Music
The frontman of UK pop giants Bastille explains why Twin Peaks director David Lynch means so much to him.
Dan Smith's Bastille might be an arena-filling, chart-topping proposition with inescapable hits like Pompeii and Of The Night, but the UK pop giants started out as a pipe dream in Smith's bedroom at the start of the decade. When the self-confessed geek wasn't writing the songs that would eventually take him all over the world, Smith was obsessing over films. Specifically those made by one particular director.
David Lynch is the man behind such brilliant yet nightmarishly surreal films as Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, as well as sinister TV series Twin Peaks, which made its return to our screens in 2017 after 26 years away. To his fans – and Smith is one of his biggest – he's one of the best directors in the business.
Interrupting Smith during the making of Bastille's third album – the follow-up to 2016's Wild World – we asked him why David Lynch means so much to him and what kind of impact he's had on Bastille's own creations. It all started, says Smith, with an early obsession with horror films.
"In my early teens I started with relatively mainstream slasher flicks and then my curious little mind got a bit obsessed, and I explored the genre as much as I could at a time when things weren't readily available," says Smith. "Inevitably, through reading as much as I could, I stumbled upon David Lynch. The first thing of his I watched was Eraserhead – I didn't know what the hell was going on. And then I got obsessed with Twin Peaks, which at the time you just couldn't get anywhere. You couldn’t just stream it. I managed to find a DVD from America and borrowed some money to import it – and it blew my mind.
"Then I watched Mulholland Drive at the cinema with my dad, which was an interesting experience. I remember leaving the cinema feeling totally bemused and perplexed, engaged and provoked. It was one of the first things I'd seen where I came away needing to think about it and talk about it."
There’s something about the cinematography in Lynch films and TV shows that is really beautiful
"There's something about the cinematography in Lynch films and TV shows that is really beautiful and he’s constantly lifting the curtain a bit or showing things in a strange light," continues Smith. "What was so brilliant about Twin Peaks was his ability to take small-town life, an almost soap-opera existence, and skew it to the point where it felt so sinister and dark. He was playing with mainstream culture in such a clever way, while allowing it to remain in the mainstream.
"It’s fascinating because he's a visual artist, primarily. I've been to exhibitions of his work and it's provocative and interesting, and yet it all feels like him. To be able to write books and paint, do visual art and make TV, films and record albums, and for it all to feel like it's coming from this one guy, who you think you know because of this famous depiction of him, but you don't really… that's just amazing."
When we released Laura Palmer, a lot of younger fans were like, 'Oh, is that you’re girlfriend?'
"I always wanted our music videos to at the very least feel a bit weird and for anybody who cares enough to engage with it to write their own narrative into it and ask questions about it. That's something we definitely took into our early stuff," Smith explains. "I love the night-time aesthetic of his work, so I wanted there to be a sense of uneasiness and darkness. It's always been important to us as a band to create a bit of a world to exist in, through our videos and the way we've presented things. Plus we have a song called Laura Palmer. When we released it, a lot of younger fans were like, 'Oh, is that you’re girlfriend?' so it was a nice excuse for me to talk about Twin Peaks and David Lynch.
"I talk about him enough that, a few years ago, I was asked by Rob Da Bank, who was releasing Lynch's second album, to do a remix of one of his songs. He was like, 'I've heard you bang on about him enough – do you want to do a remix?' We took Lynch's vocal, got rid of the rest and just imagined him floating through space. We made this dreamy soundscape and I did loads of backing vocals so that I could crowbar myself into a duet with him. He loved it and invited me round to his house for coffee. He was overwhelmingly kind, funny and inquisitive."
"I love the latest series of Twin Peaks," Smith says of Lynch's latest work. "I remember watching the first few episodes and thinking how incredible it is that this is mainstream TV and it's so much more obscure than the first two series. It's artful and inaccessible and difficult. I was watching Kyle MacLachlan vomiting black fluid on himself in the car and I was like, yes! Yes! Amazing!"
