The tens of thousands of ravers thronging the Bicentennial Park in Miami for the Ultra Music Festival this blowy spring evening have probably never heard the like. Yes, they have already partied to an eclectic range of sounds, from the primary-coloured Lego-disco of the Ting Tings to Black Eyed Peas’ surprisingly effective new club direction. Ultra is part of the annual Winter Music Conference, the biggest event on the global dance music calendar. But even WMC’s pro-hedonists aren’t prepared for what happens after night falls.
Trooping on to the festival’s second stage, Pendulum burst into action — and everyone’s head explodes. The drum’n’bass rockers — for whom guitars are as important as a ztar (a guitar with synth keys instead of strings) — are sensational. As they should be after 18 months on tour, wowing crowds at rocktastic festivals such as Reading, as well as out-and-out electronic events such as Creamfields. Made up of three British-based Australians and three Brits, they make a blistering noise: guitars, turntables, keyboards and drums, with a hyperactive MC augmenting the lead vocals. Their stage clobber may be none-more-black but their hammering mix of synth runs, beats and riffs causes a colourful, feel-good riot in the crowd.
Until now Ultra-goers have been grooving and swaying. Now they vote with their feet and knees, pogoing and slamming around the field. As Rob Swire, Pendulum’s producer, writer, singer and ztar-player, observes afterwards: “There was a huge moshpit, which is always nice to be responsible for at an electronic music festival.” Pendulum fans, he proudly notes, are renowned for going “ballistic”. So, it seems on tonight’s evidence, do festival-going newcomers.
Much of the set is drawn from the band’s second album, In Silico, from 2008. Propelled by the second single and Top Ten hit Propane Nightmares, which, improbably but brilliantly, moves from mariachi-style trumpets into a frenzied techno anthem, the album has been a huge word-of-mouth hit, selling 400,000 copies in the UK and a further 200,000 wordwide. Pendulum are big with fans too young to remember the Prodigy first time around. And they’re big with older ones who hanker after the early Nineties heyday of drum’n’bass — before it was ruined by Goldie making concept albums about space and his mum.
Drum’n’bass, or jungle, was a British-born, innovative, edgy and underground club culture that swiftly degenerated into a slightly uptempo easy-jazz.
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“I initially hated drum’n’bass,” Swire grumbles when we meet in a Miami hotel coffee shop the afternoon before their Ultra show. “All the stuff with Goldie and Metalheadz and Aphrodite — I thought it was crap to be honest,” he says in a broad Australian accent undimmed by six years living in London. Growing up in Perth, he was more into “breakbeat, straight up house and hardcore”, before Gareth McGrillen, the Pendulum bass player and turntablist, introduced him to “more electronic types of drum’n’bass” in 1999.
Did his love of obscure British club sounds make him a freak as a kid in isolated Perth? Swire, who’s so serious-minded that even his facial hair is furrowed, gives his jet-black angular goatee a stroke and frowns. In contrast to his bellowing vocal showmanship on stage, in person he’s a proper muso spod. It transpires that he’s been up all night noodling at some new tunes on his laptop. “Well,” he says eventually, “in Perth there was this weird thing where if you liked any form of electronic music at all you were called a techno.” He says the word with a dismissive sneer. “It didn’t matter if you liked techno itself — you were just a techno. Most kids were into dipshit metal like Pantera.”
In an effort to escape their dipshit cultural environs, Pendulum moved to the UK in 2003. “There’s only so much you can do in Perth, or in Australia. You’ve got five cities to play, basically. London had always seemed like the centre of drum’n’bass. And to be honest I’d wanted to live there since I visited the UK when I was a kid,” says Swire, who has family in Woking in Surrey.
Their emigration was encouraged by the small British label Breakbeat Kaos, who liked the band’s early indie releases. The label’s co-owner offered them accommodation at his place in Hampstead, North London, rent-free for a year. “We were pretty much broke but the exchange rate as it was back then was 2.6 [Australian dollars] to one [British pound],” Swire notes with typical geek attention to detail. “We wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.”
They released their debut album, Hold Your Colour, in 2005 before signing to Warner Bros and then releasing In Silico. Swire says that he wanted to inject proper songwriting into the hardcore beats that were the basis of their sound. Was he conscious that Propane Nightmares was almost a pop song?
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“Not really. That’s my favourite track on the album, but in my head I had Granite [In Silco’s first single; imagine Rage Against the Machine covering Jean Michel Jarre, with Swire’s vocoded vocals whacked on top] to be the track to work best commercially. And it ended up doing my head in because I just couldn’t get it right. Granite is the biggest nightmare I’ve ever written. It could have turned out a lot better.”
What was missing?
“Sanity,” he snorts. “I lost it, man. I usually spend a week, two weeks, finishing a track. And Granite was about two or three months. I’d be finished with it then I’d wake up, hate it, delete it and do something else completely. Just a nightmare.”
He was also vexed by Pendulum’s cover of Coldplay’s Violet Hill, as performed on Radio 1 for Jo Whiley’s Live Lounge. Surprisingly, it works, but Swire, the purist, found it “difficult, but more mentally than production-wise. At every stage right up until we were live on air we were thinking, should we be doing this?”
Is it genius, or the crassest thing ever? “Yeah, or both.”
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There were no such issues with the remix of the Prodigy’s Voodoo People. Pendulum had already bootlegged the song before Liam Howlett’s crew asked them to reboot their 1994 classic. Does Swire think the success of his band created a climate in which the Prodigy, after a long lay-off, could return this year with Invaders Must Die, a well-reviewed look back to their own dance-punk glory days? Swire tugs at his goatee and thinks hard.
“I think if anything we’ve probably just created a thing for Liam to listen to and try to have opposition against. It’s always good, whether the inspiration’s positive or negative, to listen to shit and go: ‘ Wait and see what I can do . . .’ ”
As demonstrated at Miami, and on their forthcoming live DVD (recorded over two cacophonous nights at the Brixton Academy in London last December), Pendulum are a ferocious live act. Little wonder they’re high on the bill at most of Europe’s rock festivals this summer. The band are upping the production stakes for their outdoor shows, taking a video wall, “so expect some mad visuals. We’re also doing a cover of Master of Puppets . . .”
Metallica goes drum’n’bass? To paraphrase Spinal Tap, the none-more-black and none-more-noisy Pendulum are about to go one louder.
Pendulum play the Isle of Wight Festival today, the Download Festival tomorrow, a hidden gig in London for the Crisis charity on June 17 (www.crisis.org.uk/hidden) and are touring throughout the summer (www.pendulum.com).
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Pendulum: Live at Brixton is out on DVD on Monday