Interview – Pendulum
“The day that you feel comfortable and happy with anything, is probably the day you give up and retire,” cites Gareth McGrillen, who, along with Paul Harding and Rob Swire constitutes a founding members of Pendulum, arguably one of the most progressive musical groups producing music today. “You always need that drive, its really essential to us – our drive has always been about 70% competitive and 30% love, and having that competitiveness as a lynch-pin of what you’re doing ensures you’re never really happy with where you are.”
Their need to constantly reinvent themselves has seen Pendulum rise from their humble origins in the drum’n’bass genre, to the heights of a gold album producing band. Having played to some of the largest crowds at some of the most prestigious festivals across the world, they are often surprised at how swiftly time has passed.
“At the risk of sounding clichéd,” Gareth remarks, “the last few years have literally been a roller-coaster. You feel like one minute you’re doing one thing, the next you’re doing something else, and it feels like no time has passed at all, but it’s really been years. You tend to count years in album cycles and stuff, and then you realise that it takes two years between albums and you count that as one year, so time passes quickly.”
On their last tour, Pendulum played to sold-out crowds as a live act, a project that they conceived several years ago and decided to fully implement with the release of In Silico, their second studio album after Hold Your Colour.
“We’ve definitely proved ourselves as a live act,” Gareth agrees. “With the calibre of the shows we played, and the reaction, we’re quite comfortable with the live show. More importantly, we’re more confident with what we can do and what we can achieve, we’re not afraid now in the studio – when we were doing Hold Your Colour we were thinking can we do live, and we promised ourselves we’d tackle that aspect when it came. Now that we’ve achieved that, we feel that whatever we make for the new album, we know we can take it live – because we have the technology to do what we want and do.”
Over the years, it is no secret that a small but of vocal minority of enthusiastic pundits claimed that Pendulum were “selling out” drum and bass with their audio experimentations. Happily, Gareth now believes that that once vocal minority now seems to have begun to understand the diasporal direction of their sound.
“I think the live show definitely helped that. There were quite a lot of haters that heard this album. They didn’t particularly like the direction we were going at the end of Hold Your Colour, so when they heard In Silico they were almost insulted. I think that quite a lot of them were seeing us headlining these big stadium shows and festivals, and that it all kind of started to make it make sense to them. It put a lot of it into context as to where we were heading – apparently we’re not even talked about anymore in a lot of those forums. In doing what we wanted to do we’ve killed two birds with one stone, they’ve all shut up and we’ve got what we wanted anyways.”
Before the advent of their live act, Pendulum took on the responsibility of producing under a major label, Warner, both a god-send of support as well as a daunting prospect for any new breakout act. With the release of In Silico, however, any trepidation of having to meet expectations evaporated with the addition of their first gold record, as well as, it seems, and prospect of the dreaded over-controlling studio myth.
“In a way we’ve earned our stripes with Warner, so I guess because of the nature of the music industry these days, we became the biggest domestic act on that label,” he explains. “So we definitely get our own way, but in the beginning they were really forgiving of us, they literally let us do whatever we wanted and they just helped us out. In a way major record labels aren’t the monsters that they seem to be as portrayed in movies in the 70s and 80s, they have to behave like the independent labels do, just to be competitive, the music industry just isn’t like it used to be, at all.
I don’t know how to say it without sounding cocky,” he quips readily, “but in a way going gold was kind of like “thank god for that” because we literally almost killed ourselves doing it, if it didn’t do something spectacular then we would have jumped off a bridge. It’s just that it was another fact or another number, when we get news like that on tour we’re so stuck on what we’re doing that you forget about it until someone reminds you about it in an interview for example. its one of those things that is a part of many amazing things that were happening at that time, some of the shows around then were so spectacular that it kind of overshadows the other pieces of information that you get on a daily basis that goes in one ear and out the other.”
The use of technology has always been the lynchpin behind Pendulums success, and the advent of high-speed internet and the increase in quality of global digital communications has also played its part. Add to the mix that not only is Pendlum made up of a core of producers, but that those members are also acclaimed DJs within their own right, may go some way to explaining not only their popularity, but that they seem to have a wide range of exposure around the globe. Not only, however, does this allow for them to expose more people to their music, but it also provides a reliable test bed for in-progress work.
“”It’s such a huge benefit that its essential to the cause,” Gareth ruminates. “Pendulum has always existed as part and part to the DJing. In initial stages the music was just written for DJs, and that element is still dominant in the music. Every track on In Silico was able to be played in our DJ sets, even though they were kind of songs rather than tracks, whereas Hold Your Colour was leaning more towards the dj sets. Not only was it essential to the creative process because we need to get out there and DJ the tracks and test them out before we take them live and before we release them. Its completely essential. At the moment we are DJing so much its mental, every show i find myself turning up five minutes before the show and leaving five minutes after, just because I’m burning a new CD or new mixes. Sometimes I’m literally on the road and Robs emailing me updates of the mix we;ve finished the night before. Hes sending it to my phone, and then I’m downloading it to the laptop then burning it, whilst I’m still in the venue! So we’re testing out all new stuff at the moment.”
In order to stay at the top of their game, Pendulum have always followed an inspirational ethos of pushing the limits of what they are able to do with the technology at hand, which will be reflected in the live DJ set that they will be performing for their upcoming tour.
“What we’re bringing out is essentially a live remix setup,” he explains. “We’ve reprogrammed some Ableton controllers – we’re literally taking Ableton to its limit. We saw that our live show was next level with the technology, and we class our production as next level as well, we’re particular with that.”
“We thought that there was a lack of that in the DJ setup, there was still a bulk standard DJ setup. Even though the tracks are amazing, we’re still just spinning, and we’re pretty bored of that. We see guys like Deadmaus kind of almost turning their back on DJing, in a way, and taking it to a different place, so we don’t want to be left behind there either.”
With such an intimate understanding of the limitations of the standard two decks and a mixer setup that most DJs work within, the group have identified a definite deficiency in the performance realm, and are ready to take steps to achieve another milestone in their own journey.
“In a way, its going to have similar beat-matching, different tracks, different artists, but with our own tracks we can almost live remix it from our back catalogue on the fly, and there will be three of us working on it at once, he explains, laying it all out on the line”
“We really think it’ll be quite special.”
Tags: Ableton, Deadmaus, drum'n'bass, Gareth McGrillen, Hold Your Colour, In Silico, Paul Harding, pendulum, Rob Swire, Warner