The Scandinavian starlets, Rebecca & Fiona are already mega-stars in their native homeland. Not only were they the faces of Adidas, appearing as an integral part of the “Adidas All In” campaign in 2011, they’ve also had their very own TV show on SVT (Sweden’s main national TV channel), a double platinum single and won the 2012 Swedish Grammy for Best Dance Act! Their massive collaboration with Kaskade won them a number of accolades.
The stunning duo have regularly been unleashing their might to a hungry global audience at a time when dance music’s biggest stars are screaming out for more female talent. We had the chance to do a quick interview with the talented duo before their gig at Royalty, Mumbai. Read ahead to know more about their love for Indian food, their collaboration with Kaskade, their beginnings and more!
TBB: Welcome to India! It’s your first time here and you’ve been in Mumbai for a few hours, how has your experience been until now?
Rebecca & Fiona: Yeah we are very excited. It is very warm, pretty hot in fact. We love Indian food we eat it all the time at home so we’re looking forward to gorging on the food.
TBB: How does it feel to be in India? Have you heard anything about the dance music scene here?
Rebecca & Fiona: We haven’t heard a lot about the scene here, but our friend, Richie Hawtin was here a few weeks back and he said it was really good. We always wanted to come here because we love the culture but we haven’t heard much about local artists & the scene here. Hopefully the crowd will like our music.
Fiona hits the decks!
TBB: We’re sure they will. Are you excited about your performance tonight? Any surprises in store for the crowd?
Rebecca & Fiona: Yes we’re very excited. We have a new track, our next single, which we plan to premiere tonight. We hope it sounds good.
TBB: So you guys met at a common friends birthday party right? Tell us how did your journey begin from there?
Rebecca & Fiona: Well we had the same tastes in music and we both love partying and love club music, so it wasn’t long before we decided we wanted to start working together. After a year of DJing, we decided to start making our own music as well.
Rebecca & Fiona on stage!
TBB: If you guys weren’t DJ’s, what would you be doing? Partying?
Rebecca & Fiona: Well of course we would be partying as well but guess we would be into Politics.
TBB: Some of the biggest artists of late have been coming from Sweden. Was it tough to rise as artists in a largely male-dominated scene?
Rebecca & Fiona: We grew up together. In the beginning there weren’t those many famous artists from Sweden. We were big on the techno scene and when we grew up the big stars were Adam Beyer, John Dahlback and Eric Prydz among others. Now in the later years we are more popular on the Big Room scene, so we kind of grew together. Avicii is a bit younger than us but very talented & Swedish House Mafia also helped make a name for Sweden. A lot of different artists today look towards Sweden to bring out music from new artists. A lot of people also started to look at smaller artists possibly after Swedish House Mafia made it big.
TBB: Tell us some of the challenges you faced while trying to make it big and how did you go about handling them?
Rebecca & Fiona: We haven’t had that many troubles (laugh). In the beginning we had no money of course, so we had to live poor. We also had to fight to be recording artists. We lived in a small apartment together and put everything into making it as artists.
TBB: When it comes to production, where do you find yourself? Are you more into Hardware or Software?
Rebecca & Fiona: We love Hardware but it gets too slow at times and we can’t carry it everywhere, like when we’re on tour. When we’re on the go we use Software, it’s just our MacBook’s and Sennheiser earphones and they work pretty well. In our studio we have our analog synths, which we like to use in our tracks, so almost all our tracks have some analog synth parts. We use Logic & this other software, Reason.
The crowd locked in the moment!
TBB: One of the biggest tracks you had was ‘Turn It Down’ with Kaskade. How was it like to work with an artist of his stature?
Rebecca & Fiona: We didn’t really know how famous he was when we worked with him. We were in LA and our manager said we’d been mailing him before we came to LA and then we came to his studio and it was a lot of fun and very easy. It took only a few hours and then we left and we had written ‘Turn It Down’ with him.
TBB: Could you tell us a little about your album, “I love you, man”? What is the idea behind its name?
Rebecca & Fiona: It was pretty random actually. A week before we had to give our managers everything for publishing and other stuff. They asked us what we were going to call the album and we didn’t know what to say. So we started to look at magazines and tried to find some words to collaborate words to name the tracks and we couldn’t find anything we wanted and then we saw “I love you, Man” in some article and we thought that it sounded cool and we could use it. Our managers thought it was a bad idea, but ultimately we ended up keeping it. It wasn’t a well thought out name though, more like a hi5. (laugh)
Rebecca & Fiona Live at Royalty, Mumbai
TBB: Who are your favourite artists, those who you look up to?
Rebecca & Fiona: We really like Richie Hawtin. He’s combining all his old sounds with new stuff. Still doing what he’s good at. We like Eric Prydz, a lot. He’s a great producer.
TBB: Talking about the whole dance music scene, it has suddenly exploded and a country like India has a gig every week. What’s your take on the future of dance music?
Rebecca & Fiona: We don’t know, we’re hoping it goes back to people playing live shows. Nowadays people are always playing other peoples music, instead of playing an edit or a vocal edit they can do. Instead of playing their old stuff, they just play the top 10. We’re tired of everyone playing the same music. We hope every DJ edits a track to make it really good. If you want to play a good track, you have to combine that to give it your own feel.
TBB: Avicii’s set at Ultra created a lot of buzz in the industry and got a lot of different opinions from fans. Tell us what you thought about it?
Rebecca & Fiona: We didn’t see his set but I (Fiona) listened to it later and someone also told me that something was wrong with the kick, like there was no kick. It could be that it left the crowd shocked because they were expecting something else and are used to something, but we think its great if that’s what he likes to produce. Also, you can’t keep doing the same thing; you have to continue to try new stuff as an artist.
TBB: Talking about new music, do you guys like Daft Punk?
Rebecca & Fiona: Yeah, we do but we haven’t been able to listen to it (Get Lucky) yet. Everyone wants to see them live but they’re only doing a listening party in Australia at a farm or some place.
TBB: We have a fan question, why do you like the buffalo boots so much?
Rebecca & Fiona: They’re so comfortable. We can never wear high-heel shows, cause they make you handicapped (laugh). We’ve never seen any girl dance with high-heels, because you’re probably going to fall. When you’re playing, you should be comfortable and be able to jump and move around.
TBB: What are your top 3 #bangin tracks currently?
Rebecca & Fiona: We made an edit of ‘Mammoth’ and put vocals on it and it turned out to be great! Another track we like is “Pick Up” by Carly. Loops of Fury’s, “Light em up” is our favourite, it’s a complete beast!
TBB: So you’re not going to play a very commercial set tonight?
Rebecca & Fiona: No, with the commercial tracks we put our vocals on it or make an edit out of it. I think we lost perception of what is commercial and what is not. Sometimes we even play 2 hours without any vocals, as long as there are melodies in the break, we can keep the audience going.
TBB: So do you guys have a set tracklist of tracks you play or do you assess the crowd and then decide what to play?
Rebecca & Fiona: Well both, sometimes we add some extra tracks according to the audience but we usually have a general knowledge of what tracks we’re going to play and if the crowd likes the vibe, we go in that direction.
TBB: Our last question, a message for your fans in India?
Rebecca & Fiona: Listen to our music (laugh). We hope we keep coming here to play more & more. Stay true to the music and stay off the Beatport top 10.
TBB: Thank you for the interview!
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Special thanks to Rolling Stone India
Pictures Courtesy: Siddharth Dugha
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