Interview - DIOYY's drummer Rob Bloomfield
Published: 8 September, 2011
by ROISIN GADELRAB
IT’S Saturday night and while band members James and Dan have gone out dressed as vampires to a secret screening of The Lost Boys, Does It Offend You Yeah? drummer Rob Bloomfield is at home remixing the band’s next release.
The Reading five-piece (Chloe and Matty complete the line-up) share the bill with cult electro-house producer Steve Aoki, Modestep, Mixhell, Bar 9, Roksonix, Genetix and Autoerotique at a special electro vs dubstep wars night at Koko on September 10.
But, as contrary as ever, DIOYY have no plans to play along.
Rob said: “We’re not going to do any dubstep. A lot of people are jumping on this dubstep thing at the moment the way David Bowie did a drum ’n’ bass album.
“Looking back, it’s just really embarrassing. In the short term we could get in a few fans, but in the long term we’d be doing ourselves a disservice.
“It’s uber fashionable at the moment – we’ll probably be doing heavy hard rock and taking a poke at dubstep. We dance to dubstep and enjoy it, but we’re not going to start making it because it wouldn’t be very original.”
The band know Aoki well and have played alongside him across the world.
Rob said: “We played a gig on a beach in Singapore and there were army helicopters and loads of machine guns.
“I remember getting really drunk and dancing onstage with Steve Aoki and then going skinny dipping in the sea in Singapore with luminescent jellyfish around and police boats chasing us.”
While at one end of the scale they enjoy international travel and find themselves mixing with David Hasselhoff and Lindsay Lohan backstage at Coachella, Rob revels in the more mundane.
He said: “I kind of like normal life. I love making music, in the studio most of all and gigging is cool.
When you do gigs in exotic countries, that’s amazing, but 90 per cent of the time you’re not.
So when I’m at home cooking and listening to Radio 4 I’m really happy. We meet loads of people and they’re like, ‘do you want some Ketamine man?’, and we’re like, ‘not really’, or, ‘do you want a line?’, ‘uh, no’.
“I tweet how mundane my life is when we’re doing really rock and roll things. When we played Reading Festival and our fans thought we were hanging out with Crystal Castles doing coke I was tweeting what actually was happening – having a shower, having a shave, trying to pick clothes to look cool without looking like I’m trying too hard.”
Now free from being signed to a major label, DIOYY are working on a rarities album to thank their fans.
Rob said: “It’s a blessing and a curse – a blessing that we don’t have people really trying to push us, I’m sure if we were on a major label they’d be telling us to do this dubstep album.
“We fought for ages to get rid of them because they were trying to make us do pop.
“We make loud music. Maybe the next album we’ll just do a pop album just to surprise everyone.
“Whenever anything’s expected of us we do the opposite. It means we’re never going to be rich, but we’ll always be laughing.”
The negative side of not having major label backing, he said, comes with not having a huge promotional machine pushing for airplay.
“When you turn on the radio you’re listening to bands paid for by major labels,” said Rob.
“You immediately get into certain indie publications because they look at your promotional budget and do articles about you because they know you’ll pay for adverts in their magazine.”
However, they have built up their own cult following and have 250,000 fans on Facebook.
Rob added: “We’d rather be the sort of band that bubbles under and slowly grows like The Pixies or something, you hear about us from your older brother or sister.
“We got a huge crowd at Reading and we haven’t had a single penny spent on promotion, so something’s working word of mouth-wise.”