Bombay Bicycle Club are yet another guitar-heavy indie outfit however they are a band capable of such crisp edginess that they stand apart from everyone else. After first attracting attention by winning The Road To V in 2006, the BBC became a standard fixture on the festival circuit, receiving a torrent of publicity focused on the age (average 16) and immense potential of these school-friends from London. Since finishing their A2s last year, the band has taken on the music world, keen to absorb everything it has to offer whilst sharing their own distinctive take on being young, romantic, and restive in the capital.
Long-awaited first album, I Had The Blues But I Cut Them Loose, is testimony to their ever-growing skill in using simple accompaniments to offset quirky riffs. Instrumentally it is tremendously tight, both in moments of flourish taking the listener’s full attention and supporting Jack Steadman’s cloudy vocals. It also sees them being more adventurous in production than in their earlier EPs. As MacColl explains, before their “recordings were more a straight take, stripped down, just playing. The newer stuff is more of a return to how Jack (Steadman) would record in his bedroom. Layering things up a bit, adding unusual sounds.” Most tracks alternate flurries of sound, sometimes bizarre, with moments of quiet simplicity. Whilst impressive on first-hearing, the band’s real strength is in having a depth to their music that makes it continually interesting to listen to.
MacColl is fairly scathing about the majority of British indie music frequenting the airwaves at the moment; describing it as “pretty crap, there’s not a lot of space for it in the public’s minds”. Their distinctive sound is apparently influenced partially by Canadian and American indie music, hip-hop and folk, whilst Steadman is thankfully purposefully avoiding “just singing about being in the music industry”.
With Paris, Amsterdam, Leeds and Reading mentioned through the interview, it’s clear that they really do “still love every festival”. However, always keen to seek out something different, the band embarked on The Tour For Lulu early this summer. They posted a notice on their website asking fans for suggestions of novel venues around the country, saying that they had been blacklisted from various venues. Whilst their live shows are pretty energetic, this was apparently a slight over-exaggeration by Steadman. Nonetheless, it allowed them to go to places they hadn’t been to before, and wouldn’t usually feature on tour itineraries. Like the bottom of a Devon mineshaft, described by MacColl as “interesting and terrifying at the same time”. However, “there aren’t that many good venues in the South-West”, so the mineshaft it was. Though “it is one that’s open to the public, not one that no-one’s ever been down.” The tour also included an abandoned castle near Manchester, although for some reason they declined the offer of medieval clothing.
Oh, and the name – why Lulu? “When we played at the Great Escape, we went to Brighton Aquarium the day after we played, there was one of the talks and a feeding of the sea turtle (called Lulu) and we found it quite amusing for some reason. Our record label tried to suggest a few names that were a bit crap, so we came up with one ourselves.”
Bombay Bicycle Club are now focusing on achieving that long-hyped potential; for the moment promoting their recent single Magnet – its minimalist introduction giving way to trademark borderline-warbling vocals, catchy riff and low swooping backing keys, in the hope of “moving on to bigger and better things”. They are also palpably excited about the prospect of touring as far afield as Japan later this year, as well as looking to record an acoustic album. And if the final track on the album, The Giantess, is anything to go by, the band’s capacity for more gentle and mature acoustic expression needs to be tapped.
However, will a band formed through school friendships really continue to hold together? The response is an emphatic yes. They consider each other a “second family. The chemistry’s still good, we spend so much time together. I don’t see us splitting up.” Which is good news for their ever-increasing accruement of fans, impressed that they we are living up to the hype.