Joe's Big Toe

Bombay Bicycle Club

Feb­ru­ary 11^th and after a week in action, the NME Awards tour is in full swing. Tonight it’s Birmingham’s turn to play host to the onslaught of Indie rock and judging by the num­ber of people, young­sters and adults alike who are already brav­ing the freez­ing con­di­tions when we arrive, it’s not hard to see why the tour has sold out all but three of its four­teen dates. Bom­bay Bicycle Club are amongst the line-up which also boasts the Mac­ca­bees, The Drums, and London’s electro-rock duo The Big Pink, who are already warm­ing up the ruddy-cheeked mem­bers of the audi­ence as we pick our way through towards the back rooms where Suren and Ed are enjoy­ing a quiet beer before its their turn to hit the stage. They con­fess to being a little tired at this point in the tour, but there are some smiles when they see the don­key piñata we brought for them to pose with. Before they can get down to some ser­i­ous mule-whacking though, we have a couple of questions….

You just came back from a pre-show gig at Birm­ing­ham Uni­ver­sity, how did it go?
Suren: “Well, it was quite good…”
Ed: “We kept fuck­ing up in little ways that made us look very dumb!”
Suren: “It was quite weird because we were play­ing in a Cafet­eria; there was a lot of noise from the crowd.”
Ed: “Yeah, and half the people were there to eat lunch and the other half were watch­ing us.”
So are you more com­fort­able play­ing in a smal­ler envir­on­ment?
Ed: “Yeah, any­where but a cafet­eria though. It is nice to go to Uni’s and places like that, just for people who can’t come to the show.”
Suren: “We’ll be doing a few things like that dur­ing the tour, we’ve played in lib­rar­ies and just ran­dom places like that.”

As a band you star­ted quite young, do you feel like you’ve had a good head start in the music industry?
Ed: “Yeah I think we have, most people reach the stage we’re at now when they’re in their early twen­ties, so we’ve got a good amount of time.”

Have you ever found that other bands have been threatened by how much younger you are?
Suren: “I guess some bands prob­ably get kind of arsey, they think we’re just stu­pid little kids.”
Ed: “That’s fair enough, we are stu­pid little kids! We find most people are friendly with us, but we just play music and hang out.”

You’re known for hav­ing quite a laid-back atti­tude towards your music. Do you feel that it’s some­thing that can be passed on to fledgling musi­cians?
Suren: “We’re prob­ably a little bit too laid back to be hon­est. They should find a middle ground.”
Ed: “Yeah, they prob­ably shouldn’t be this laid back about it because they won’t get any­where, we were very lucky. We are very focused when it comes to play­ing and writ­ing music, and everything else.”

Apart from win­ning “Road to V” was there a defin­ing moment when you real­ised “Fuck, I’m fam­ous”?
Ed: “Well, we entered Road to V more as a joke and then we for­got that we’d entered, but we just happened to win. It didn’t even feel like a defin­ing moment then, only recently have we real­ised that it was big­ger than we thought it was at the time.”
Suren: “But even now we still don’t feel like we are fam­ous.”
Ed: “There’s been defin­ing moments in our career that have been amaz­ing, and we’re thank­ful for hav­ing done them.”

Do you still get to do the nor­mal side of things like going out with friends?
Ed: “Yeah, all the time. When we’re not play­ing in the band we’re still friends with the same people we’ve always been friends with, prior to the band. It’s just like the band is a job we have, we do it and then we go home, like we all still live with our par­ents. It’s still fairly normal.”

Ed, you joined the band when you met them at a funeral, how did that hap­pen?
Ed: “Well that’s just some­thing we say in inter­views really; I did know the guys before­hand, but we were all at a funeral, and they had to play a gig the next day. I knew them fairly well and I can play gui­tar so they asked me to play bass just to fill in, and after that they asked me to join.”

You’re play­ing a fun­draiser for the Haiti earth­quake in a couple of weeks, is that some­thing you per­son­ally wanted to be a part of?
Suren: “It’s def­in­itely some­thing that we wanted to do. We get asked to do quite a lot of char­ity gigs that we cant do coz’ we’re always up and down, but this is one that we were really inter­ested in doing.”
Ed: “Well after a dis­aster like that you’ve got to help out any­way you can. And this is some­thing we can do fairly eas­ily, so we have to do it to make a difference.”

And are you get­ting along well with the other bands on the NME tour?
Ed: “Yeah we love them, they’re all really nice. We usu­ally go and have a few drinks with them most nights.”
Suren: “We some­times have DJ sets after­wards as well so the other band will come along and they’ll be like…”
Ed: “Boogie-ing to the mixes!”

Some of the songs for “I Had the Blues…”were writ­ten a few years in advance, do you think there’ll be a more pres­sured approach for the second album?
Ed: “Some of the songs are about four or five years old, but some newer ones were writ­ten at the time of record­ing. I think there can be the nor­mal second album syn­drome, where you’ve got 15 years to write one album and then one year to write the second, but I don’t think we would find that kind of pres­sure.”
Suren: “Well we’ve got a few ideas already for songs, so they’re already com­ing along.”
Ed: “I don’t think we’re a band that would ever rush any­thing any­way; we’re so laid back it could take years, I don’t think even the record com­pany would be able to make us do it!”

Any other plans after the NME tour?
Suren: “Well we’re just about to fin­ish record­ing a new acous­tic album which was meant to be fin­ished quite a long time ago, in fact I think we’re sup­posed to fin­ish it like, tomor­row! But that should be com­ing out in the sum­mer.”
Ed: “I think we’ll do a nice little tour of that as well, hope­fully in some nice ven­ues. We like to play in churches, places you wouldn’t expect a band to play. All these big­ger ven­ues are the same really, they lack soul.”
Suren: “We did an acous­tic tour before, and we asked our fans to sug­gest some ran­dom places for us to play, so we ended up play­ing on a beach, down a mine shaft, in a castle, and it was the fun­nest tour ever.”

Any plans to con­quer Amer­ica yet?
Ed: “I’d like to go to Amer­ica first, really.”
Suren: “We might actu­ally be record­ing in Amer­ica, we’ve been talk­ing to a pro­du­cer over there. We won’t actu­ally be play­ing over there yet, but hope­fully we will soon”.

Jack and Jamie are now in the room again, and as a com­plete group they cer­tainly seem to become more fired up as show-time approaches.
As they take to the stage and imme­di­ately com­mence with their set
opener; “Emer­gency Con­tra­cept­ive Blues” is undoubtedly the begin­ning of the most ener­getic live per­form­ance I (and most likely a lot of people) have seen the band play to date. Jack in par­tic­u­lar, thrashes around like a man try­ing to shake a bat out of his hair and in the quieter moments, looks as though any­thing could set him off again. Suren and Ed exhibit none of the leth­argy we saw earlier. Instead they dis­play such enjoy­ment at what they do that when Jack assures the audi­ence (as bands always seem to), that they have been the best of the tour so far, it’s dif­fi­cult not to believe him. Des­pite the amount of oomph they throw into their set, it sounds water-tight, and not once dur­ing Jack’s phys­ical tirades do I hear him miss a note. All the favour­ites are thrown in; their most pop-friendly num­ber, “Open House” is greeted with a riot­ous response and festival-favourite “Can­cel on Me” her­alds the first of a steady stream of crowd surfers. But it’s “Always Like This” that steals the show, and ensures the band can leave the stage know­ing they’ve conquered another city. They aren’t head­lining the show, which is brought to a fire-breathing con­clu­sion with an indefatig­able per­form­ance by The Mac­ca­bees, but I don’t doubt that they will be back here soon with a show of their very own; these kids are going to be around for a while!

By Tom Lawlor