Underground/Overground: Pendulum in Interview

WORDS & PHOTOS:
RORY CARROLL

“My strongest memory of Snowbombing is jumping off the stage onto the lighting truss, then looking back at Skream and Benga thinking ‘How the fuck am I going to get down?!’” laughs Ben (Mount, Pendulum’s MC in Chief) within moments of meeting Artrocker.

The band’s headline set later that night wasn’t short of energy, but there were no lighting truss gymnastics. Probably for the best: it’s those moments when 2,000 people are watching you that things tend to go horribly wrong.

Pendulum are now in a position to sell out gigs faster than you can say ‘Slam’, but no-one would ever say they’ve had an easy ride – especially from certain corners of the music press.

The truth is that hard graft and bold crossovers have put them in a position to challenge the scene’s heavyweights. But this rise brings its own problems: older fans can get precious about the underground band they love appearing to ‘go mainstream’; newer fans expect them to keep churning out the more popular material they’ve just heard. The words ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’ spring to mind.

“The difficult part was the transition from Hold Your Colour to In Silico – that was the killer. That was nervous breakdown territory,” says Gareth [McGrillen, Bassist].

“We always thought ‘what if we get stuck on an iceberg between two continents – one being rock and the other being dance – and no-one’s willing to swim out and meet us in the middle?’ That’s always the analogy we scare each other with.”

Pendulum onstage at Snowbombing

Luckily, people have met them halfway - and the runaway success of 2010’s Immersion is testament to this. Yet, there’s an unmistakable progression in sound with each album, so is each transition actually taking them further away from their drum n’ bass roots?

“It [the progression] was kind of inevitable,” begins Gareth. “We’re going this direction because the other alternative was to make more ‘Blood Sugars’ and ‘Slams’ – like certain record company people that I won’t mention said we had to do. In a way, this album’s a bit of a middle finger to them.”

Whatever they’re doing, it’s working. The band has been relentlessly touring and DJing across the globe for almost ten years, and the shows just keep on getting bigger. Surely there must come a point when that begins to take its toll?

“Yeah”, says Gareth. “What we’re actually doing at the moment is starting to decide to take a little break. We were in a position where your hobby became your career, so it gets difficult to separate out what relaxation is”.

Fortunately, that’s where your friends come in: “A good piece of advice he gave me is to find out what relaxes you – for him whether it’s… I mean, he may do gardening, but he also races superbikes and off-road 4x4s, so he doesn’t fuck around!”

The ‘he’ in question? The Prodigy’s Keith Flint – an unlikely source of life advice, but one you’d be foolish to ignore.