Bastille's Dan Smith on his ambitious new project '& (Ampersand)' and its companion podcast Muses • Interview • DIY Magazine

Mining the pages of myth and history isn’t exactly new territory for Bastille frontman Dan Smith. Cast your mind back 14 years, for example, to the release of the band’s debut 7” single. Nestled alongside the soaring heights of ‘Flaws’ was the similarly anthemic ‘Icarus’: a track dedicated to one of Greek mythology’s more ambitious - albeit doomed - characters. It’s perhaps little wonder, then, that when faced with the band’s first real downtime since those early tracks were released, he would find himself returning to similar ground.

For Dan, the intimate process of songwriting has always been somewhat at odds with the extroverted role of being a frontman. Even when DIY spoke to him in the early throes of the band’s career, back in 2013, he told us point blank that “music was always a hobby, something I did for fun”. Today, his use of songwriting as a way to unwind is still very much present and so, having spent the better part of a decade living out of a suitcase whilst touring the world, when he finally touched base it was via his favoured outlet that he sought solace.

Forced to halt Bastille’s endless schedule during the pandemic, Dan penned an initial pair of tracks - ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ and ‘Leonard & Marianne’. Soon, a new chapter began to take root. “I guess I must’ve seen them written down together with the ‘&’ in the middle, and thought, ‘That’s really interesting’,” Dan explains today of the beginnings of ‘“&” (Ampersand)’, as we meet in a hotel in his hometown South London. “I immediately thought that it could be a fun project to explore the idea of these pairs of people, and then I wrote a bunch more but slightly worried that I was falling down the trap of it being 20th and 21st century romantic couples. Whilst that is potentially really interesting, I wanted it to be more than that.”

It was then, after writing ‘Marie & Polonium’ with collaborator Ralph Pelleymounter [of To Kill A King], that the goalposts were shifted again. “That was a helpful turning point: [the songs] could be about a pair of people, a person and their idea, a person and their reputation. That song was really helpful in steering that; it’s helpful for me to have rules, and set myself little tasks. I love it when I’m writing. That’s why I really enjoy writing for film, and for other people. The changing of the rules there basically opened it up to absolutely anything.”

“I had a lot of nervousness around some of these stories, and trying to represent people who are mammoth, titan figures and did amazing things.” — Dan Smith

Initially beginning as a solo endeavour that wasn’t guaranteed to see the light of day, Dan felt that, regardless, these songs should live in a different sonic world to that of his main job. Similarly to the band’s ‘Other People’s Heartache’ mixtape series, the project is billed as ‘Bastille Presents’ - releases that are not strictly Bastille, but play a key part in their wider universe. Here, it sees Dan move away from the bombastic nature of the band’s regular output and into a more intimate, hushed environment.

“I had done a song for a film a few years ago called ‘Hope For The Future’ which was sonically quite ethereal and acoustic,” he explains of this move. “I had in my mind how much I loved that song, and wanted to make an album adjacent to that sound. That was helpful in terms of there being a sonic world for it to exist in.”

Continuing the MO of changing things up, after penning 17 tracks, he began to share them with a select few friends for feedback and decided to hit the ground running (“A few people that I’d sent them to were like, ‘This is great, you should just get on with it’,” he notes). Rather than work in the South London studio he and his Bastille bandmates would normally frequent, he instead assembled a new cast of “musicians, friends and collaborators” and booked into a residential studio for three weeks; a first for the frontman.

“I know that the idea of going to do a residential recording is really normal for most other bands and musicians, but it’s just not something we’d ever done before,” he says. “It feels like quite a big ask of other people to step away, to essentially put your life on hold for two or three weeks. But to do that for the creative process was brilliant because you all have this weird, shared goal in a bizarre musician parallel universe. It’s a fun little bubble that you live in. I’m such a loser,” he laughs, “I made survival kits for everyone with incense and some ‘&’ Zippo lighters, some relaxing candles, and a little cyanide pill box filled with Nurofen. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, it must be a nightmare to spend three solid weeks with me…’”

Instead of the more regular ‘shift’ feel that had settled in around his work closer to home, the new location and dynamic added a fresh energy to the whole process. “We had three rooms on the go; trying to do 17 songs in three weeks was quite ambitious but we managed to do it. Because you know it’s temporary, you’re working from when you wake up to when you go to bed, and part of the fun was having different people come in at different times - it was like guest stars in a sitcom.”

“[There was] part of me that potentially wanted to stop doing music a few years ago and do another degree or retrain.” — Dan Smith

Opening up the musical side of things wasn’t Dan’s only priority. Glance down the tracklisting of ‘“&” (Ampersand)’ and, chances are, you’ll recognise a variety of his protagonists. But for each of the more notable lives explored - Marie Curie, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Eve (the Bible version, not the rapper) - Dan wanted to expand his remit to highlight some of history’s lesser known but equally inspiring characters. In order to do so, however, he needed some help, and turned to friend, academic and podcaster Emma Nagouse.

Approaching the songwriting with an admittedly varied approach to his studies (“There was definitely a lot of Wikipedia-level research…” Dan admits), it was nonetheless equally important for the pair to flesh out the characters’ historical context outside of just the album. And so, Muses was born; a companion podcast series which dives into the internal lives of the record’s cast, while reflecting on Dan’s own interpretation within his tracks.

“In anything in life, understanding context is really important to me,” Dan notes. “The way my brain works, I need to know what I’m walking into and what’s going on. Unpacking and learning stuff like that with Emma, and the researchers we’ve worked with, has been super interesting to me. With the podcast, I sort of wanted to be - as I feel I am in life - the interested idiot, who wants to learn and understand the nuance. So, we were trying to bring a bit of that to this, and challenge ourselves to try and think, ‘Who was this person? What was life like when they lived? What were the challenges they faced?’ And then, after the fact, why were they remembered as they are and is that right? Is it wrong? Is it unfair?’ It’s been a really fun thing to be involved in.

“I think, as well, I had a lot of nervousness around some of these stories, and trying to represent people who are mammoth, titan figures and did amazing things. As a self-loathing idiot questioning who am I to write about these people and stories - and that’s a whole other conversation - it was an interesting thing to navigate. I think the thing that will surprise people is how funny [the podcast] is. Hopefully it toes the line between a bunch of really interesting things you wouldn’t have known, even if you think you know these people, but not delivered in a heavy-handed or educational way.”

An ambitious, detailed project that goes way beyond the regular remit of an album, it sounds as though, after more than a decade of band life, ‘“&” (Ampersand)’ has provided the creative relief that Dan had begun to crave - so much so, in fact, that he’s already working on new tracks. “[There was] part of me that potentially wanted to stop doing music a few years ago and do another degree or retrain,” Dan admits, “but in the best way, this has kind of been like that. Getting to work with a bunch of academics, do research again, deep dive into all these lives and then, at the same time, learn guitar and work with loads of new people… It’s sort of been the tonic. It’s felt like going back to school a little bit, doing a bunch of stuff that’s outside my comfort zone.”

‘Bastille Presents: “&” (Ampersand)’ is out 25th October via EMI.

#AD