Where did ‘Beat Of My Drum’ come from?
Well, we found a piece of music and wrote the song around it and then created this song. We felt like we needed additional production and that’s where Diplo came in.
How did Diplo get involved? You don’t phone him up and go ‘oh hai I’m Nicola from Girls Aloud, can you produce my single please’.
Well, I was a big fan of Major Lazer and a lot of the MIA stuff, and I knew that my song needed some kind of backbone… We were in the studio for like four days trying to come up with the right mad sounds but I was so close to the song that I couldn’t step away from it. If there was one person to do it, it had to be him. I could hear what I wanted for the track and I knew that he could do it. So I asked him if he’d have a look at it for me. I rang him and it was 9am in LA. He was like [croaky LA voice] “hello…”. Amazing. It’s the same with the makeup range – there’s always a way around things. Just ask. I drive people mad.
Was it Diplo or nothing? Was there a Plan B for the song?
If he’d said no I probably would have had somebody look at it.
What’s the song about?
It’s a bit like a story. For a long time it was called ‘Baby In The Corner’. I never saw it as a single actually, I always thought of it as an album track. We had the first chorus, the melody and all of that, and I lyriced the chorus and then that led me to the verses. I thought ‘Yo-Yo’ was the first single, but taking a step back and looking at it with a wider eye ‘Beat Of My Drum’ seemed liked the one to go with first.
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