A few hours before they hit the stage of Home Nightclub in Sydney as part of the Mastercard Priceless Gig series, I sat down with Rob Swire and the new drummer Kevin Joseph Sawka of UK-based Pendulum. Although in our eyes, they’ll always be the Drum and Bass pioneers from Perth!
As we relaxed in their hotel room at the Intercontinental, overlooking Sydney Harbour on a ridiculously stunning day, we chatted about the upcoming album Immersion, moving to the UK, fitting Kevin into the mix and … Cuicas?
Larry: You’ve got a new album coming out later this month, “Immersion”. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rob: Yeah it’s been about 2 years on and off in the making. And then six months pretty intensive work on finishing it. It wasn’t easy… no Pendulum album ever is. But it’s definitely been more fun this time, than the last one.
Well it’s a slightly less rock-focused album this time around. Was that intentional?
Rob: Yeah. Well we wanted to include more electronic stuff definitely. We sort of wanted to take it to extremes… we wanted to make sure that the electronic stuff we were writing ended up much more electronic and the rock stuff we were writing was much more rock. To the point that we’ve had people from like Japan say the same thing as you, but about the rock thing: “We noticed this album is ah, much more rock” (he says this in a wonderfully hilarious Japanese accent).
We’ve got tracks that are dubstep, and drum and bass… but then we’ve got some collaboration with some Swedish Death Metal bands. Some interesting stuff.
Is there a lot more exposure to the Swedish Death Metal scene in the UK?
Rob: I actually found that I was a lot more exposed to that scene down here. Although metal does have a big fucking underground market in the UK.
Your interest in rock and metal goes back to the beginning, when you were playing in Xygen. When did the drum and bass interest come into the equation?
Rob: Xygen was pretty much completely separate to that, I mean it was good, we learnt a lot of shit and we were playing alongside Karnivool and all those guys for a while, to the point that they were featured on Hold Your Colour playing guitar. But the whole drum and bass thing came as a side project at first. Me and Garth (McGrillen) were working on it. I fucking hated drum and bass at first. Especially Jungle music – like Aphrodite and Goldie and all that shit. Couldn’t stand it man. Inner City Life (by Goldie)? Just couldn’t get that shit. It was when it started getting a bit darker and a bit “techier”, when the production lifted up a notch, that I started to get interested.
When Bad Company and Konflict started coming out, that’s when we latched onto it heavily.
Would it be fair to say that there was really no one else doing what you were doing, to the level you were doing it, when you started out in Perth?
Rob: Yeah, but it was funny, with us we always needed to focus on someone as competition. So there’d be some Perth DJ making a tune, to play at a local night, and we’d hear it and go “oh fuck that, let’s go home make a better one”. That’s even how “Vault” came it out. It was a response to some of the other track some other dude had made. It ended up sort of destroying the Drum n’ Bass scene that year. But originally it was just to play at a club. It was pretty much in the same format as when we did that as when it was released.
Was that part of the reason to relocate the band to the UK? More competition to drive you?
Rob: Yeah. It just seemed like the place to be. All the DJs who came to Perth with (UK) after their name, then that was the night you were going to go to. It didn’t even matter who the fuck it was, or if he was unknown. If he had UK next to his name, you’d go. It was held in pretty high esteem. We even saw a live feed of The End club in London, when “Vault” was first played … and yeah, it was sort of held in a magical high regard.
Would you say you’re bigger over there than you are here?
Rob: Yeah, that’s the probably as a result of us being over there though, combined with the Drum and Bass scene being initially bigger over there. The roots taking hold over there in the UK. But we’re trying to do a lot more over here.
And speaking of which, you’re returning to Sydney today for one show at Home nightclub tonight – which of course sold out in record time! Are you looking forward to playing it?
Rob: Yeah, it should be good. It’s the first show in Australia with the new album material, and new drummer Kevin and new visuals. The show has just been taken up a notch, so it should be good.
And indeed you are the newest member of the band Kevin, how did you come into the fold?
Kevin: Well a couple of years ago, Rob contacted me, I think it was through MySpace – a really quick note “Hey, you wanna come on tour with us?” or something like that. So I did more Pendulum research, and got “Vault” and a few others tracks and thought “these guys are pretty dope”. And I looked into it more and found out they do it live! And I’d been doing live Drum and Bass and Jungle and Breakbeats forever, so thought “wow, that’d be a pretty cool fit”. And I hadn’t been over to the UK very many times, just a handful of times, so it was intriguing.
And then we slowly tried to figure out how we could collaborate on some sort of tune. And then I think it was last year in Miami that we met face to face, and had the deal sealer of “yes, we’re going to do something together”. And then it was between touring and album cycles and Rob called me up and said “why don’t we join forces?” – So we did at the end of last year!
When you put the album together, are you thinking at the back of your mind “How are we going to do this live”?
Rob: I think that was one of the best things about Kevin joining, because some of the most complicated beats we were putting down, we knew would probably be the easiest ones for him to play. In fact there was a track off the new album, where Kevin sent me over a whole folder of these beats – and me and Gaz were listening to them going “…we could put that into something so easily”. So we cut it up and put it alongside the track and it boosted it so much. And then we went… “Fuck, he can actually do that live!?” It opened it up a lot more.
You recently released the 360 degree video clip, which is quite epic – kind of reminds me of playing the old Myst games when I’m watching it! How did that come about?
Rob: I think we were on the CNN website and I there was a drive through of Haiti, the earthquake destruction, where you could pan around. So rather than use it for humanitarian awareness, we decided to use it for our own personal evil.
It was pretty exciting, what you can do with the video clip in that sort of context. But it’s a hard thing to do, because you can’t actually have any crew members around, because it’s a 360 degree camera – a bunch of lenses on a helmet. You can’t have a crew member holding a battery pack or anything. It’s literally one guy with a camera on his head standing still.
Going back to the tour, what will be making up the tour once you head back to the UK? You mentioned taking it up a notch?
Kevin: New visual rig!
Rob: Yeah, new visual rig is going to be exciting. Been done with Pixel Addicts who did stuff for the Nine Inch Nails show and Deadmau5 and stuff like that. Extreme gigs, the best people you could work with. I love people who get too immersed in what they do, and end up going a bit mad, figuring shit out which no one has figured out before. These are those sort of guys, good people to work with.
Will you be bringing it back to Australia later this year?
Rob: Definitely. We had the album preview tour earlier this year, which was pretty much just DJ sets, just to see what the reaction was like down here, and whet the appetite a bit. So it only makes sense to bring it down here later this year.
Well we look forward to it! And finally, this is directed to you Kevin, something I try to ask all drummer I meet – what’s your favourite percussion instrument?
Kevin: Maybe the Cuica?
What’s that?
Kevin: *Laughs* I’m just joking. It’s this little thing that goes *Makes sound effect of a Cuica – Google it!*
Rob: Remember that Uncle Toby’s Ad?
I didn’t know it had a name!
Rob: We just call it the Uncle Toby’s thing.
Kevin: I was in a drumcore marching band and I played snare and kettle drum. So I think just a drum with some wires on the bottom, a kettle snare drum is definitely my all time favourite drum.
Rob: We put one in Coda didn’t we?
Kevin: Yeah, I think we put 9 mics on one snare. *laughs*
Rob: I think I ended up using two! *laughs*
Pendulum’s new album
Immersion
is in stores May 21st.
