Interview: Bombay Bicycle Club

If Bombay Bicycle Club had been born on America’s West Coast, their music would no doubt soon be all over the soundtrack of the next big teen drama. All the ingredients are there: the artiness, the phlegmatic cool, and the tunes that form a natural soundtrack to people’s lives. That’s Bombay Bicycle Club, the band. The individuals, however, are refreshingly normal. They are more like a bunch of guys you might meet in a student union. At Jack and Ed’s digs in central London, theartsdesk hung out to discuss the new album, rocking out, and how they plan to conquer the States.

Jack Steadman and Ed Nash live next to a chain restaurant off Covent Garden. Up four flights of stairs I find a mess of student furniture, band equipment and one rather extraordinary sculpture of a head that looks like it once belonged in the video for Lionel Ritchie’s "Hello". It’s the hottest day of the year and, inside, it’s too muggy to think. The boys offer to take me up to the roof. Emerging through the hatch to a Mary Poppins world of chimney pots it all looks rather like the album cover to John Martyn’s London Conversation, whose “Fairytale Lullaby” appeared on their last album.

That album was called Flaws. It was acoustic, and was nominated for an Ivor Novello songwriting award. The new one, A Different Kind of Fix, lead singer Steadman explains to me, is nothing like it. Steadman is neatly dressed, averagely sized, and speaks vaguely, as 21-year-olds are prone to do. Nash is smaller and more direct. What they are both keen to point out however is that the previous album was an anomaly, influenced, Steadman says, “by raiding my dad’s record collection”. “We didn’t feel that we needed to tie this record with the acoustic album (Flaws),” he continues, “because for us that was just a side project and we didn’t feel that we needed the new one to make sense with it.”

The new album is named after an old song of Steadman’s whose title he thinks sums up what their fans want: something identifiably theirs but which doesn’t sound like their previous albums. The most notable additions are the synths. “It starts where the first record left off,” he says. “Songs like 'Always Like This' had elements of electronics in them but they were always a minority on that album. We’ve taken that, expanded on it and it’s become a common theme of this album.” Nash adds, “The first album was influenced by American Indie bands like Yo La Tengo, but I think we’ve expanded on that with all the electronics.”

The electronics come from a Steadman side project. Six years ago, when they started the band at school, his dad built him a home studio. That’s where he records his song demos for the band. It’s also where he likes to write electronic music for fun. For this album he decided to combine the extra-curricular with the career. The result was put together by producers Jim Abbiss, who worked with them on their first album, and Gnarls Barkley's man, Ben Allen. Abbiss took them to Hamburg to record half the album, and Allen took them over to Athens, Georgia. The American influence won out. The new album's a beautiful mix of shoegaze and US indie all underpinned by a folk sensibility. You can hear elements of Yo La Tengo, American Analogue Set, Grizzly Bear and Death Cab for Cutie. The synths haven’t changed the core sound, just thickened and sweetened it a bit. And despite Nash’s protestations, the album sounds just as American as it is incredibly precocious. The only significant departures are “Take the Right One” and “Still” where Steadman sounds like Chris Martin before Martin started believing his own hype.

Musically it’s an incredible achievement for four guys barely into their twenties. And it’s not just Steadman’s songs. The entire band's sound has expanded in line with the size of venues they’ll now be playing. Lyrically, though, I couldn’t make out anything more than the odd fragment. When I press Steadman about this he becomes confessional and slightly vague again. “I don’t think it’s that kind of album, where you can hear what every song’s about,” he says, adding, “I don’t think the style in which I sing is very helpful to hear the actual words. We do all the music and I leave the lyrics to the last minute. I just think of something that has happened recently, involving a relationship or something that has happened to me”

Some of what has been happening has been moving down to London, and becoming the focus of their new social set. Between recording and touring duties the boys have been falling into a pattern of jamming around the kitchen table until three in the morning and getting up at 11. And eating curry. The band may have long regretted naming themselves after a popular chain of Indian restaurants, but the association has earned them complimentary meals courtesy of the chain’s owner. And now's the time to start enjoying them. They are enjoying a short hiatus after a tiring tour of the big festivals. Glastonbury saw Jack becoming converted to the musical charms of Beyoncé, and Ed worried that he was actually going to faint in the 32 degree heat. At Latitude, Jack says three separate mosh circles broke out spontaneously.

How can that possibly happen during such downbeat music, I ask. There’s a thoughtful pause before Ed offers, “Maybe it’s because we are so energetic on stage?” As theartsdesk found out in April, Bombay Bicycle Club sure know how to put on a show. “When you’re starting out and you don’t have any crazy light shows, that’s how you make it into a spectacle – just by being energetic,” says Steadman. During the summer’s festivals, though, BBC were joined by an Afrobeat band, giving them even added energy. But during this autumn’s tour everything is going to be played straight, right up to the closing night at Brixton Academy where the band say they would dream of playing whilst starting out.

But first there is the small matter of trying to conquer America. Theirs is a sound that sounds like it was made for college radio, and Bombay Bicycle Club have every chance of making it huge in their genre and beyond. “We haven’t started much in America,” says Steadman. “But we are about to support Two Door Cinema Club, and we are playing some really big venues. I think that will be the beginning of our campaign in America. I think it’s all going to kick off when we tour this autumn...”

• Find Bombay Bicycle Club on Amazon
• Download Bombay Bicycle Club on iTunes
• Book tickets for Bombay Bicycle, on tour from 30 September to 19 October

Watch Bombay Bicycle Club perform "Always Like This"