Sequestered in the corner of an east London restaurant, Clean Bandit are having a hard time describing their fans. “Age-wise, it’s very broad,” says cellist, producer, and de facto front-person Grace Chatto. “It doesn’t feel like it’s any particular type of person – it’s just a big group of, er, random people,” laughs producer Jack Patterson. With a frankly ludicrous 4bn global streams making them one of the UK’s most successful bands, their difficulty in finding a neat catch-all is pretty understandable.
In accordance with modern pop rules, these fans have given themselves a collective noun – “fandits” – and while Grace is adamant that they’re “really nice” and “don’t battle with other fandoms”, Patterson is reminded of a more sinister experience. “This one fan wrote to all my friends saying she had a dark secret about me,” he says, pushing the dregs of a caesar salad around his plate. “Then she sent a photo that was meant to be proof of something,” laughs his brother Luke, the group’s drummer. “But it wasn’t even you.”
It is a telling anecdote from a band who have maintained near anonymity (Jack says he often gets mistaken for the tennis player Andy Murray) in the face of huge success. Their 2014 Jess Glynne-assisted, Grammy-winning Rather Be alchemised the band’s fusion of classical and handbag house into a million-selling single, spending four weeks at No 1 and gatecrashing the US Top 10.
It was followed by four more Top 10 singles and then, in 2016, by Rockabye’s ludicrous conjoining of dancehall, a near 400-year-old nursery rhyme and Sean Paul rapping about single mums. It spent nine weeks at No 1 in the UK and took the Christmas top spot. Rockabye features on their restlessly inventive second album What Is Love?, which, as well as containing two more chart-toppers (string-drenched weepie Symphony, featuring Zara Larsson, and the juddery electro of Solo alongside Demi Lovato), also comes with a genre-agnostic, Spotify-friendly gaggle of collaborators, from Ellie Goulding to Stefflon Don, via Craig David, Rita Ora and Outkast’s Big Boi.
The group have spearheaded a new kind of Avengers-style pop, with multiple star turns helping lesser-known artists such as Benny Blanco, Jonas Blue and Tiësto to the upper reaches of the charts. But Clean Bandit remain ultimately reliant on the mercurial pizzazz of proper pop stars front of house, so what are people’s perceptions of them as a band? “They don’t have any perceptions,” says Grace. “I still feel like most people don’t know much about us,” shrugs Luke.
The band formed in 2008 after architecture student Jack started adding beats to some of the classical string quartet pieces Grace, his then girlfriend, had performed with her old school friend Neil Amin-Smith as part of the Chatto Quartet. Graduates of Jesus College, Cambridge, the couple were living in Moscow (Grace is fluent in Russian and Italian) when Jack created Mozart’s House, a song that fused the titular hitmaker’s String Quartet No 21, K575 with bubbling electronics. Sensing they had hit upon their sound, they invited Amin-Smith, Luke and vocalist Ssegawa-Ssekintu Kiwanuka (who would later leave to undertake a PhD in laser analytics) to Russia, and Clean Bandit was born. Jack and Grace broke off their romance in 2014, although Grace isn’t a fan of that phrase: “I don’t like the term ‘couple’ or ‘break up’; when we made a change to our [personal] relationship, our working relationship became easier.”
While the perception is that Clean Bandit arrived seemingly fully formed and focus-grouped with Rather Be, they enjoyed the early hustle, gigging constantly and hosting their own club night, National Rail Disco. Back in London, it was Grace who would constantly harangue MTV to ask why it wasn’t playing the self-directed video for Mozart’s House. When she was told it would only play it once the song had some traction on radio, she found a radio plugger and gave him the equivalent of a month’s rent in cash. “We couldn’t even afford to get the tube at that point,” she remembers. “Within a few weeks, Radio 1 was playing it and then, all of a sudden, all these lawyers and managers contacted us.”
They signed to a major label, Atlantic Records, in 2012 and the re-released Mozart’s House peaked at No 17 a year later. For a while, before the success of Rather Be, they planned to focus solely on making videos and started a production company called Clean Film in 2011. “Shooting videos is the most intense, full-body experience,” beams Grace. “It’s almost like a ritualistic, sadomasochistic process that we have to put ourselves through after every song’s finished,” adds Jack. “We have to self-flagellate and punish ourselves.”
The idea of them working behind the scenes makes sense given that they seem to struggle with the basics of their day job. They dismiss the criticisms of 2015’s near-legendary advert in which they lost a charisma battle with Cortana, Microsoft’s version of Alexa (“I’m totally fine with that advert,” says Grace. “We were able to pay our rent”), and blame the stilted awkwardness of a live interview on BBC Breakfast on the fact that the producers had played an incorrectly graded video for their I Miss You single. “We were seeing it for the first time live and we were annoyed,” says Grace. Do they care about being seen as uncool? “No,” she says, letting out an awkward laugh. “I mean … No, not really.” In fact, Jack thinks there’s something ingrained in their music that keeps it from ever being rebellious. “There’s a sense of innocence in a lot of the stuff we’ve put out,” he muses. “This kind of weird sense of joy, and I don’t know where that’s come from.”
That’s not to say they have avoided controversy altogether. In fact, Mozart’s House cost Grace her pre-fame job. “I was teaching cello in a school and some of the kids found the video and the parents complained that it was inappropriate,” she says, referencing a section where she strolls through a car park with a violin covering her bare chest. “That notion that female skin is somehow dirty or inappropriate for children is such a bad message.” She says she was also determined to keep a scene of her masturbating in the video for Solo. “I had kickback from the label saying: ‘What if children ask their parents what’s going on?’ And I was like: ‘Well, that’s fine, if they do ask their mums, then they won’t find out from other things on the internet.’ Those scenes were important for me to put in because seeing women masturbating is not something that happens in popular culture, unless it’s with a hetero male gaze.”
In October 2016, violinist Amin-Smith quit. While Grace seems genuinely sad when I ask if they had any idea he was unhappy (“He always loved doing lots of other things,” she says), she is more robust when it comes to a tweet he posted in July that criticised an interview she gave about the band’s decision to play in Israel. “I find musicians and DJs pulling out of performances there a self-defeating act,” she says. “I’m not really sure what they hope to achieve and the suggestion that playing in a country means you support the political or foreign policy of that country is ridiculous, especially if you’re not willing to play there but play in America or the UK. Me wanting to play in Israel is not me making a statement about what’s going on there.”
She is also unafraid of getting involved in UK politics, talking at the 2017 Labour party conference and performing at last summer’s Labour Live event. “We were having lots of debates on DMs [on Twitter],” she says enthusiastically when I ask if there has been any negative reaction from fans. “A lot of my friends were door-knocking in the lead up to the election and getting frustrated, but having that online platform to discuss issues and engage young people was great.” Is Jeremy Corbyn a “fandit”? “I don’t think he is,” they sigh in unison. Meanwhile, a new song on the album called Nowhere was inspired by Donald Trump. “We want to get Alec Baldwin to play him in the video,” smiles Jack.
They had assumed the success of Rather Be, and then Rockabye (their second US top 10), would lead to such superstars banging down their door, but they say they often have to do the chasing. They failed to catch Bruno Mars and Harry Styles, who were on the wishlist for the new album, while the track they did with Elton John didn’t make the cut. “We realised there was a sound developing in a certain part of the Venn diagram of the album and we wanted to push that,” says Jack. “It was kind of this tropical, plastic-y, mournful sound, whereas his songs were more from the Rather Be world.” What had they earmarked for Styles? “Solo,” jokes Jack. “The video would feature Harry wanking off a cliff.” At one point, the album also featured Gwen Stefani. “[A song] was recorded but then it fell through, which was devastating,” Grace sighs. “She was my childhood idol, so that was a real shame.”
An early version of Rockabye featured vocals by the Norwegian singer Ina Wroldsen, who had written the song about her young son under the impression that she would be the featured artist. Somewhere along the line she was swapped for label mate Anne-Marie. “That was taken out of our hands,” says Jack. “It was a terrible situation and I fought with people for a couple of months and in the end there was nothing we could do,” adds Grace. They are keen to reiterate it wasn’t anything to do with Anne-Marie herself (“She’s one of our favourite singers at the moment”), but the fallout almost led to Grace quitting the band. “I did feel like I couldn’t do it any more because the idea that my business was hurting people … that was really painful. I went completely crazy for a while after that. I just had to carry on, but inside it was really hard.”
Famous yet faceless; identity-free yet politically active; detached yet deeply passionate about what they do, Clean Bandit remain one of the strangest entities in British pop. “On paper it does sound like a car crash,” says Grace. “There was never any plan, though. This was kind of an accident.”
• What is Love? is released on 30 November on Atlantic
