Hadouken! became a roaring success almost overnight, pushing the envelope further than many other bands in the Music Industry at the moment, and hopping backwards and forwards from numerous genre to keep fans on their toes, whilst continuously adding more appeal to attract new listeners. Electronic Arts has a strong track-record of signing up hot groups to bring cutting edge music to its videogame products, and Hadouken! is the latest band to strike a deal with the large Third Party publisher/developer. Cubed3 was given the chance to catch up with the group for a quick chat.
Adam Riley, Senior Editor at Cubed3: Can you briefly tell us some info about your group, like when you were formed, who you all are, if your name indeed came from Street Fighter, etc?
Hadouken! We formed in 2006. James, Dan and Alice were all at University together. Nick is Dan’s brother and Chris was at music college with Nick. We released our first album ‘Music for an Accelerated Culture’ in May 2008 and our second, ‘For the Masses,’ came out in January this year. The band is named after the move in Street Fighter just because we loved the game and thought that it would make a unique name.
AR: Its becoming very difficult nowadays to classify styles of music, but what would you say your music is most similar to, and what influences your tracks?
Hadouken! I think we try to keep it simple, avoid really detailed genre divisions and just describe what we do as dance/rock. When recording, our biggest influences at the moment are probably big crossover dance acts like Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Leftfield, but when we play live we have a more traditional live band set up with influences from bands like Rage Against the Machine.
AR: Are you pleased with how well your second album has been selling so far?
Hadouken! Absolutely. We released the record on our own label, so we never really knew what to expect, but the fans have reacted to it really well and they’ve gone out there and spread the word about it for us.
AR: With The Prodigy making such a strong comeback lately, and Pendulum riding high in the charts, do you ever have concerns that consumers may see Hadouken! merely as more of the same ? How are you trying to carve out your own corner of the market?
Hadouken! Not really. We’ve got massive respect for both those bands and are influenced by both in some ways but I don’t think anyone could say that we sound exactly the same as either. We’re very confident that we’ve got our own distinct sound and that in actual fact there are still a lot less bands doing the kind of thing we/Prodigy/Pendulum are doing than there are standard Indie Rock or Punk/Hardcore bands.
AR: Your first album saw great success over in Japan is that a particular market you imagined cracking so early in your career? Have you seen similar success in other Asian markets, like South Korea, for example?
Hadouken! We never predicted that we would do well in Japan, but we’re really pleased it turned out that way. We love spending time in Japan and we love playing over there. We haven’t seen any similar success in other Asian markets yet, but if the opportunity came to get out there more on tour and promote the record we would be very keen to do it!
AR: Considering you tend to deal with the marketing aspect of the group yourselves, what sort of techniques do you think have worked the best? Do you have any other clever publicity schemes in the offing you care to talk about?
Hadouken! The main ‘marketing technique’ we use is just to keep in constant contact with our fans. We all use things like Facebook and Twitter anyway, so it’s natural for us to use those tools with the band, to update people about what we’ve got going on and also to hear what our fans think about what we’re doing and where they want us to play, etc. We don’t have the budget for big TV ads or anything like that, but we’ve found that this more basic approach works very well.
We get asked a lot about a video we put online last year called ‘100 Greatest Hits of Youtube in 4 Minutes,’ which was a compilation of viral videos with our track ‘M.A.D’ as the soundtrack. It went on to get over 5 million views, which introduced a lot of new people to our music, but we never set out to make it as a marketing tool, we just made it for a laugh because we’re always killing time watching stupid stuff on YouTube and thought our fans would like it. The most effective stuff is always going to be stuff that is done genuinely andspontaneously like that rather than carefully planned in a boardroom meeting.
AR: Following the critically acclaimed remixes of Bloc Party and Sugababes, do you have plans to take on any other bands tunes, giving them your own feel?
Hadouken! We’re always open to doing new remixes, but it has to be the right artist at the right time. At the moment James is busy writing tracks for album three, so the remixes might have to be put on hold for a little while.
AR: What is next on the cards in terms of touring?
Hadouken! It’s summer festival time for us now, so we’ve got one or two shows every weekend for the next few months. After thats finished we’ll decide whether to go out on another headline tour later in the year or whether to get straight on with recording album 3.
AR: Are many of the group into videogames? If so, what are the main platforms you tend to play on?
Hadouken! Yeah all of us are into videogames to different extents. We have a Playstation 3 and two DS’s on the tour bus and an Xbox and a Wii at home so we have pretty much all bases covered.
AR: How did you get into an agreement with EA? Was it them that approached you, or vice versa?
Hadouken! EA approached us as they thought our music would work well on the soundtrack to their games, which was really exciting for us as we’re big fans of some of the titles that EA have released and it will hopefully give us a way to reach out to some new fans in the gaming world.
AR: Are you able to talk about any details regarding the deal, for instance how many games your tracks will feature on, and if music in EA games will be old tracks, remixes of old tracks or some new material, etc?
Hadouken! It’s still early days at the moment so we can’t be sure of the details just yet, but there have been a few titles mentioned that will feature our tracks later in the year that we’re really excited about but people will have to wait and see.
AR: When can we expect to see the first EA game featuring Hadouken! in the credits?
Hadouken! Before the end of 2010, for sure.
AR: Cubed3 is a Nintendo website, so clearly that’s our main focus, so what are your thoughts on systems like the Wii and DS? Are you all prone to playing a bit of Mario Kart or Wii Sports from time-to-time?
Hadouken! Absolutely! I live with Nick and Chris and we have a Wii in the house with both Mario Kart and Wii Sports. I really like the Wii system because it provides a completely different experience to the other big consoles. Nintendo has always been about having the best gameplay and simply being the most fun games to play and not getting too hung up onhaving the most insane graphics, etc, which is really important. Too many games are trying to be the most technically impressive and losing track of what people play games for in the first place.
AR: What are your thoughts on how Nintendo has tried to make gaming appeal to a far wider audience than before? Would you say the name Nintendo has become widely accepted now, or does it still maintain kiddy tag from in the 1990s?
[b]Hadouken! I think they’ve been really successful. It maybe still has a kiddy tag but in a good way. Nintendo games are light-hearted and innocent, but sometimes thats what you want. You don’t always want to be running round with an Uzi mowing down zombies. If anything, because of that they can now reach out to an older audience than their competitors. I know most of my parents generation would rather play tennis on the Wii than Call of Duty or similar.
AR: There have already been some amazing games released this year. What have you all been playing the most lately?
Hadouken! At the moment we’ve been playing a lot of FIFA as everyone was pretty hyped about the World Cup, but also Battlefield Bad Company, Call of Duty and Assassins Creed 2.
AR: Have you ever considered, or would you ever consider, taking on some classic gaming tunes and remixing them in a Hadouken! style? If so, what sort of music from days gone by would you pick?
Hadouken! We’ve never really thought about this but I love the old Streets of Rage soundtracks, so it would be a lot of fun to play about with them.
AR: Michael Jackson helped compose some of the soundtrack for old Sonic the Hedgehog games, and even 2 Unlimited got in on the act of making music for a SNES game years ago. Would Hadouken! ever fancy doing something similar, and if so, what genre of game would your soundtrack likely be best suited to?
Hadouken! Composing music specifically for a game would be a really interesting challenge for us. I think it would be really cool for us to have a go at doing something for a racing game!
