Q&A: Rob Da Bank on curating the soundtrack to Forza Horizon 2

TMN caught up with UK-based Bestival Founder and BBC Radio 1 DJ, Rob Da Bank (Robert John Graham), who created the music playlists and soundtrack for the Forza Horizon game series. Bank takes us through his process and explains why not being a gamer himself was an advantage.

How did the process work when you were curating the artists Forza Horizon 2?

I suppose it was a bit easier this time because we’d already done Forza Horizon 1 last year; I’ve never worked on a game so I wasn’t entire sure what I’d do but we got through it and I think we did a really good job and it went down well. So the second time around we kind of knew what was going to work, which was a mixture of upfront, really new tunes that we thought were still going to have life in six months, two years, or even five years’ time. We also mixed it up with some classics and more vintage sounding things, it’s sort of like when I curate Bestival or my radio show, it’s trying to guess what’s going to be hanging around for a while and what will be big.

Take us through the process.

I spend all day listening to music. I have tonnes of it sent to me digitally and physically so I spend all day filtering through that music, whether it be for the show or if I’m looking for bands for the festival, my record label [Sunday Best] or any TV or film stuff that I’m doing so I always have my musical brain switched on. With Forza we spent a couple of months filtering through all of that and with some things that would instantly stand out we’d be like, ‘Okay, we got to have something like Jungle who are doing well in the UK and around the world’, they’re going to be one of the biggest indie bands of the year so we need tracks from the likes of them and big dance tunes like Oliver Dollar or Route 94. It’s no more complicated than that. For us, it’s purely about getting the playlist together and dividing them up into the radio stations to provide a different vibe for each one. No different from doing my radio show.

What made you decide to come back for the second Forza Horizon title?

I love a challenge and I’ve done a lot in music in the past 20 years but not a video game. I’ve been open with Ralph [Fulton, Design Director] at Playground that I don’t play computer games myself so I see it as a sort of double challenge and I don’t see a problem with that. I think it’s actually a strength that it’s not my medium. My forte is programing music for people to listen to in lots of different environments so I love that challenge. It’s like with booking a festival, I have to try and guess what people might like and we’re really trumped with the feedback we got from the first one. We didn’t know what gamers would say about our choices but we’re really pleased with it so we came back for a second one! Also, Playground have almost doubled the amount of music stations in the game and also added these label stations as well so it’s really exciting.

What is a ‘label station’?

As well as the normal radio stations in the game, we decided having some sort of handpicked and curated stations from some of our favourite record labels. […] I think it’s Hospital, Innovative Leisure and Ninja Tunes. We’re massive fans of those labels so we gave them the choice of what they brought to the table but we were a bit worried that they might go for their lesser known tracks, but it ended up really well and they all even have their own unique DJ.

Getting synched to a franchise like Forza is a big coo. Suddenly an artist has an extra million people listening to their tracks. How do you think this affects the artists?

Like I said, I’m not a gamer so if you see it from my perspective then it looks like an amazing thing. I hope now that Forza Horizon is in its second game we can establish ourselves as a real music brand, let alone an amazing game. I think for an artist to have a link to that is strong; it’s a young, cool brand and the music reflects that.

Did the game creators give you any guidelines for the playlists, or was it 100% your choice?

They are involved. We direct the general flow of it and come to them with long lists, at least two or three times the actual music that gets into the game, and go through it with them during the play testing of the game. There are certain bass-heavy tracks that don’t work well with the engine sounds as well as certain frequencies that don’t work and that’s something we don’t really have any control over. Ralph from PlayGround, who’s sort of in charge of it all, is a real music fan and there are tracks on here that he specifically said, ‘Oh man it’d be amazing if that was on there’ and I like that, I don’t want to be selfish and say this is what we’re going to do. We want to make sure we’re doing the right thing and the great thing is the guys from Playground are playing it right through the development cycle and giving us constant feedback.

If there ever is a Forza Horizon 3, would you jump on board again?

I’d love to. We’ve just set up a new music supervision company and we’ve just got our first film score. It’s totally the direction I want to go for. I think the game’s going to do really well. It looks like there has been some fantastic development since the first one.

The massive open world racing game Forza Horizon 2 is set for release in Australia on the 2nd of October. Click here to listen to the Best Of Forza Horizon 2 playlist ahead of its launch.