Five Things You Don’t Know About Clean Bandit’s ‘Rather Be’
A popular song by British electronic group Clean Bandit, "Rather Be" is now an international phenomenon topping the charts on both UK and Australia. Released on Jan. 17, the song is the fourth single from the group's upcoming debut studio album, "New Eyes."
Now one of the world's most streamed track on Spotify, "Rather Be" debuted at number one on the UK singles Chart and so far this year's fastest-selling single. It spent four weeks at number one with an astounding 727,000 copies sold since it was first played on Dec. 4 on BBC Radio 1 by DJ Zane Lowe's "Hottest Record in the World."
Here's the five things you don't know about Clean Bandit's "Rather Be."
1. "Rather Be" was written and produced by the band that features video game-style synth blips, a slow bass, piano and vocals. According to Contractmusic writer Holly Williams the song is a "mushy love song."
2. The song holds the record for most streams in a single week on Spotify in the UK and received 1.09 million plays over seven days in February. The song is so popular that it even surpassed the record previously held by Daft Punk's "Get Lucky."
3. Now an international sensation, "Rather Be's" music video was made by the band itself and features Haruka Abe as a Japanese fan of the band. The band even went to Tokyo just to shoot the video where they spent a week to get the right footages.
"The video is about a Japanese fan of the band who becomes delirious and has hallucinations of band members and our logo appearing unexpectedly in her daily life as a chef. Filming in Tokyo was an amazing experience: we spent almost a week there and everyone was so helpful. We made it ourselves as always, which was quite scary as we've never produced anything so far away before. We had a bit of trouble filming the scene on the train though. Turns out it's considered incredibly rude to make noise on a train so when we started dancing around to the track in the carriage with the extras, it didn't go down well!!!! Got shouted at," says the band in an interview posted in their website.
4. For the first time, Clean Bandit performed "Rather Be" in BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge and did a cover of Lorde's "Royals."
5. Now set as one of the biggest records of the years, the London-based group beat the likes of Will.i.am and Miley Cyrus to number one. Their first studio album "New Eyes" is scheduled to land in May of this year.