“We were told to stop making pop music and were sent dance playlists to Spotify with the request to ‘have your music here'”: How Clean Bandit fell out with Atlantic Records
Remember Clean Bandit, the Cambridge graduates who mixed string instruments with upbeat pop and found a successful chart formula in the early 2010s? In a new interview with the BBC The trio have revealed how they clashed with their record label and how they are taking a new approach this decade.
The dispute seems somewhat bizarre. The band were consistently present in the UK singles charts between 2014 and 2018, reaching number one four times with a number of guest singers.
Their best known hits were “Rather Be” with frontman Jess Glynne, which was a huge worldwide hit in 2014, and “Rockabye” with singers Sean Paul and Anne Marie, which reached number one in the Christmas charts in 2016. But that apparently wasn’t what their record company Atlantic really wanted.
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“There were efforts to do without string instruments in our music,” says cellist Grace Chatto.
“We were also told to stop making pop music,” adds their bandmate Jack Patterson. “We were sent dance music playlists on Spotify and told, ‘Your music has to be here – only Harry Styles can make pop music.'”
The problem was that, as Clean Bandit were essentially a production trio, they didn’t have much of an image. Because of this, Atlantic feared their pop success would soon dry up. “We were told, ‘You don’t have a face, you have to make club music,'” Patterson recalls.
To achieve exactly that, they did without the violins and made their sound “darker”. The result: the pop success did dry up. They haven’t had a top ten hit since 2020. “The music didn’t feel like our music,” says Chatto. “Our fans felt it. We felt it. In the end, we thought, ‘What’s the point of doing anything?’
They left Atlantic and moved to the Sony-backed label B1/Ministry Of Sound. As they explain in the interview, the trio now takes a more global approach to music production. In 2024 alone, “two full records” of material were produced during writing sessions in Miami, Jamaica and Lagos.
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“I hate to go back to this, but our previous label was based in the UK,” Patterson explains, “so their priority was always what would work here. If it wasn’t played on Capital (radio), they weren’t interested. Now if we work with someone in Mumbai, that’s fine. The fact that we don’t have a singer means we can be quick and work anywhere in the world.”
In fact, the band recently collaborated with Colombian singer Piso 21 and released “Mar Azul” on the Spanish market.
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Back in the UK, the band’s new single is a return to their earlier sound. But Cry Baby only managed a modest 78 last week. Clean Bandit clearly have some catching up to do…
