[Exclusive] Royal Pirates First Step in Borneo, Malaysia

May 4, 2015July 31, 2019 Miza

It’s their first time promoting their mini album in Malaysia and their first stop is the land below the wind, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah! Royal Pirates received the biggest and warmest welcome at the airport when they arrived and were so pumped up seeing their fans. We managed to meet and interview Moon, Sooyoon and James before performing their first showcase in Malaysia.

Q : What makes Royal Pirates different from other bands in K-POP?

James : First of all, I think we are more organic, we met each other in natural way, we are a band before we ever thought about it. First thing to us is the music, same as for most of the artists but in Korea most of the companies kinda created the bands, for us it’s more like grass roots. We had to do a lot of things on our own at the beginning. Because of that we started off writing our own music before training professionally. Our focus was more on the song writing as a whole and now I think we are getting round up as artists.

Q : What was your first impression of each other?

Moon : When I first met Sooyoon he looked really quiet and smart. The more I got to know him, if he gets comfortable with people he is really outgoing. And James, he is just super tall, I never see any Asia guy that tall, he had really long hair so he looked like a Latin in the movies.

James : For me, when I first met Moon, he could speak English so well, it was shocking. I think he was eating at Burger King that time. I thought this guy was super Korean but he is as American as I am. I realized as open minded as I thought I was, you can’t judge a book by its cover. And he has also a very deep manly voice, that was kinda shocking. Sooyoon was so skinny and he was wearing pink shirt, he was an amazing drummer — the first time we met, we jammed so, we cannot judge a book by its cover.

Sooyoon : When I first met Moon, he was very outgoing and he was very talented, he likes music so I think I can do music with him. And James was wearing like sport shorts and tank top I think, he was like a basketball player because he is really tall and wearing jersey.

When being asked about the Malaysian fans :

Moon : We know we have Malaysian fans but we didn’t know we have so many fans here. We are really grateful and thankful.

Sooyoon : We think Malaysian fans are a little more aggressive, they show their support more aggressively than our Korean fans. Malaysian fans treat us like their friends, very nice, very kind, very gentle. They are like our close friends.

Message for Malaysian fans.

Moon : We are very thankful that they have waited such a long time for us to come here and we are very happy to meet them here. We hope to have fun together during the shows. Seeing their passion makes us want to come back here. Just seeing how excited they are, definitely recharges us. The whole experience in Malaysia so far is way better than we expected because we honestly don’t know that much about Malaysia yet, but the whole experience here is very awesome.

Before the interview session ended, Moon learned how to say “I love you” in Malay especially for their Malaysian fans, so be prepared to hear that a lot from him!

They performed a total of 4 songs for the showcase in KK : “Shout Out”, “Seoul Hillbilly”, “Haru” and “Love Toxic”. They also performed one song for their encore stage which is the English version of “Drawing The Line”.

When they get back to Korea they will resume their mini album promotion shows and at the same time they are currently working on for a new album.