Bombay Bicycle Club: ‘People were still calling us landfill indie’

Now comfortably in their second-era stride, Noughties indie rock’s most celebrated escapees talk to Mark Beaumont about class, Keir Starmer, and getting Damon Albarn to noodle around on their new album

How we are: the reunited Bombay Bicycle Club have vowed not to take themselves as seriously as the intense teenagers of 2009 (Tom Oxley)

With his shaven head, bookish round glasses and professor-like intonations, Bombay Bicycle Club singer Jack Steadman is just a utility belt, moustache and pith helmet away from resembling Phileas Fogg. He has the adventuring spirit, too. The band’s global textures were inspired by his travels in Turkey and India. He once wrote and recorded a solo album during a round-the-world expedition by land and sea, setting up portable studios in cabins on the Trans-Siberian Railway and Pacific cargo ships. And his art has kept pace with his inexorable forward motion. Geographically and creatively, staying still is not an option.

“Evolve or die,” he nods intently, as if, mid-interview, he’s stumbled across his life’s essential ethos. The group’s red-bearded guitarist, Jamie MacColl, agrees. “We were probably, at least from our generation, one of the earliest genre-less bands,” he argues, settled at a bench outside the north London rehearsal studio where the band – completed by bassist Ed Nash and drummer Suren de Saram – are preparing for further globetrotting adventures on a tour of the UK and Europe. “Because we made four albums within five years that are all quite different to one another, 10 years ago, we’re not bound down by genre in a way that a lot of our contemporaries were.”

Musically, Bombay Bicycle Club are born wanderers. Signed and celebrated before they’d even left school, they spent their early years charting routes from the jovial indie pop of early tunes like 2009’s “Always Like This” into the electronic and experimental unknown. By the time 2014’s exotic fourth album So Long, See You Tomorrow topped the charts, they’d become one of Noughties indie rock’s most celebrated escapees, headlining the final show at Earls Court thanks to their unwavering dedication to growth and innovation. “Otherwise you just end up making a worse version of the first record over and over again,” MacColl says, “which people think they want, but they don’t actually want.”

Building on the grainy synthetic tones of 2020’s Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, their forthcoming sixth album My Big Day is anything but a return to their roots. As intrepid as ever, the album is steeped in crackling retro soul, hazy Sixties folk, touches of French chanson and electronic Afrobeats. Plus the sort of hallucinogenic funk and pop that suggests Bombay Bicycle Club as a band might have developed a taste for the old psychedelics. “Not as a band,” Steadman grins. “Maybe individually...”

For the album, Steadman and MacColl tell me they’ve pulled from both swaggering hip-hop and heavy rock, with Steadman putting the band’s eclecticism down to his process of crate-digging for new ideas. “So naturally all these different areas of a record shop find their way into it... I think it’s a testament to the mindset we were in this time, where we said, ‘As long as the four of us are into something, then let’s put it on. Let’s have faith in our fans that they’re as eclectic as we are. Let’s not patronise them by thinking that they can’t handle something that’s a bit leftfield for us.’ And I think it’s paid off.”

As they eye up their biggest show to date, outdoors at London’s Alexandra Palace Park next July, BBC might appear to have had a trouble-free ascent. Yet in 2015, in the wake of the success of So Long..., the band sold their gear and essentially split up for three years, with other worlds to explore. MacColl completed two degrees and began working at a security think tank, while Nash and Saram collaborated on a new band called Toothless. This was when Steadman, alongside starting a degree in astronomy (“I did one year. The Open University lets you have 20 years to finish it”), vowed to travel from the UK to New York without flying, travelling east and recording an R&B/soul solo album God First – released under his alias Mr Jukes in 2017 – en route.

Throughout his sonic circumnavigation – whether crate-diving in Tokyo jazz cafes or doing karaoke with the crewmen of the Hanjin freight company while sailing from Shanghai to Canada – Steadman thrived on “the inspiration and the feeling of momentum and excitement. That’s why I like taking trains everywhere, because I’d always be on the move. And that would make me wake up and think, ‘Let’s be productive today rather than just sitting still’ ... I find it hard writing in London.”

I would imagine now, given the education cuts, the gap between the experience you have at a private school versus a state school in terms of your ability to play or learn music has got even wider

Jamie MacColl, guitarist

Becoming a father two years ago has curtailed Steadman’s wandering a touch. “The idea of me going on a cargo ship for four weeks isn’t really feasible any more,” he says, happy with his more settled situation. However, “If my wife said, ‘Hey, I’m taking our son away for a holiday, just me and him,’ then I’d be like ‘OK,’ and get straight on the Trans-Siberian again.”

Yet, to a degree, My Big Day was also written on the move, Steadman taking samplers on family holidays so he could “sneak off and write a few songs”. And when he took the record along to Damon Albarn’s studio to play it for the Blur and Gorillaz frontman – a friend and “unofficial” mentor to Steadman following their work together on Parisian opera projects and the non-profit organisation Afrika Express – Albarn dared Steadman to venture across the globe to hunt down an exotic disco diva of legend to sing on “Tekken 2”: Chaka Khan.

“I think I just burst out laughing in his face,” Steadman says. “But on the way home I texted my manager and said, ‘Why not? Let’s just ask.’” A few exploratory emails later, Steadman was on a plane to Los Angeles, rather unprepared. “There was this massive studio in LA that she requested – state of the art, enormous mixing desk,” he chuckles, “and I just turned up with my little Windows laptop, plugged in, didn’t really use any of it. She was really down to earth, super professional. I didn’t know how much I could push the whole, like, ‘Can we do that one again because that was out of tune?’”

There was, indeed, something of an open-door policy on album guests. Continuing the collaborative mindset that had seen Steadman work with the likes of De La Soul and Lianne La Havas on God First, there are a melody and lyric for “Sleepless” penned by Beabadoobee, and appearances by Holly Humberstone, LA singer-songwriter Jay Som, and UK singer Nilüfer Yanya. There’s also an impromptu contribution on the euphoric acid-jazz-pop “Heaven” from Albarn himself.

“I was just asking for his feedback for the whole record,” Steadman recalls. “For most songs, he’d be like, ‘Try this, here’s an idea.’ And this song came on, and he went, ‘Give me a microphone,’ and started improvising words over everything.”

‘We’ve written a very optimistic album, so if you want to escape, come and listen to our record and feel good for 40 minutes’ (Supplied)

If Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, the post-hiatus comeback album, involved some feet-finding compromise, BBC now feel they’re hitting a confident second-era stride – full of optimism, and less frustrated than 10 years ago that casual listeners might still lump them in with the Noughties indie herd. “It bothered me more just before the band went on hiatus,” says MacColl, “when we had made quite an ambitious alternative pop record, and it did feel like a lot of people were still just calling us landfill indie or whatever.” “In a way,” adds Steadman, “when you’ve done it for this long, maybe it’s good to still have something that you feel like you have to prove.”

The reunited Bombay Bicycle Club have vowed not to take themselves as seriously as the intense teenagers of 2009. Their reformation came accompanied by a video depicting global society collapsing without their music, and the promo for My Big Day’s title track – an introvert’s guide to celebration, involving, Steadman explains, “drawing the curtains, turning your phone off and saying ‘I’m just gonna get really stoned today’” – featured Steadman as a bong-spangled newsreader reporting on egg-whipping world record attempts, the introduction of police cats, and a woman capable of singing the “brown note”. Attempt to pierce the band’s legendarily placid demeanour by asking what enrages them about the modern world, and Steadman will turn his unflinching ire upon the demise of the mobile phone headphone socket. “The world’s a lot noisier,” he gripes. “I liked it when we all had our headphones on.”

Yet My Big Day has serious points to make about the cyclical nature of parenthood (“Turn the World On”), forging on in the face of inevitable mortality (“Onward”) and, on “Tekken 2”, learning to shed negative mindsets as we grow older. “Not sweating the small stuff much any more,” Steadman expands. “Realising that it’s so toxic to dwell on that stuff. Trying not to worry so much, because everyone else is just worrying about themselves as well. No one’s worrying about you, even though you think they are. We’re all very self-centred, aren’t we?”

There are deep-seated social consciences at work here, too. When talk turns to the indie rock advantages of a middle-class background, the band freely acknowledge the privileges of their public schooling at Hampstead’s University College School. “The biggest privilege [was] having a school with a great music teacher, and with great instruments there, and with encouragement and time to say, ‘Yeah, go over there and experiment with it,’” Steadman suggests, while MacColl credits the educational investments made by the Blair government. “I would imagine now, given the education cuts,” he says, “the gap between the experience you have at a private school versus a state school in terms of your ability to play or learn music has got even wider.”

Jack Steadman in 2012: ‘When you’ve done it for this long, maybe it’s good to still have something that you feel like you have to prove’ (Getty)

Having benefited from the endless churn of the streaming age – even through their hiatus, their click rate remained constant – they’re fans of music’s new machinery, but recognise that a system designed to provide an endless supply of what’s already popular sidelines original new music like theirs. “It does reinforce existing power dynamics in the industry rather than breaking them,” MacColl says.

Likewise social media. “It’s been good for the band but bad for society,” MacColl argues. “Having spent more time on TikTok over the last year, I would really not want my children to be using it, just because of how addictive it is. I’m addicted to it. It’s like they’ve taken the most addictive parts of Twitter and Instagram and supercharged it.” Steadman is more philosophical: “I always wonder whether my parents thought that about watching television. They probably did. Our kids will probably say, ‘No, this is just normal.’ I don’t know. Even when the radio was invented, people started getting hysterical about the written word.”

What really angers and frustrates MacColl, though, is political decay. His three years working part-time at a cybersecurity and technology policy think tank have left him feeling hopeless for the future of a Britain not just broken but ossified. “There is the constant feeling of stasis,” he says. “The British state has become almost close to uniquely bad at actually doing things, HS2 being a good example of that. So many of the core functions of the state just don’t seem to operate very well.”

He’s not confident that a Keir Starmer landslide will change much, either. “Not because I necessarily think that Labour are the same as the Tories, which I think is a ridiculous argument – there’s very clear policy differences between them, and approaches to how to run an economy and society. But a lot of the parts of the state have eroded to the point where it’s quite hard to rebuild a lot of the capacity, and we’ve had a generation of very unmotivated civil servants after the last decade. It’s going to be very hard to move things forward in a positive way.”

Steadman butts in. “But we’ve written a very optimistic album, so if you want to escape, come and listen to our record and feel good for 40 minutes.” That’s Bombay Bicycle Club: a beacon of derring-do in a world of derring-don’t.

‘My Big Day’ is out on 20 October via AWAL