Quotes from Dan Smith

There are so many different points to 'Wild World,' and it sounds quite different to what people would expect from us.

There's a part of me that wants to let all the different moments of 'Wild World' to have their moment and be released properly.

Whenever we're on the red carpet, we look like competition winners. It's a joke.

Reading interviews with other people, I see them say, 'All I want is for our band to be massive', but it was never an ambition of ours to be in a band that's this big. That's so far from how my mind works that I find it puzzling. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, but we're not.

Often, with our music, there's quite a lot going on, so people hear melodies that sound up and catchy, and production, and maybe don't really listen to what the songs are about, so it's nice to sing a song like 'The Currents' and really mean it.

I think basically, there are some bands and acts who feel the need to cultivate a persona or act a certain way or get quotes or whatever, because they feel like that helps them get promotion, and I feel like we're a band who have always just made music that we love and kept ourselves to ourselves and got on with it.

It's fun to take songs from a completely different context and reframe them. We did two mixtape albums called 'Other People's Heartache' and 'Other People's Heartache Pt. 2,' which were full of those kind of covers and mash-ups, mixed with film music and film quotes.

The Backstreet Boys posted a cover of our single 'Good Grief.' It was so cool, and they reached out to us, saying, 'When you're in town, come to the show.'

We've been having a great time writing for other artists in and amongst making our Bastille albums and mixtapes.

There are moments, when you're playing your songs to thousands of people, which are amazingly satisfying. I'm very self-critical, so I find it hard to go along with moments like that.

I was obsessed with harmonies and how to put songs together in lush soundscapes. But I don't know what it was all about, really.

To be honest, I'm always really interested when people say they can relate to our songs. On the first album, that wasn't something I'd ever anticipated or thought about.

I'm massively obsessed with Frank Ocean, so it's always great when he decides to release music.

Sometimes it's necessary for your sanity to hone in on the things that you love and the people you enjoy hanging out with.

After everyone's gone to bed, I still find myself sitting at the computer writing songs. It's a nice reminder that this has always been a kind of hobby that I get on with because I really love it.

A lot of our songs are based in reality but imagined or using fictional characters as a way to write about something. I think inspiration comes from anything and everything, and it's filtered through our brains, and it comes out sounding like our band.

I never, ever imagined leaving Great Britain.

The mixtapes, and a lot of our music, it comes from a place of fandom and appreciation and of respect and of nodding toward stuff that we feel really affectionate towards.

I once went on a date where the girl drove and so couldn't drink. I was nervous, so drank quite a bit - it didn't end amazingly. As much as I love movies, I think cinema dates can be weird because you essentially sit next to each other in silence for a couple of hours.

When we started making mixtapes, we were just ripping stuff off YouTube and DVDs, naively thinking that because we were putting it up for free, it was gonna be fine.

The first turning point, when I stopped doing things by myself and the Bastille project began, was the inclusion of more electronic music into the sound.

'Fire Walk With Me' was so divisive because the tone was so different than the TV series. But now television is almost more of a free medium than cinema.

I remember being obsessed with 'The Score' by The Fugees. I used to listen to a lot of really melodic music with a lot of harmonies. The Beach Boys used to make me happy, and Simon and Garfunkel, and I used to listen to a lot of film soundtracks as well.

I've never been interested in diarising my life through song. So much stuff has been done before. So many people have brilliantly articulated the pain of heartbreak or the joy of love or whatever. Those elements exist in our music, but I guess I strive to write about unconventional things instead.