Outside Royalty keeping it regal in the United Kingdom
Words Ben Graham
The Outside Royalty began life nearly five years ago as a full-on glam rock band in Pittsburgh, a city at least five hours’ drive from the nearest large population centre.
“The scene was dying,” singer/guitarist Adam Billing recalls. “Venues were closing down, and there was an article in a local music magazine that was saying to bands, ‘If you want to have any chance of success, get out.’ So we just decided, ‘Hey, we gotta make a move, where’s it gonna be?’ London seemed like a stretch, but it seemed like kind of a possibility.”
On arrival, the four-piece picked up two further members in the shape of Frederique Legrand (cello) and Paul Rigel (bass), and developed a subtler, more spacious sound that gave Adam’s acoustic guitar and dark, sensuous vocals more room to breathe, while Echo Wu’s violin carried the melody. In contemporary terms, The Outside Royalty sit halfway between Arcade Fire and The Killers; sometimes they sound an awful lot like Pulp, while still evoking the high glam of Roxy Music, early Cockney Rebel and The Doctors of Madness. And there’s something of John Foxx-era Ultravox about them too.
Debut single ‘Falling’ is a blackly humorous vignette about falling in love just as the plane you’re both on starts to plummet terminally from the sky. It’s backed by ‘The Voice Beneath the Rubble’, a haunting ballad inspired by the 2006 West Virginia mining disaster, and how “people are always searching for those signs from within to give them faith or comfort or hope”.
There’s actually something very English about The Outside Royalty’s sound, which Adam traces back to the moment, as a child, when he first heard T-Rex’s The Slider. “It’s something that will always be there, that’s very personal to me,” he says. “When I first heard that music, it seemed to have an attitude that was completely separate to all of the look and the fashion that went along with it. I was completely oblivious to all of the trappings… Something just felt so familiar, so comfortable, so right.”
His obsession was such that when The Outside Royalty were first starting out, Adam wrote to legendary producer Tony Visconti to ask him how he achieved the sound and feel of that seminal LP. “He wrote back one of the most supportive letters you could ever imagine,” he recalls, “just saying that it was a great record at a great time, but don’t look at it! Go your own way. I could tell you all the settings for all the mixes, but it wouldn’t mean a thing. And he was right, of course.”
Taking Visconti’s advice, The Outside Royalty have forged a unique sound that harnesses all of the promise implicit in their name.
“We’ve all spent most of our lives being more comfortable outside of the mainstream,” Adam says. “We’re just trying to create something as beautiful as we can, and bring it to its highest point, while remaining out on the fringe.”
