Take a minute to think about the music industry and where your favorite bands and artists are from. Some of mine are Lorde (New Zealand), One Direction (the UK), Set Sail (Australia), Tegan and Sara (Canada), and now The Royal Concept (Stockholm, Sweden). Could you imagine never knowing about bands and artists from overseas? The Royal Concept deserves all of the attention they get, and more. Their music will brighten your day and even more so, you’ll fall in love. We’re extremely honored to feature them as this week’s highlighted artist. Check out below what Filip Bekik (lead guitar/ synths) had to say about the journey of the band, listen to their current single “On Our Way,” and enter to win a T-shirt prize pack (one girl and one boy will be chosen).
Current Single
“On Our Way“
“On Our Way“
Members
David Larson – Lead Vocals // Guitar // Piano // Synths
Filip Bekic – Lead Guitar // Synths
Magnus Robert – Bass // Synths
Frans Povel – Drums
How did The Royal Concept form?
David and I met in high school and started playing in bands together immediately. We became best friends and explored both our youth and music together. That was a great time. We continued to study jazz at a music college in Stockholm, but grew tired of being educated in music really fast. We wanted to tour and express ourselves more…we where tired of just jamming around. So we started to write songs together. David did melodies and I did lyrics. Frans Povel was already back then a pretty famous drummer in Sweden. He played in Robyn’s band among others and we contacted him to get some advices. He said he wanted to produce our first songs, but instead he became our drummer and we felt like we needed a fourth member. Magnus Robert was playing in another, way bigger band than us, at that time. We saw them play live once and immediately fell in love with his approach. So we tricked him into playing one show with us and the four of us has been together ever since. We’re just starting our third year as a band and it’s still getting more and more fun for each day.
What has been the highlight of your career?
Every show of ours is special in its own way. We’re trying to play every show as it would’ve been the last one. Therefore, we’re trying to stay away from staged stuff and “backtracks”, cause it’s just harder to keep a show spontaneous that way.
We’ve obviously had some highlights. Tokyo this summer was absolutely crazy. We didn’t know people knew about us over there but there were like 15.000 people singing along. That was unreal and fantastic.
The first show we ever did in America, at Troubadour in Los Angeles, will always been remembered in our hears as one of the most emotional ones. It was supposed to start with David singing and playing the keyboard, but when he came up on stage the keyboard was broken. When things like that happen on your first american show you get pretty panicked. So he did the whole first song just singing without any instrument. When the second song started and the band came in it was like one of the biggest reliefs of our lives. That’s when we kind of realized that anything can happen on stage and that you just have to go with the flow and give the crowd an unique experience. It was pretty cool that we learned that so early and we can thank Troubadour for that.
Why should people listen to you?
I think people should give every artist a chance and if they don’t dig what they hear they should turn it off and move on. The same goes with us.
We are no salesmen and can’t come up with arguments why people should listen to us or like us.
But if they dig our music they should definitely try to catch us live cause that’s where we feel like we belong. And they should come up and say hi after the show. We love to hang out with new people and talk about music, love and stuff. When we write a song we always envision a scene from a movie. It could be a movie we’ve seen or just us making up a scene on the fly to describe a certain feeling we have. Then we just soundtrack the scene and we have a new song. To us, our music is very cinematic, picturesque and each song on our EP is like a story in itself.
What makes you different?
I think that’s the question all artists ask themselves every day. Somedays it’s easy to find an answer cause you woke up with a lot of confidence in yourself and other days you just want to dig yourself a whole and hide. But I feel that the combination of the four of us is unique and that the passion we have when we play is special. We’re not that aware of our own “concept”, we’re just trying to constantly develop what we have and always learn new stuff.
We love playing live and treat every gig as if it was our last. No matter the capacity, we try winning the crowd over and for them to become part of our family.
Keep up with The Royal Concept on their socials!
Contest Rules:
1. You MUST ‘like’ The Royal Concept on Facebook using the widget
2. You MUST ‘like’ Highlight Magazine on Facebook using the widget
3. You MAY for an extra point, comment on this post below telling us why you want to win the T-shirt + EP
** Contest ends Friday
Prize:
– One girl will win a t-shirt and The Royal Concept EP, from 2012
– One boy will win a t-shirt and The Royal Concept EP, from 2012
a Rafflecopter giveaway
