What do you do when you clash with the Sunday headliners, ‘Real Music’ legends Foo Fighters, at Reading? Put on a way more exciting show with confetti on the first song, balloons, crowdsurfing, karaoke and of course, bangers.
We caught up with our mates Bastille before their Sunday’ closing’ slot to see what’s been going on since ‘Doom Days’, and what was about to go down that night.
Hey kids, how’s it going?
Dan: Very good. Leeds was amazing on Friday. Everyone’s first night, shit loads of energy, yeah we were blown away by how many people came along.
Woody: That was genuinely one of my favourite gigs we’ve ever done, I think.
D: Just piling in, loads of people outside the tent, everyone jumping up and down losing their minds, yeah we loved it.
Do you think people are gonna have more or less energy on the final night here?
D: I mean after their third consecutive day, I think heatstroke- if there’s anyone there I think we’ll feel lucky.
What can we expect from this evening?
W: Definitely not the same set as we played at Leeds, 100% not that.
D: We’ve got a load of singers with us, we’ve got a brass section, hopefully just have a bit of a last night of the festival party in the tent.
W: We finish after Foo Fighters, so we’ll be technically closing the festival.
We’d take that if we were you.
W: Yes, then we are closing the festival.
D: Just a big old cross-section of what we do. I crowdsurfed at Leeds, I’m gonna see if I can reach further out this time.
W: Try and reach one of the houses this time, that’d be great.
D: Reading & Leeds is always awesome, always really rowdy, and it’s a festival that’s meant a lot to us. We’ve played pretty much every stage. It’s exciting to be back, and it’s fun to able to bring our new tunes to a sweaty tent on a Sunday night.
So you’ve done the tour for ‘Doom Days’, and you’ve got the club tour coming up, so this is the album’s first proper outing, right?
D: Our touring’s been a bit weird, the summer of festivals has been like to celebrate the album.
What’s been your favourite song to play off the album?
D: We’ve been playing ‘A Million Pieces’ right before the end, and getting the crowd to sing the ‘million pieces’ line, assuming they don’t know what that song is. It’s like tricking people into thinking they know the song.
Kyle: It’s worked so far.
D: It’s got some big trippy visuals, and we just wanted it to be a kind of escapist, throwback, weird rave moment in our set and so far it’s been really fun.
W: I quite enjoy doing ‘Doom Days’ too, because that’s the coolest I feel on stage, and it’s the angriest Dan gets while he’s singing as well.
D: I fucking shred my voice. I guess the lyrics in that song are quite important to us, they’re in massive writing behind us, and I really enjoy watching people who half know the song try to sing along, karaoke-style. And I get to pretend that I’m a rapper for two and a half minutes.
W: His flow is sick.
And you’ve been out with Murph from The Wombats this afternoon, is he joining you?
D: Who knows?
You can tell us, we promise.
D: He might make an appearance. I think he was a bit gutted when he saw how late we were on.
K: “Yeah, I’ll do it!” “Ohhhhhh.”
D: Yeah it was nice to play with him. We wrote that song last year, and I had to have the lyrics written on my hand, and then I sweated them off, which was a fucking nightmare. I was like ‘it’s fine, I’ve got this’, then I looked at my hand, and it was just a big blurry mess.
What else is coming up?
W: We’ve got an eight week US tour starting next week. So we’re doing all of America, and a bit of Canada and a bit of Mexico.
D: We’ve got some new music coming out. We’ve got some more stuff from our album, more videos, we’re just enjoying having this album out and using it as a way to put out loads of cool stuff. It’s been a really fun summer.
Words: Abigail Firth
