After making their first live US appearance at last spring’s Coachella Music Festival, Pendulum has returned for their Tour of the Americas. We sat down with production mastermind Rob Swire to pick his brain about the evolution of Pendulum, as well as that of the finicky recording industry.
This is your first American Tour, do you feel like you have a bigger following overseas?
Yeah, definitely in the UK, that’s where our main [following] has always been. Other places seem to have picked up since we’ve started the live thing, the U.S. especially. You can take any place where we’ve had about 70 people for DJ sets before and it’s seemed to have [multiplied] itself by 10 – so we get 700 people coming out to the show suddenly.
It seems like Europeans in general have a broader taste in music.
I think that’s definitely true. Especially with the UK they’ve got that whole Radio 1 thing – and since it’s sort of government funded but not government controlled the DJs sort of just play whatever they want. I remember when we first moved to the UK 5 years ago there were DJs playing dancefloor rave anthem tracks, it was like another planet next to fucking Coldplay tunes in the middle of the day. You just don’t get that over here.
How did you guys make the transition from DJing and producing to being a live band?
I think especially for anyone who’s an older fan it seemed to have happened overnight, but it was kind of a gradual thing. We really didn’t notice or see it coming. One moment we were sort of messing around with Kodish and his drums and trying to experiment with different ways of him playing our samples, and the next thing you know we’re at the Reading festival playing in front of 40,000 people. It happened quite slowly and we spent about a year putting all the bits and pieces together for the band.
It seems like you incorporate a lot of hip hop elements into your music. Are you guys hip hop fans?
I mean, not hardcore enough to own obscure albums but I just get into a lot of the production. The recent Lil Wayne album, I think the production’s nicely done.
What do you think is wrong with the American music industry?
Well I think a lot of the things that are wrong with the American music industry are wrong with the global music industry. I mean the music industry here hasn’t taken as much of a battering as it has in the UK.
You think it’s worse in the UK?
Yeah because downloading is more of an accepted thing than it is here.
So there’s more regulation here than there is overseas.
Yeah. It’s more accepted that “Oh, I’ll just download it for free.” And a lot of UK fans and UK artists are just giving music away for free on the net or on the front of newspapers which I think is fucking ridiculous. I think in the UK there’s more of a culture to hunt and search for new music which I don’t think they have as much of here. Over here they sort of want what they want and they find their little box to put it into, and then it’s hip hop or it’s a Nickleback rock thing. In the UK you don’t have that as much.
Talk a little bit about what the process is like when you guys record.
Generally it ends up being something pretty simple. We just get a bunch of beats together, whether it’s Kodish recording a break, or it’s us fucking around with a lot of samples, or ripping a snippet of sound from one of our other tunes and messing it up, or sitting and coming up with ideas into [a digital recorder]
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