Mike Kerr, who is one-half of the British-based rock duo royal blood (he’s the singer-bassist component; ben thatcher handles the drums), has two distinct views on being in...
Mike Kerr, who is one-half of the British-based rock duo royal blood (he’s the singer-bassist component; ben thatcher handles the drums), has two distinct views on being in a two-man band.
“On the one hand, the duo thing forces us to be creative because we can’t rely on other people to fill up the space,” he says. “That allows me and ben to improvise more because it’s all on us. In a bigger band, you have this big ship you have to guide and turn around. That makes it hard to go off, so you have to stick to the tune and follow a lot of rules. We don’t have that, so it’s cool.”
On the other hand, Kerr sees the band’s limitations as sometimes being, well, just that—limitations. “There’s a certain amount of impatience that we feel being just two people,” he says. “Sometimes you can feel stuck. You want to do those other tricks that other bands can do. Maybe it would be fun to share what we do with other musicians onstage, or it might be cool to just let somebody else pick up the slack while I concentrate on singing or whatever. But we don’t dwell on that. We are what we are, and it’s what we want to be.”
On their pummeling eponymous debut album from 2014, Royal Blood were routinely compared to the White Stripes, but their aesthetic actually owed more to the metallic/stoner rock wallop of another power duo, Local H. But whereas that band’s frontman, Scott Lucas, runs a hybrid guitar (outfitted with bass pickups) into bass and guitar amps, Mike Kerr opts for a bass that he sends into pitch shifters and other various stomp boxes (including one that’s a closely guarded secret).
The resulting sound is as thick and lowdown