"When I am with you there's no place I'd rather be!"
Clean Bandit is a string-enhanced electronic dance music trio from Cambridge, UK consisting of Jack Patterson, Luke Patterson, and Grace Chatto. 2014 saw them release an enormously popular single, "Rather Be" (which spent four weeks at number one in the UK and is the best-selling single from the first half of the year) followed by a debut album New Eyes. The group was initially a quartet prior to Neil Amin-Smith's departure mid-to-late 2016.Discography
- New Eyes (2014)
- What Is Love? (2018)
Will you trope me tight and not let go?
- Band of Relatives: Jack and Luke are brothers.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The source of the name Clean Bandit, apparently from the Russian for "Utter Bastard".
- Bury Your Gays: The video for "Symphony" tells the story of a gay man who is killed in a hit and run, his widowed partner's grief and their relationship before the tragedy.
- Disappeared Dad: The protagonist of "Rockabye" is a single mother. The father has abandoned both of them shortly before the song.
- Hallucinations: The video for "Rather Be" involves a fan in Japan having hallucinations of the band's members and logo appearing everywhere in her day-to-day life.
- Heavy Meta: "Symphony" features the singer comparing love to music as well as an actual symphony orchestra playing in the background and also in the music video.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: The protagonist in "Rockabye" is implied to be one. The music video confirms this.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: Inverted. The narration at the start of "Mozart's House" says "So you think electronic music is boring? You think it's stupid? You think it's repetitive? Well,
it is repetitive..." - Job Song: "Rockabye" is about a single mother who works as a stripper while trying to get a better future for her six-year-old son.
- Lyrical Dissonance: "Solo" features an upbeat and fun song about a woman who is heartbroken and resorts to self-pleasure to fight the pain.
- Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: "Solo" is a song about a woman who broke up with her partner and is still not over it, so to vent her sexual frustration, she resorts to masturbation.
- Mind Screw:
- The music video for "Rather Be". Just try to figure out what's going on.
- The music video for "Solo" is even more mindscrewy. Basically, the plot revolves around Grace Chatto paying the rest of the group to create a substance that turns her abusive boyfriend into a psychedelic rainbow golden retriever puppy.
- Parents as People: The protagonist in "Rockabye" is a poor single mother, works as a prostitute who struggles to provide for her son but loves him dearly and wants him to have a better life than she did.
- Self-Demonstrating Song: "Mozart's House": "I can make my voice sta!cca!to! / then mix it allll le... ga... to"
- Silly Love Song:
- "Rather Be", a song about a long distance relationship.
- "Symphony", where the singer compares her love to a symphony and hopes that it is reciprocated.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: In the non-acoustic version of "Solo", the F-bomb in the chorus is obscured with a sound effect.I wanna f-*WOOP WOOP WOOP*, but I'm brokenhearted
- Take That!: The music video for "Mama" is about a Lonely Rich Kid who is constantly pressured by his Abusive Parents and eventually grows up to become a character that looks and acts exactly like, but hasn't been confirmed to explicitly be, Donald Trump. The message of the video is spelled out at the end, on the carpet on which "Trump" and "Melania" are dancing: "Damaging children can damage the entire world".
- The Smurfette Principle: Grace is the only female member in the band.
- Title Track: "New Eyes" on New Eyes, naturally.
