Location: Cirkus / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Interview date: 15.11.2011
A hot attraction coming out of Split and our southern neighbor’s neck of the woods goes by the name The Beat Fleet this time. A one-of-a-kind mix of mocking hip-hop preaching from the band’s three frontline pillars, Saša Antić, Luka Barbić and Mladen Badovinac, backed by an organic trio on guitar, bass and drums, had the great honor on 15.11.2011 of opening, with its promo show (RockLine report from the gig HERE) for the freshly released album “Pistaccio Metallic” (Dallas Records, 2011) – RockLine review HERE, a brand-new club venue in Ljubljana called Cirkus (formerly Kino Vič). A few hours earlier, at that very same venue, we also got the chance for a quick chat with the guys….
RockLine: A few days ago you sold out the big hall of Dom sportova in Zagreb. Did you expect things to turn out like this?
Mladen: The feeling is amazing. Super. We’re really happy. Actually we’re very surprised, because we’ve pulled it off for the second time now. But we’re not making a big fuss about it. We’re keeping modestly quiet and knocking on wood.
Saša: What we were quietly hoping for is exactly what happened. It was a huge show, we played for over two hours, and the atmosphere didn’t drop for a second. From the start to the end of the set. People were incredibly into it. We’re still getting emails where people quote lines from our songs. Really, beautiful things are happening for us right now.
RockLine: That’s quite a contrast to the experience at Močvara, where you recorded your live album “Perpetuum Fritule” last year.
Luka: Absolutely. And that goes for the gig itself too. We played an “unplugged” version there, since it’s a place with a more intimate vibe. The atmosphere was different, but still incredible.
Mladen: Of course, we didn’t have a screen as huge as the one in Dom sportova there (laughs).
RockLine: How did the experience of recording a live album shape the making of “Pistaccio Metallic” afterwards?
Saša: We’re a band that’s constantly on the road, so that gig and the album recorded at Močvara were just one of the stops on this endless journey of ours. So everything we do, we do along the way. Of course, you shouldn’t take that completely literally, because we give everything we take on proper attention. It’s the work of six people. And “Pistaccio Mertallic” was recorded with a bunch of people in the studio at the same time, playing together in the studio.
RockLine: You can feel that some of the energy from that “unplugged” show spilled over into the studio. The sound feels very organic.
Mladen: Yes. That was our goal. And another thing that shaped that feel was drummer Janko Novoselić joining the band. He’s been playing with us for three years now. His playing style brought more variety and change into our sound and style, so we come across even more relaxed, and that shows in the sound too.
Saša: The trio of Nikša (Nikša Mandalinić, guitar, editor’s note), Ognjen (Ognjen Pavlović, bass guitar, editor’s note) and Janko just click perfectly. We add the samples afterwards, and the same goes for the keyboards and vocal parts. That trio, though, nails their stuff in the first take, all together. They recorded everything in six days. The following week we recorded the vocals, then another week went by for mixing, and that was that.
RockLine: How would you describe what’s new on “Pistaccio Metallic”?
Saša: Every album of ours has the same point. Listen to the first and the last track and it’ll all be clear to you in a flash. The songs follow each other so that the end of one is basically the start of the next, from the first track to the last, all the way through the album. Given that the last track on the new album is Uspavanka (Lullaby), it’s possible that on the next one we’ll all be asleep (laughs).
Mladen: Until now we’d never been completely happy with the production. “Pistaccio Metallic” finally ticks that box too. This time again we didn’t think about any kind of concept; we had a bunch of songs ready, picked the best ones, and the motive, as always, was to reach a quality where a random listener won’t have to hit “skip” between tracks while listening to “Pistaccio Metallic”.
Saša: Besides, in the lyrics we don’t reveal anything we haven’t already said on previous albums. Let me caricature it: “Get some exercise, eat less greasy food, read a book, etc,…” Of course, all wrapped up in a kind of Monty Python goofing-around vibe.
RockLine: Lately there’s more and more room for organic feel in your sound. When did you sense the need to move in that direction?
Luka: It happened totally naturally. No calculation. Even on the first album we worked like that: we recorded the album with samples, but were already playing live with the whole band. The difference was that back then we had no money for samplers and keyboards, so our early shows came across, if I can use the word, more “punk”. So picture a guitar, drums and bass in the background, and the three of us up front on stage with the vocals. Later we built all that up and kind of gelled into a compact whole, which has a much bigger impact when interpreting the studio material on stage. In my book, that impact is honestly even better today than at the start of our career.
Mladen: We searched for our sound for a long time, and there were a lot of lineup changes too… It got more and more exciting for us to work as a classic band. Our shows give off more energy that way too. We in The Beat Fleet have always been team-oriented. We simply enjoy working like this.
Saša: As for the message, too, the organic feel you’re pointing out works really well with our poetry, which is very simple and direct. Klapa together.
RockLine: You shot two new videos. First for the song Mater, followed by the clip for the song Veseljko. What’s the backstory behind these videos?
Mladen: It’s the work of the studio GITAK TV. They’re a crew who got noticed when they were shooting sketches. They’re from Split too, and they get inspired by similar things as we do when making their sketches, so teaming up was kind of a logical thing and totally natural for us. What they do is insanely fun for all of us, they’ve got incredible potential. We’ve been working together since the song Data from the album “Tutnplonk”, when they shot the video for it. That was actually the first music video they ever made. They hadn’t done videos before. And they immediately won a Porin Award for it. It was an innovation in the world of video making, since they created something half sketch, half clip. It turned out to be a bullseye, so we called them to ask if they’d be up for a similar collaboration on the song Mater. We gave them free rein with the ideas. As far as I’m concerned, they did a downright genius job.
Saša: After this unexpected success with the videos, the guys from that crew switched over completely to making music videos. So the work on the video for the song Veseljko followed. It’s going great for them. I think they’re currently preparing to shoot a video for Edo Maajka, etc,…
Mladen: Working with GITAK TV is unbelievably easy. We laugh at the same things, we pay attention to the same details, and everything we’ve made together so far is the fruit of total freedom of inspiration and creative ideas.
Saša: Yeah. For Mater they handed out the roles we had to play in the video. They’ve got it all in their heads, they tell you exactly what to do in a particular shot,…
Mladen: Yes, and since they see things the same way we do, we can really read each other’s minds, so the whole shoot went very efficiently.
RockLine: How does the audience in Slovenia receive you?
Mladen: It’s hard for me to answer objectively if I tried to compare reactions between the various places in Slovenia where we’ve played so far. But overall, we’ve always gotten a very good response from the Slovenian crowd.
Saša: I really like the very strong club scene Slovenia has. People are incredibly polite and friendly. They’re like that even when, let’s say, they don’t like the music (laughs).
RockLine: Overnight you became kind of stars in Croatia. Is the burden heavy?
Saša: Luckily you can’t feel that in Split. You can still let your mustache grow out and nobody will chase you through the tabloids for it (laughs).
Mladen: At first it’s fun, but then it can turn into a nightmare. None of us stresses about it, but it must get really annoying if, after you step off the stage, you’re forced to swap the head you have on stage for some other head. So far we don’t have that kind of trouble.
photos from The Beat Fleet show on 15.11.2011 at the club Cirkus (Ljubljana): Aleš Podbrežnik
Photo Gallery
