect about you guys?

Rudimental: If you bought and have the have the album, you will love it, its an album for everyone, but you will understand the message a lot more if you come to see us live. We are probably the only dance act at the moment live. When you come to see us live, it is not only a drummer, you have the keyboard, we’ve a got guitar, bass player, trumpet, horn section and three vocalists. We are doing our thing, it is a carnival experience. You don’t really get it when you hear the sounds of Rudimental through your CD player. Come see us live.

FNT: Do you have a crazy story from the road?

Rudimental: Ah yeah. There was a crazy story the other day actually. We were touring in the UK and we had our tour bus and it was hooked up to the tour bus’s trailer. It right at the beginning of our tour schedule, so we had probably invested 100 grand into all of the equipment that we were touring with. It was in a trailer and the trailer literally came loose while were driving 60 miles per hour on the highway. There were cars swerving in and out of lanes trying to avoid the trailer. It was crazy. That was our career, our lives in that trailer and funny enough it got transported to our next gig the next day and everything worked perfectly. It was kind of like a Final Destination moment when we saw it unhook from the tour bus and just jump onto the highway, it was crazy.

FNT: What do you guys have coming up… You guys recently made five songs with The Game?

Rudimental: Yeah we were with Ed Shereen and funny enough The Game came to LA and managed to produce six tracks with both Ed Shereen and The Game. It’s kind of exciting stuff because both us in the studio, there were all types of people just hovering around like Jonny Depp just playing his guitar in the studio and you had Psy as well haha. So it was crazy being among those people, so many different types of talents in one place. I am just guessing that is just one of many things that have been doing. We are back here [USA] in October, Made in America this weekend, which will be cool. So we have our headline tour in the UK as well, we are doing Australia as well. Basically, get two days off a month and the rest of it is going to be touring and trying to fit in some production time.

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