Bombay Bicycle Club

When the music industry becomes enamoured with youthful talent, it often ends badly. Kids who are yet to realise how utterly disposable they are, become industry cash cows and often end up tossed mercilessly in the bargain bins of popular culture. Thank goodness then for the sense of Bombay Bicycle Club, who at the age of 16 forced themselves into the music loving public’s consciousness when they won Channel 4’s Road to V competition in 2006. Despite the surge of attention from industry, press and fans alike, they refused to get rushed into anything and instead decided to juggle school with band life. School’s finished now and the band released their debut album, I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, in July. They’re about to embark on a tour which includes a visit to Hastings’ Crypt on Tuesday December 15, and we caught up with guitarist Jamie MacColl for a quick natter.

E: How are you doing today?
JM: OK. I just woke up (it’s around 11.50am)

E: You’re about to embark on pretty big tour which takes in Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, Tokyo – have you been to any of these places before?
JM: We’ve done Paris and Amsterdam – those are the only gigs we’ve done outside of the UK actually.

E: How are you feeling about the Tokyo one?
JM: Yeah, pretty excited. It’s a bit surreal I guess, to travel the world to do this.

E: Is it the first time you’ve been out of Europe?
JM: Yeah, but I’m more excited about the European ones for some reason.

E: Have you played in Hastings before?
JM: No we haven’t. I was trying to figure out where Hastings was, then I realised it was in East Sussex because it said so in Peep Show the other week.

E: They sell good bread there. It’s been a year since you left school right?
JM: Yeah, exactly a year pretty much.

E: How are things going now you can dedicate more time to the band?
JM: Yeah, it kind of goes in cycles in how busy we are and that sort of thing. At the moment we’re pretty relaxed, even though we should be writing the second album. But yeah, as soon as we left school it was pretty mental, in that we went and did a big tour and then went straight into the studio to record the album. So it was a bit of a shock. It’s changed so much since we left school. We’re a proper band now I guess.

E: Was it difficult juggling the band and school life?
JM: Yeah, in a way. But in a weird sort of way school always took priority, which is a bit lame. I don’t know, I think we were managed really well and were never put under any pressure to leave school. I think if we’d left school when we were 16, after we won Road To V and got a bit of interest, it would have been such a bad idea. Apart from anything, staying at school and finishing allowed us to develop a lot musically as well. Not being rushed made us a better band.

E: Were any of you tempted to go to University?
JM: Yeah. We’re all quite academic as well. I’d still like to go at some point, just not now.

E: You released your first album this year (I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose). Did it feel like the culmination of a lot of hard work? You broke through in 2006 so it’s been over three years in the making.
JM: Yeah, I was just happy it happened in the end. I didn’t care what people thought or how many it sold because it had just taken so long for it to happen. At one point I thought, this is never going to happen and we’re just waiting forever trying to release an album. But yeah, it was so exciting when we got the physical copy in your hands. So yeah, it’s what you said really – it’s like a culmination of years of hard work I guess.

E: How was it working with Jim Abbiss?
JM: We started working with him in 2006. He got hold of some of our demos very early on and he was one of the first people to get in touch. By the time we got to recording the album, we’d been working with him for two years and we knew each other well. It was good. At first when we went into the studio with him as these naive 16 year olds, it was a disaster. We knew bugger all about recording and playing our instruments. If we’d have left school at 16, that’s what would have happened. We would have gone into the studio to record an album and not have known where to start. That’s a good example of why we decided to stay at school.

E: How did he get in contact?
JM: My dad’s a musician and he’d worked with Jim about ten years ago, and he said, ‘Oh you should listen to my son’s band’ and gave him my phone number. And that’s how he contacted me. But it was weird because the Arctic Monkeys album had just come out and he’d produced that and Kasabian, and he’d had quite a few number one albums in the space of a year, so there was quite a lot of success hanging over us.

E: When you on the Road To V competition, did you feel there any initial pressure to get an album out quicker?
JM: Yeah, and I think for us as well, we were like, well should we release an album now. When people are talking about you, I think a lot of the time you can believe the hype, which is a mistake I think, for the most part, because, well, it just is. But we got over that pretty quickly and realised it wasn’t the right time.

E: Just finally, what can Hastings expect from a Bombay Bicycle Club gig?
JM: Well, I don’t know. We pride ourselves on playing live and that’s probably more important to us than playing in a studio or anything else. It’ll be a very exciting gig – we jump around a lot, fall off the stage and try and incite the crowd to something or other. In our last gig we had someone carted away in an ambulance, so hopefully something like that won’t happen. But yeah, it’ll be an exciting gig.