Between Britain And Bombay

When I called, Jamie McColl was in a gym. A rugby player since schoolboy days, he'd forgotten about our interview. Taking a breather from the workout, McColl is one quarter of Bombay Bicycle Club, an understated Brit-rock four-piece that's spent the last six years holding the rainy island's once burgeoning guitar music scene together. “Yeah, I've been playing rugby for years. Back in high school, my team went on tour to Australia,” says McColl, BBC's lead guitarist. The score? “Uh, I think we won four-two” McColl confesses.

It's not the first time we have chatted with McColl – back in February, the redhead spoke about the pressures of success. Bombay Bicycle Club entered the spotlight after winning Britain's 'Road to V' competition in 2006, at a time when they were still too young to drink. Headed by the charismatic Jack Steadman, the band found band name inspiration thanks to an English Indian restaurant chain they passed on the way to their first gig of the V competition.

BBC have been touring the planet pretty relentlessly since 2011's A Different Kind Of Fix, venturing across America no less than three times in a single year. Last May, they performed at Lollapalooza, and apparently had an in-depth encounter with the paranoid Southern Stateside types regular folk seem to love to hate. “We met one guy who thought that if Barack Obama won another four years he'd turn the country into a dictatorship, and lead a Black Panther uprising,” McColl says, laughing. “The amount of people who think like that is kind of insane, really. And also just kind of casual racist, homophobic and sexist jokes, and you just don't know what to say,” he adds.

Since their innocuous debut album, I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, the band have kept it together, building on their previous album's strengths. “I think the most important thing is that none of us have changed, pretty much. We're still friends, everyone is still happy, which is quite a rare thing I think by the beginning of the fourth album,” McColl explains. “One of the things that has helped sustain it was not doing too much touring [for] the first couple of albums. The problem, I think, is when you have indie bands that have a popular first album, which they tour for a couple of years. By the end of that, they're burnt out, and can't think of a second. It was good, A Different Kind of Fix – to still have all that left” says McColl.

“Jack, our singer, is going to India to do some writing, a bit randomly,” McColl explains of the band's songwriting progress. “But at the moment, we've got like [a third of] an album, so we're part of the way there” says McColl. Yet, BBC have managed to work an Australia tour (with Tasmanian beach time) into the formula. “We're really excited, we had a lot of fun last time. It'll be nice to get back. I could spend years on the beach in Tasmania,” says McColl. 

“All of our albums have been fairly different to one another, but I don't think that we're making a particularly radical departure from the previous one. It'll be more electronic, perhaps like Shuffle,” says McColl, remarking on the blissfully groovy first single lifted from their 2011 third record. “I say that, but we might turn around and go somewhere else. You never know. Especially when we just released three albums in rapid succession.” It's a statement validated by the varied sounds the band is renowned for: each of Bombay Bicycle Club's preceding albums (I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, Flaws and A Different Kind Of Fix) has its own distinct soundscape, and the band have a penchant for shifting their style, which has earned them praise and at times ill-informed criticism. BBC are a young outfit, after all, and their variation between conservative Arctic Monkeys' Brit rock and a more lucid flirtation with electronic production should be welcome in the moderately tepid British guitar band scene.

On this note, McColl returns to themes he touched on during his previous interview with us: the current, apparently dire, state of independent British guitar music. It's a valid observation, unless you think Joe Newman singing in a Muppet voice about breezeblocks or evangelical Christians on banjos are cool. “I don't think it's particularly an amazing time for British music; there are no bands out there [from Britain] that I like… I think Foals are one of the best bands out there. We had a band supporting us in the US called Vacationer who I really like, and I think people in Australia would really like. The last album I enjoyed was Bon Iver, and if we could collaborate with anybody, it'd be them,” he says. I ask him the obvious. “Mumford and Sons? Coldplay with banjos, as someone said…” he adds, laughing.

Bombay Bicycle Club will be playing the following dates:

Tuesday 1 January - Regal Ballroom, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday 2 January - Factory Theatre, Sydney NSW
Thursday 3 January - The Tivoli, Brisbane QLD