Ruel takes YouTube Music Nights underground at Mood on the Roof

Ruel comes down off the roof into a room that’s already rammed wall to wall, fans stacked in on every side and the front row more or less standing on the kick drum, and by the time the band drops into “Hate Myself” there’s a camera riding the neck of his guitar and a robot arm sweeping through the haze above the pit, a little like a Boiler Room set somebody handed a film crew.

YouTube Music Nights has sent Jack Antonoff home to the Stone Pony with Bleachers and put Kacey Musgraves on the floorboards at Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas, and now it’s pulled up at our warehouse in Glebe for Ruel’s first Mood on the Roof.

We’ve been running Mood on the Roof out of the Mude studio since 2020, and for most of that time the films have lived up on the garden above it, one artist and one take with the skyline of Sydney’s southern CBD in the background, while the warehouse underneath, cyc wall and all, never got a look in.

We’d been itching to shoot something grimier down there for ages, and the first time we sat down with Ruel’s team at Flagrant Artists and the YouTube Music crew, it turned out everyone had the same room in their heads. The references mostly consisted of the grainy 90s New York basement shows that mostly survive now on camcorder tapes, where the crowd’s so close to the band they end up part of the set.

The one Ruel’s team kept coming back to was the All-American Rejects’ House Party Tour, where the band behind “Dirty Little Secret” spent more than a year playing fans’ living rooms and skating rinks across the States, with Tyson Ritter pitching the whole thing as a swing at ticket prices and saying live music shouldn’t be “a District 1 Hunger Games luxury”.

Ruel was born in London and grew up in Sydney, where at sixteen he became the youngest solo artist ever to win an ARIA, and nearly a decade in he’s past three billion streams with a catalogue that has Denzel Curry on the “Painkiller” remix and a good chunk of the new record co-written with Kenny Beats, the producer behind Denzel’s Unlocked.

That record is Kicking My Feet & Screaming, the darker half of a pair he split out of more than 200 songs, and the warehouse was one of the first rooms to hear it live, with “Dazed & Confused” and “Painkiller” dropped into the set for the day-ones.

Grungy shows like this usually end up on a shaky handycam, all blown-out highlights and Hi8 wobble, and we wanted that lo-fi, in-your-face feel with proper production hiding underneath it, so the robot arm we rigged for Mood on the Roof Nights came downstairs as the main camera.

The camera moves are keyframed ahead of time and blocked out with Ruel and choreographer Zoee Marsh, which meant that during “Don’t Say That” (the song he held back from Kicking My Feet and teased as its 52-second outro) the arm could glide through the room and find him on cue.

Before the closer, “In Your Mind”, Ruel strapped on a Snorricam, a rig that came straight out of some Dijon references we’d been trading since the first call. Two Icelandic brothers built the first Snorricam in 1996 for a Maul Girls punk video (Darren Aronofsky later made it a signature in Requiem for a Dream), and with the camera strapped to his chest, his face stays locked dead centre while the whole room swings around behind him.

Getting in was invite-only, fans who’d applied through a questionnaire plus guests from both teams, and everyone was told on the way through the door that this was a film shoot as much as a gig and that phones were staying in pockets, which is about the quickest way we know to get a whole room locked in on the band and feeding off each other.

The full show is on Ruel’s channel from 2 October at 5pm Sydney time, with standalone cuts of “Faking Smiles” and “In Your Mind” and a run of Shorts dropping over the weeks after, while YouTube Music takes footage from the night to billboards in the US from 15 October.

Ruel spends October carrying the new record through rooms like Electric Brixton in London and La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris, then comes home in November to open Benson Boone’s Australian arena run, three nights of it at Afterpay Arena in Sydney (Benson played our roof back before “Beautiful Things”).

Watch the full show on Ruel’s channel, and there’s more on Ruel and the set on the Mood on the Roof show page. For more on how we film live music, see our pieces on Winston Surfshirt at Mood on the Roof Nights and Gretta Ray for Amazon Music.