Bastille to headline Victorious Festival as they release Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past, and hold a signing session at Pie and Vinyl | Big Interview

Indie-pop stars Bastille have got a busy weekend ahead – they’re playing Leeds Festival on Friday, Reading on Sunday, and sandwiched between those, they’re headlining the Castle stage at Victorious Festival here in Southsea on Sunday.
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And tomorrow there’s the small matter of releasing a massively expanded version of their chart-topping album, Give Me The Future. Now called Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past, over its three parts and 27 tracks it include a whole new album’s worth of songs, collaborations, covers and reprises.

With the original album on part one, part two continues some of the themes and narrative from the original record, delving into songs that are shot through with notions of technological dependence, human connection and the limitless possibilities of life online. Part three, meanwhile, acts as a mini return to their acclaimed Other People’s Heartache mixtape series.

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The Guide caught up with frontman and main songwriter Dan Smith before the band were due to play at Boardmasters Festival in Cornwall.

Bastille are headlining The Castle Stage on Saturday at Victorious Festival 2022Bastille are headlining The Castle Stage on Saturday at Victorious Festival 2022
Bastille are headlining The Castle Stage on Saturday at Victorious Festival 2022
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So, did you always have this extended album tucked up your sleeves?

‘100 per cent, yeah,’ says Dan, ‘we made it as a kind of double-album, and I can't lie, it felt quite strange holding back tracks that we absolutely love from the first half, but we wanted it to be short and direct and to the point, but we still had quite a lot more to say,’ he laughs, ‘having lived in that world musically for a couple of years.

‘Now it's really exciting to have it all coming out finally and to be able to share the whole thing.’

Bastille are headlining The Castle Stage on Saturday at Victorious Festival 2022Bastille are headlining The Castle Stage on Saturday at Victorious Festival 2022
Bastille are headlining The Castle Stage on Saturday at Victorious Festival 2022

Bastille love a concept album

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The band are no strangers to a concept album – their previous long-player, 2019’s Doom Days was about partying as the world ended.

‘Unfortunately we made a concept album about an apocalypse, and then everyone lived through one – whoops! I just find it really fun with concept albums, setting up themes and sonically. It can be really helpful in terms of the writing process and I love getting to geek out over things.’

Virtual reality (VR) and escapism are key concepts explored on the new album, is that from Dan’s own experience?

Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past is released by Bastille on August 26, 2022Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past is released by Bastille on August 26, 2022
Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past is released by Bastille on August 26, 2022

‘Videogames and VR are not how I escape, I much prefer films and books – and writing songs! As a kid I used to do a lot of gaming, and I'm kind of interested in it. We've always been interested, as a band, in escapism and the things we do to get out of our own heads, whether that's mentally or digitally.

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‘We started working on this album before the pandemic, but living through it, the ways we escaped from our every day lives became so vital didn't they? Whatever that might be – whether it was playing games, or doing puzzles, or whatever.

‘It's been way more acute, and we were all forced to reckon with technology in a more vital way – like how Zoom became our social lives for months.

‘We were looking at how bizarre reality feels, and how it often feels like we're living in some weird dystopian science fiction, but we also wanted to come at it from a non-judgemental perspective because we're not waving a flag to say: “phones are bad, phone addiction is terrible”. I'm as addicted to my phone as anyone and in a lot of ways they’re amazing – it connects you with everybody, and you can do everything from it, but it's addictive as well.

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‘And we all know the internet can be great, but it can also be hugely divisive.

‘So we wanted to come at it from a human perspective’

No agenda

Does he ultimately think technology has been good for human connectivity or bad?

‘Nothing in life is binary – nothing is black and white. It's been so amazing in terms of enabling people to do things they wouldn't have been able to do, and experiencing things, or meeting people on the other side of the planet, but like everything it can be corrupting, and it's had such a weird effect on interactions, and people feeling able to say stuff they would never say in real life to someone's face. It's very complicated – and that was kind of our point.

‘We were writing from the perspective of normal people living through the world.

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‘I'm not coming at it with an agenda, I just wanted to hold up a mirror to how bizarre everything is. A bit like science fiction films, really, they're constantly making a comment on now and how strange and complicated things are, but they do it through the lens of a futuristic adventure – and that's what we wanted to do.

‘We wanted to make a pop album, an album that was futuristic and fun to listen to and an escapist tool – both in us making it, but hopefully also for the listeners.

‘Hopefully it doesn't take itself too seriously and there is time to poke fun at ourselves in the lyrics, and if there's a hypocrisy there, we turn it back on ourselves a bit.

‘Some people will just listen to the melodies and not even realise what we're talking about. I love that sort of “despair on the dance-floor” corner of music sometimes, I think it can be brilliant – that knife-edge between euphoria and despair, it can be really fun and cathartic.’

Other People’s Heartache returns

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The final part of the album sees a fifth entry into their Other People’s Heartache mixtape series. The series has previously allowed the band to experiment and cover songs as diverse as Charles and Eddie’s Would I Lie to You? and Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, or record a mash-up of Barber’s Adagio for Strings with Haddaway’s What Is Love?

‘The mixtapes for us have always been a nice, fun place for us to either cover other people's heartbreak songs or make up our own, and to collaborate or to do stuff that people wouldn't expect, so we got to work with Tyde, and Alok, and just mess around in worlds and genres.

‘Those mixtapes were a hugely important part of our development as a band in getting to try things that people wouldn't expect from a four-piece like ours. And we wanted to bring it back for this. Whenever we're making music, I'm always writing for us and for other people and having as much fun experimenting as possible.’

This time, they cover Bruce Springsteen’s mega-hit from 1984, Dancing in The Dark.

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‘I love Bruce Springsteen,’ explains Dan, ‘and always really loved his propulsive narrative songwriting. I love Dancing in The Dark, whenever me and my mates have a house party that's always a song that gets a few rotations. It's always scary touching a classic song, and a lot of the time with Other People's Heartache covers it's been about trying to do something completely different so I thought it would be a nice moment to strip it right back, because it's such a brilliant song. It was a real pleasure to just sit down at an electric piano and mess around with it.’

The album’s lead single is ‘the rave-ready electronic club banger’, Revolution, of which Dan says: ‘The chorus is about the intimacy of human connection in the context of some science fiction, space-centred imagery. But it’s also about the idea of those amazingly thoughtful people who spend their lives trying to change the world in a positive way.’

Hope For The Future

One of the album’s other new songs which has found its way into their live sets is its final track, Hope For The Future, which was written for a documentary, From Devil’s Breath.

‘The director asked me to write a song for the closing credits to this short documentary about climate change and forest fires in Portugal. It's a beautiful little film, and I was kind of nervous about the sound of a Bastille song coming in at the end of such a sad and tender, thoughtful film. But I was chatting to the director and talking about influences, from (indie-folk artists) Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver, and wanted to do something down that road a little bit, so that's the song I wrote by myself at home in an hour after watching the film. It's the first song I've ever written on a guitar.’

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With the whole project’s genesis pre-pandemic and being created during it, Dan admits: ‘It's like a window into the last couple of years of our lives, we're just really excited for it to be out there now.’

As well as playing Victorious, the band will be holding a signing session for the new album at Pie and Vinyl in Southsea on Sunday at 2pm, where Dan says with a laugh: ‘It is just a signing – unless someone shoves a guitar our way – we'll see what happens...’

For details of the signing session go to pandvrecords.co.uk.

For Victorious Festival tickets go to victoriousfestival.co.uk.

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