If anything it felt like it was slowly killing me.” But I guess what I’m getting at is even if I hadn’t done it to such excess, it wasn’t making me feel very good. We were essentially on a seven-year stag do. I’ve drunk more than anyone will ever drink in their entire lives. “I mean look, I’m in a rock band that’s been on tour for seven years so. “It’s hard to measure, because everyone in my industry does it to such excess that… ” he pauses. Now, he says, he can’t see himself having a drink again. You rewire some things, so you’re able to do this for an hour and a half every evening.” “I could play a show, pretty well, and you would have no idea, you know? You just evolve to your surroundings. “I felt like I was functioning at an incredible level,” Kerr remembers. There were extremes to reflect on in a career that’s involved a robust quota of red carpets, A-list praise and rivers of tequila with longtime friend/fan Josh Homme, among other things, the highs have been very high and the lows… well, very low. Allusions to the build-up to his sobriety – the hazier, shadier side of show business – are peppered throughout the album’s muscular yet sassy tracks. Indeed this buoyant framework gave Kerr the freedom to write his darkest words yet. So there are real messed-up things going on, but also you can’t help but dance to it.” But then… it gave us this opportunity to write darker lyrics, but which don’t bum you out so much with the music. “It made us smile, it made us dance, it made us move.
“The way Mike’s riffs were sitting over the top of the drums became this quite euphoric music,” Thatcher enthuses. Excess tweaking and preening of demo versions was kept to a minimum, much like their debut.
Writing additional songs (including boot-stomping, hip-shaking single Trouble’s Coming) and producing it themselves, the two friends gave the whole album an invigorating facelift. Lockdown provided a rare, unexpected opportunity to reflect and reassess. Not surprising when you consider that they hadn’t had any real time off since starting out in 2013. Figuring out what they actually wanted to do with the album hadn’t been easy. Sonically, anyway.”Įffectively ‘completed’ pre-COVID, with songs tracked in California in 2019, Typhoons was half-recorded when the world shut down in March of 2020. Actually in rock music, in the early stuff which we’re really influenced by, there’s hardly any bass in those songs. “Actually the heavier stuff, most recently, is hip-hop artists, and people like Kendrick Lamarr who, when certain shifts in the music, it sits and the bass becomes larger-than-life and it gets into you. “We’ve found that heavy music isn’t just in rock music,” Thatcher reasons. It’s still heavy as hell, but this time that weight comes at least as much from French electronica and 70s disco as from rock and metal.
Where their head-turning self-titled debut and 2017’s similarly successful follow-up How Did We Get So Dark? leaned on relatively familiar, grizzled blues rock tropes, Typhoons pushes a more colourful mix of buttons. You could imagine Queens Of The Stone Age and Muse cooking it up in a disco, with Chic and Daft Punk on the decks and (in the psych-infused Either You Want It) Tame Impala popping in for a dance and a spliff. Ultimately, it was Kerr’s lifestyle change that paved the way for the duo’s most danceable, most feelgood album yet, this year’s monstrously groovy Typhoons. “We were so in the moment and having a lot of fun with it all, it was just something that we knew was coming, and we knew he had to make some changes." “I think it was just needed,” Thatcher says simply, of Kerr’s decision to get sober. The propulsive beat-keeper of British rock’s most incendiary two-piece of the last decade, with a slew of hits to their name that were too heavy for radio – then got played on the radio. The anchor for Kerr’s off-the-wall, bass-that-sounds-like-a-guitar theatrics. It’s easy to see how Thatcher could be considered to be the rock of Royal Blood. He darts out and returns with a panting, tail-wagging armful of cuddly cockapoo. Her name’s Penny, I’ll get her for you if you want?” “I mean, I have a lovely car and a lovely house… and I have a dog. “I’m quite tame when it comes to all that stuff,” he says when asked about his extravagances since Royal Blood made it big. Immediately flouting a wealth of ‘silent drummer’ stereotypes, today he’s the warmer, chattier of the two. Ben Thatcher, Kerr’s permanently baseball-capped bandmate, is easier company.