Elliot Morgan Clean Bandit (Clockwise from leading): Jack Patterson, Luke Patterson and Grace Chatto Discovering a signature noise is the holy grail of pop music. There’s no Pink Floyd without David Gilmour’s sweeping guitar lines. Remove Dr Dre’s incendiary production, and NWA’s lyrics lose some of their effectiveness. Billie Eilish’s vocal shipment is so unique she can dive inbetween categories without losing her essence. For Clean Bandit, their signature noise is a basic, however efficient, mix of chamber music and dance beats. It’s a formula they came up with at university. Cellist Grace Chatto was dating architecture trainee Jack Patterson, who began splicing samples of her string quartet into his instrumentals. It wasn’t precisely a brand-new concept. In 1976, Walter Murphy turned Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 into a thumping disco track; and in 1995, Madonna’s manufacturer William Orbit made an album, Pieces In A Modern Style, that took Ravel, Vivaldi and Handel to an all-night rave. But Clean Bandit weren’t interested in remixes. They composed huge pop strikes like Solo and Rockabye, utilizing their classical chops to offer the tunes psychological heft. “It’s a fragile balance,” states Patterson. “If you included a sax solo, for example, it’d be one aspect too far. You may as well put on a waistcoat and go home.” But when it works, it works. Clean Bandit’s hallmark noise made them 4 UK number one songs, 2 Ivor Novello songwriting awards and a Grammy. Then, with grim inevitability, their record label informed them to ditch it. “There was a push for us to stop having strings in our music,” grimaces Chatto. “We were informed to stop making pop music, as well,” states Patterson. “We were sentout dance music playlists on Spotify and informed ‘your music has to sit on here – just Harry Styles can make pop music’.” Getty Images Four of the band’s tunes haveactually gonebeyond one billion streams on Spotify – Rockabye, Rather Be, Solo and Symphony Part of the issue was that the band are, in their own words, “shy and simple individuals”. Their tunes are fronted by pop titans from Demi Lovato and Ellie Goulding to Charli XCX and Lizzo – however the trio (completed by Jack’s sibling Luke) can still catch the Tube without being troubled. “We were informed ‘you puton’t have a face, you requirement to make club music’,” remembers Patterson. The needs were so regular and insistent that the band started to skepticism their impulses. They removed the violins and went for a darker sound, more indebted to home than pop. It did not go well: Since 2020, none of their records hasactually made the leading10 Jobs on the line “We enabled it to takeplace since we were like, ‘We’d rather release something than absolutelynothing’,” states Chatto. “But the music didn’t feel like our music. Our fans were sensation it. We were sensation it. “In the end, we were like, what’s the point in doing anything?’ Eventually, they workedout an “amicable” exit from Atlantic Records that permitted them to maintain the rights to all of their unreleased tunes. “It couldn’t haveactually ended in a muchbetter method,” states Chatto. “We’re still goodfriends with those individuals… I simply th
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