album sales and shifted 300,000 tickets around the world. In the UK, they hit No.1 with their self-titled 2014 debut (which has 636,941 sales, according to the Official Charts Company), and repeated the trick with 2017 follow-up How Did We Get So Dark? (206,107 sales) and have won a BRIT Award to go alongside their NME and Kerrang! gongs. Their biggest single, Figure It Out, has 616,248 sales. There is a lot for Typhoons to live up to, let alone top. Warner Records president Phil Christie tells Music Week that Royal Blood have emerged with a record that can take them to the next level. “The album is genuinely brilliant, which is the most important thing,” he says, happily. “It’s a progression from the style of the first two records and lands with a whole new energy. We have already matched their career peaks at US alt and rock radio. We have a chance of connecting with a broader audience than on album two.” Mike Kerr giving up booze didn’t mean he sprung out of bed the next morning and material came pouring out of him, either. It was, he says, a long process of putting himself back together. It took a short summer tour in 2019, a run of dates that Kerr used to “refresh myself of what I do and who I am in my sober mind”, for everything to become clear. “I came off the road and it was like a clarity had descended on me,” says Kerr. “And that’s when the record began.”
The members of Royal Blood are two nice, solid blokes, the sort of people you can imagine don’t leave the pub without getting their round in. But whilst there has always been an exhilarating edge to their live shows, Kerr and Thatcher have never
given anything away in interviews. They have been devoted students of the ‘we make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus!’ school of quotes. Kerr knew as they were making Typhoons that he was all wrapped up in the new record and it was all wrapped up in him. To talk about the songs, he would have to talk about himself. And he wanted to talk about the songs.
“I was really back and forth in my own head about whether I was going to expose myself and talk about what’s been going on in my life,” Kerr says. “But as we came closer and closer to the end of making it, I realised that censoring what’s been going on in my life is just lying about what the album is about. I can’t talk about the record without talking about that. I realised that they just go hand in hand.” Both members pinpoint the future-disco swagger of Trouble’s Coming as a
Two’s company: Royal Blood
“Royal Blood are a one in a million musical proposition” PHIL CHRISTIE WARNER RECORDS
42 | Music Week
musicweek.com
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