Pendulum

Thu 28th Oct, 2010 in Features

Afhead of Stonefest and a national tour, Gareth McGrillen from Perth’s biggest dance export gives us the band’s take on their supposed ‘feud’ with The Prodigy, the drama behind In Silico and what we can expect from their Immersion album tour.

What are you and the band up to at the moment?
We just finished playing this big metal festival in Sweden, actually. At first it was a little bit weird to play to shows like that and to see these full-on metal heads going nuts to the music but it really makes sense to us now because Rob [Swire, Pendulum’s frontman] and I used to listen to the heaviest of metal and rock so it’s clear that some of that has made its way into our music.

There definitely seems to be that widespread appeal these days with Pendulum. Is it a little crazy to think that you can be doing festivals like that one day and then hearing your tunes played on commercial radio the next.
It’s a cool thing, I think. And the good thing about us is that we can be very popular but still remain fairly anonymous because we don’t look like stars or anything. People do recognise us a little bit over in the UK, which is I suppose where we are the biggest these days. It’s pretty funny, really, you’ll pull up at the lights and look over and there’ll be this man in the next car going nuts to our music! And then just at the last second he realises who you are. It’s a cool feeling.

How’ve you found the reaction to Immersion since its release following In Silico?
It’s been incredible. We really weren’t expecting it to be so massive and for people to go as nuts as they have, but it’s almost been unanimously positive, which means a lot to us. It’s crazy to think about it but it debuted at number one on the charts in its first week of release and it went platinum in two weeks. We couldn’t be happier with how it’s gone so far.

A lot of noise was made about In Silico with some fans voicing their disappointment at the album’s more palatable sounds and you yourself have said that you wanted to move away from that on this third LP. How do you personally view In Silico in retrospect?
You know, In Silico was a good album and it did its job. It just went platinum the other week so obviously people found it and liked it. But looking back at it, I think it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. We went through such hell trying to make it and I think we feel like we kind of hate it now. We were having an identity-crisis on that album and it was mostly self-inflicted. I think we did it to ourselves.

So what made Immersion a different experience for the band?
“That was definitely a case of the ‘second album syndrome’ but when we came to this record we weren’t afraid of what was on the other side, we just had the confidence to do what we wanted to do.”

I was interested to see that Liam Howlett from The Prodigy is on the album and you guys have been playing shows with them all year in Europe. You guys have a close relationship with them, right?
Yeah, that’s right. We forged our relationship with those guys on the Big Day Out tour back in 2009, I think it was. At the start we were all a bit standoffish with each other because, obviously, they’re our heroes and we figured that they saw us as these new kids on the block out to steal their thunder. But once we got chatting we realised that it was just some media-generated animosity born out of musical comparisons. But now we just love those guys and I think they feel the same way because they invited us on tour with them and we got Liam on Immersion.

Playing those shows with them would’ve been a massive thrill for you guys because all these years on they’ve still got it. Do you look at them and hope that you’ll have the same longevity with Pendulum?
They’re just incredible. They’re real professionals and they know what they’re doing. They know how to be absolute psychos on stage and then chill out during the day. That’s something you need to learn otherwise you’d die from all that energy every night. I definitely hope we’re the same way in ten years time and have managed to experience what they have.

You guys are coming back home to do a national headline tour as well as the Stonefest bash in Canberra, and then next year you’re doing the big Future Music Festival, do you have a preference over which arena you like to play in?
We love doing festivals, it’s always great and we try and make our shows as memorable as possible. I think there’s a part of us that wants to show-up the other bands on the bill! But now that we’ve got the headline tour it’ll be even better for fans because that means we can bring all our live setup with us. It’s the best thing for a band. We get to take up the whole stage, use our huge lighting rigs and turn up the volume as loud as we want. We thrive on that.

Pendulum’s Immersion tour:

Friday 29th October – AEC Theatre, Adelaide [All Ages]
Saturday 30th October – Stonefest, Canberra
Monday 1st November – Festival Hall, Melbourne [All Ages]
Wednesday 3rd November – The Tivoli, Brisbane [18+]
Thursday 4th November – The Tivoli, Brisbane [18+]
Friday 5th November – Hordern Pavilion, Sydney [All Ages]
Saturday 6th November – Challenge Stadium, Perth [All Ages]