On Your Bike

The British lads in Bombay Bicycle Club are all grown up, taking the producing duties into their own hands for their fourth album, So Long, See You Tomorrow and experimenting with new types of instrumentation. They've sure come a long way since they were unsure 18-year-olds working on their 2009 debut, I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, but drummer Suren De Saram is not getting complacent.

“We've always just made music for ourselves primarily and if other people happen to like it then fantastic. We don't really think about, 'Is this song going to be a chart smash' or whatever... We just put pressure on ourselves to constantly create as good a piece of work as we can.”

For the album they decided to move away from the live record format towards a more carefully orchestrated approach (heard on songs like Feel and Carry Me), due in part to the influence eastern instruments and cultures had on lead vocalist and guitarist Jack Steadman when they toured Tokyo and Mumbai.

“On all our previous albums, we've always tried to record as much of it live, like all four of us just in a room playing together, whereas with this album it didn't really lend itself to that. Basically all the parts were recorded individually on this album… It was just in the nature of the songs.”

Adding to the pressure they heaped upon themselves was the decision to have Steadman act as producer on the album, which in turn put their debut album nerves into perspective.

 “Looking back on our first album, we were 18 and we were working with Jim Abbiss who had worked with some pretty huge acts [Arctic Monkeys, Adele], and then we were just these young kids, and the studio back then was quite a new environment to us. We didn't really know exactly what was going on. We were kind of, I don't know about intimidated, but kind of anything Jim the producer suggested we would go along with. That became less and less the case as the albums went on. So by the last album I think we were a lot more vocal and we were a lot more confident in the studio. Obviously with Jack now producing it, we haven't got this other man.

“We were all a little bit skeptical when we chose to go down this whole production route, like it wasn't the original plan. We did try out a couple of producers for this album, we tried recording a couple of songs but it just didn't work out for various reasons. They just didn't turn out sounding the way we wanted them to sound. That's when we brought up the self-production idea; took a little bit for us all to be convinced that was the right path to take, but we obviously took it in the end and I think it's all worked out well.”