Calling from Hiroshima, Bombay Bicycle Club guitarist Jamie MacColl is excited. “I can’t believe it’s taken us this long to get to Australia. I mean, I came and did a rugby tour when I was 16. I played a bit of AFL too but, fuck, you have to be so fit for that.”
Bombay Bicycle Club skipped the 2012 Big Day Out, but they’re coming to lend Elbow a hand with their Australian tour, with a couple of their own shows thrown in for good measure.
“Big Day Out were having so many troubles this year, I’m glad we’re doing our own headline tour in a way. And I guess we’ve had fans constantly on our Facebook and Twitter saying, ‘We don’t want to pay $90 to see Elbow.’”
You’d think teaming with a group of industry veterans (Elbow will celebrate their 21st anniversary this year) would have a young guitarist frothing, but MacColl let slip that he might have a bit of homework to do before the tour. “I don’t really… I mean, I haven’t listened to their records, let’s just leave it at that but I have seen them live and they’re really good. They’re very epic live.”
“Having not come out [to Australia] as a band, we’re not sure what the reception will be like. With the internet you can interact with people on the other side of the world without even going there, so I know we have a few fans out there. I guess we’ll just do these shows and see if anyone turns up.”
There’s a certain British charm that comes through MacColl’s bashful demeanour that seems beyond his age and the fact he and his band mates are on their fourth gap year from high school isn’t missed. He bursts out a laugh, “That’s exactly what I’m telling my parents! We’re doing stuff that a lot of bands do on their first album, like going to all these new places for the first time really and it’s still all feeling so fresh for us.”
Having formed to play songs on their school assembly when they were 15, MacColl is joined by Ed Nash (younger brother of Kate) on bass, Suren de Saram on drums and Jack Steadman on vocals and guitar. “We’ve got on more as the years go by, which I think can be unusual in bands and A Different Kind of Fix was by far the most fun to record. The first album was probably the most communal in terms of song writing but this one was the most communal in the studio, particularly because on the first record we were so young and really didn’t have a clue what was going on half the time. It was just a stressful six weeks of recording but this time it felt like we had that freedom to mess around and experiment with things… Hopefully not in a self-indulgent way.”
Bombay Bicycle Club has released one album a year since their debut in 2009; I Had the Blues but I Shook Them Loose. With hit single “Shuffle” making an appearance in this year’s Hottest 100, many would believe most recent LP A Different Kind of Fix [2011] is the band’s first album effort. “That’s the thing, ‘Always Like This’ [2009] was sort of a big hit in the UK but nowhere else so it’s quite nice to go to places and have that not to be our biggest song.”
He continues, “Fans are very picky, so we were more worried about not sounding the same than sounding the same. We’d already thrown a curve ball in making a folk album [2010’s Flaws] but it’s not a conscious decision; it’s just sort of what comes. I think it’s reflective of being young and having a taste in music that’s constantly changing and I guess generally being that age where they’re still trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Instead of figuring out what kind of job we want to do we’re more like trying to figure out what our characteristic, defining sort of sound is.”
“I mean, they’re all quite different from one another really. Although the first two albums are very different, they’re both centred around the guitar. With A Different Kind of Fix, the guitar is just another instrument instead of being used as the main song writing tool. A lot of the songs start off with loops like on “Lights Out, Words Gone”, which is also my favourite song on the album. They don’t have much guitar… Being the guitarist, I don’t know what that means. Maybe I don’t have a job anymore.”
MacColl clarifies, “When we talk about Bombay Bicycle Club, we’re really talking about Jack’s writings. We all do write our own songs but none have really been recorded for an album yet. My songwriting might not be what Bombay Bicycle Club sounds like, you know what I mean? And, to be honest, songwriting is such a personal thing I don’t know if I’d want to have my thoughts and feelings out there in the way that Jack does. A lot his songs are quite heartfelt.”
So if the band follow the unintentional pattern of releasing one album a year, is there are new one in the works? “We have been vaguely talking about the next album. I thought I had a clear idea of what it would sound like, but the songs Jack’s written so far have been very different, even more personal. There’s a couple with a lot of big guitar riffs, sort of heavier than anything we’ve ever done before but then there’s a couple of songs more sort of electronic, dance orientated. So now I have no idea… maybe we’ll make a double album or something!”
Check out the details of the tour here.
