Not many bands lay siege to rock music’s boundaries with every release in the way that Royal Blood do. Their wild third album, Typhoons, is their boldest, most personal yet. Here, Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher, joined by Warner Records president Phil Christie and manager Ian McAndrew, tell its story...
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n January 2019, Royal Blood went into Los Angeles’ Pink Duck recording facility with studio owner Josh Homme to begin tentative work on their third album. Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher were hardly overflowing with ideas but they’d become close friends with Homme after supporting his band Queens Of The Stone Age the previous year and they trusted him to help get the motors going. Homme identified a skeletal tune titled Boilermaker as a song that could possibly generate some momentum and they got to work. Progress was dependent on more than geeing up from their heroes, however, and deep down Kerr could feel it. The frontman and bassist knew his band would remain tethered until he resolved a developing alcohol dependence, an overspill from a year’s worth of touring and partying that had yet to subside. You know this story, you’ve read it before: a band are at their peak and on top of the world, but a bittersweet subplot is emerging, the frontman’s on-the-road life morphing into his off-the-road life, the chaos becoming all-consuming. On top of that, Kerr was starting to feel a weight on his shoulders regarding the small matter of Royal Blood’s third album. He knew that, Boilermaker aside, he had no other material. Royal Blood had already pulled one rabbit out of the hat, trudging through tortuous album sessions to emerge with their triumphant second album How Did We Get So Dark?, but he didn’t feel it was in him to do it the hard way again. His problems hadn’t dampened the singer’s ambitions. Kerr wanted to make Royal Blood’s next record better than anything he’d done before, an album that was both lyrically vulnerable and refined and reinvented the lithe rock grooves that had made his band huge. But he knew that something had to give. “I was looking at the way I was living my life,” he says down the phone from his home in Brighton on a snowy February morning. “And I was like, ‘Well, the two cannot exist together, one thing has to be sacrificed. One thing has to die.’ Looking back, the idea of trying to write any music in that state is just laughable. I was barely functioning.”
And so Mike Kerr took a weekend off from recording to go where all hedonistic demons meet their maker – Las Vegas –
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and went on a bender. One night sat at a bar, woozy and weary, he decided it was time to get sober when, at that very moment, the barman handed him an espresso Martini. A fine farewell, we’re sure you’ll agree. ‘This is my last drink,’ Kerr thought to himself as he downed it.
Upon arriving back at Pink Duck, he explained his new situation to Thatcher and Homme, telling them, “I’m sober now, I don’t know where it’s going to take me or where it’s going to lead.” “They were like, ‘Good for you,’” he recalls. Thatcher had seen it coming. “I could see things going on but it never affected our relationship,” says the drummer, checking in on Zoom from his home, also on the South Coast. “It was between him and himself. It was eating him up and only he can make the change. That’s the way it works, you don’t want anyone else telling you what you’ve gotta do, even though he might have wanted that. You’ve got to step up your game and do it yourself if that’s what you want. And he did.” For his part, Kerr is glad it was Homme he was in the studio with whilst his personal problems came to a head. “He’s given me some really wise and sometimes stern nudges in the right direction,” he says. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I had to go and do all the hard work myself…”
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hat was over two years ago now. The snarling Boilermaker has made the cut for Royal Blood’s excellent new album Typhoons, due next month, but it’s the only thing that wasn’t done in the wake of Kerr’s sobriety. Everything else has been built upon a clean slate. The band sound revitalised by it: Typhoons is a thrilling, push-it-forward rock record that sees the duo anchor their sea monster riffs with driving beats and nods to their love of French house dons such as Daft Punk, Cassius and Justice. The title is no coincidence: it is a record steeped in emotional turbulence. They might as well have called it Mike Kerr’s Stormy Weather. That Kerr wanted Royal Blood to improve upon everything that had gone before is quite the statement when you run the numbers. Royal Blood are the biggest breakthrough rock band of the past decade. They have amassed over two million global
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