Bastille's Dan Smith interview: 'Our live shows feel like election escapism'

A freezing Monday in Margate, and the Bastille touring party are, according to Dan Smith, “dropping like flies”. Backstage at the appropriately named Winter Gardens, the arena-sized band’s frontman admits that their intense, 11-day underplay tour of the UK has been beset by “coughing, sneezing and spluttering”.

Still, as the four-piece were gearing up for this week’s final show, they were less limping home than roaring back on a victory lap in a transit van.

Right now, Bastille have the biggest song on telly, in the shape of the soundtrack for this year’s reliably cutesy John Lewis ad, a cover of REO Speedwagon’s Can’t Fight This Feeling. It’s the final track on a new, 22-track repackage of this year’s third album, Doom Days.

With the band in a defiant, celebratory mood, the nine shows comprising the Doom Days Club Nights have been a caution-to-the-wind opportunity to cap a year in which their third album reached the top five in the UK and US. During the tour Bastille have been supporting themselves, as their alter-ego Chaos Planet.

“It’s the first tour we’ve done in probably six years in a splitter van,” says Smith, a gung-ho rock star whose cheeriness cannot be dimmed by flu, norovirus or a winter coughing bug. “So it’s been nice driving up and down the country, actually getting to see some views out of the window, and bouncing around different towns that we’ve not been to before or haven’t been to in ages. It’s been a real cross-section of the country,” he notes of a tour that’s taken in Aberdeen, Llandudno and Torquay.

Doom Days is an album about “escapism and choosing night-time temporary distractions from the problems of daily life and the things that bombard you in the news”. The lyrics of the title track shout out to “proud Remainers”, whether they’re doggedly keen to stay at the party or stay in Europe. The 33-year-old is happy with his band’s timing. “It feels fitting to be playing this record in clubs on the eve of an election. For us, and hopefully for the people coming to the shows, this feels like quite a cathartic exercise in escapism — but also in a knowing escapism.”

Indeed. The logistics and messaging of Bastille’s final tour of a hectic year has the air of a bunch of one-last-push politicians touring heartland Britain on a battle bus. How has it been traversing the country in the midst of election fever-slash-fatigue?

“Well, as somebody that grew up in London with immigrant parents,” begins Smith, whose mum and dad are South African, “it’s been really interesting to get to see corners of the country that I’ve not visited before. For better or worse, people get passionate about the election — some people don’t give a flying f*** and some people want to not think about it and avoid it entirely.”

To his credit, Smith is pushing the buttons of those in the latter camp. “I’ve been wearing a T-shirt every night that says in big writing JUST VOTE. Obviously people feel very divided in opinion and mentality and political thought at the moment. But the most important thing, given that we all have to live with the consequences of this election, is to at least feel like you participated.”

Smith and his bandmates are small-business employers, running a studio and a label in south London where their MP is Neil Coyle. Smith confirms that the Labour man will be getting his vote. But given the current polling, is he pessimistic about the party’s chances? He exhales deeply.

“I’m not feeling hugely positive about the outcome,” he admits. “But it’s really hard to tell from the polls, and it’ll be down to how many people get out and vote — the level of the ‘youthquake’ and how, if that happens, it affects things.”

On the Bastille battlebus, hope springs eternal — as, of course, it does in the John Lewis ad featuring a sad dragon and a plucky girl. Smith admits to being “flustered” when Bastille were asked to sing the soft-rock classic.

“We’d just come out of a long, two-month US tour ... but it was an amazing opportunity to work with the London Contemporary Orchestra, who I’m a huge fan of, and it was a really nice opportunity to do something that my nephews would like and be aware of.”

The band’s schedule was such that Smith had to record his vocals in New York, “and it was interesting explaining to the engineer in the studio why we were doing this song and what the significance of it was. This advert is obviously a very British seasonal tradition, an institution that for a lot of people signals the beginning of the festive period. As someone said to me recently, it’s like the Bond theme of adverts.”

So, even for a self-acknowledged “cynical f***er”, getting creative with a big slab of Christmas pud indulgence was a no-brainer. “It’s been really fun, and a totally unexpected, kind of surreal way to cap off our year.”

Doom Days: This Got Out Of Hand edition is out now