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hard to wrap your head around everything. And the album offers no answers,”
he cautions. “It’s just a series of little stories and human reactions, and ways to try
and navigate through the confusion.”
Lofty goals for a recording artist these
days, when pre-fab, emotionless hits are
churned out in Sweden for optimum chartclimbing effect. But Smith is no ordinary
chap.
The idea that Smith thought and wrote
visually was fairly obvious on Bastille’s
dazzling 2013 debut Bad Blood – which
reprised a man-running-in-car-headlights
shot, a la David Lynch’s Lost Highway, on
its faux-movie-poster cover art, and featured tub-thumping, but decidedly cinematic hits like the Lynch-inspired “Laura
Palmer,” “Things We Lost In the Fire”
(rooted in the Suzanne Bier flick of the
same name), and the tribal stomper
“Pompeii,” which reimagined the cultureobliterating eruption of Vesuvius – certainly one of the most unusual, even erudite
subjects for a breakthrough worldwide
smash. Smith says he’s always instinctively responded to images, ever since he was
11, and first discovered the moviemaking
realm through an odd portal – the camp
horror classic Scream, about a masked
ghoul breaking into houses which he
unfortunately happened to see while –
gulp! – spending the spooky night at a
friend’s family abode. It really left a mark
on his imaginative young mind.
“So my route into film was by horror,”
the auteur admits, chortling. “There was
something about the nature of watching
something that was totally inappropriate
for me at that time that led me into reading
loads about it. So that fueled my fire, and
led me to the genre of horror itself, then
back through mainstream horror and all
the historic franchises. And then that led
me to Japanese horror, and to Dario
Argento – I got really obsessed with Giallo
film, and (Argento’s) Suspiria is just so
fucked up. And that was my route into
being interested in film, in general, and
exploring that as a teenager, in that way of
– when you’re a teenager and you suddenly find an interest – you want to know
everything about it.” That opened the door
for him on art house and indie cinema, he
adds, which finally brought him to one of
his idols, David Lynch, who eventually
allowed him to remix one of his own texturally-dense songs and even gave Smith
samples of his private coffee blend when
the two finally met in Lynch’s native Los
Angeles. “And film is such a vibrant medi-
24 illinoisentertainer.com august
2016
um, isn’t it?” the singer asks, rhetorically.
“It goes from the most commercial through
to the most pretentious and challenging.
And I think someone like Lynch really
encapsulates that – few people I know
have watched his Inland Empire more than
once, or even once, really. But at the same
time, he did something like The Elephant
Man, which managed to be so poignant,
and quite an accessible movie. And Blue
Velvet is just definitive -- there are so many
iconic moments within that, that just echo
throughout culture.”
Naturally, Smith envisioned a career in
film for himself, too. Attempting to study it
in college, however, opened his eyes to the
fact that he basically lacked the organizational skills necessary to see a movie
through to post-production. So he majored
in English instead, which only whetted his
cinematic appetite further. After reading
certain novels, he grew interested in their
corresponding movie adaptations, he says,
and the sometimes subtle, often glaring
changes made during the book’s transfor-
mation to more concise script. “And I studied every aspect of that, from The Shining
to American Psycho,” he recalls. “ Films that
were judged at the time for the editorial
decisions that were made. So I really loved
the idea that people are hearing the same
thing, but that it’s completely filtered in
their mind. We’re all hearing the exact
same description, but we’re seeing something very different as individuals. And
that has just been fascinating to me.”
The concept hasn’t always panned out
for the vocalist. Utilizing piano and the
recording capabilities of his laptop computer, he started Bastille as a one-man
band in his London bedroom, and – as his
originals began piling up – gradually
expanded his vision to include current
members Kyle Simmons on guitar and
keyboards, Will Farquarson on guitar, bass
and keys, and his longtime chum Chris
‘Woody’ Wood on percussion and programming. But Smith learned his lesson
about proprietary rights. Bastille had no
money in the beginning, so for one early
video, he freely incorporated clips from
Terrence Malick’s classic movie Badlands,
and proudly posted it. He thought it
worked quite well. Malick, sadly, did not
agree, and the band received the first in a
long line of cease-and-desist letters, which
their liberally sampled series of mix tapes
also incurred. “A lot of our mix tapes were
about celebrating films or older songs that
maybe weren’t seen as classics, or were
slightly looked down [on],” sighs Smith,
who thought he was doing the composers/directors a huge favor. “But you
just can’t always make mix tapes and put
things out there for free and not expect a
cease-and-desist. So it was very surreal,
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