BOMBAY Bicycle Club’s third album, A Different Kind of Fix, has seen them take a different kind of approach to touring.
This year has been spent on the road, and their 11-date April tour of Britain was announced as soon as the London quartet had finished last year’s sold-out UK tour.
“This is the first album that we’re touring extensively,” says drummer Suren De Saram, who will be sat behind his kit at York Barbican for a sold-out debut appearance in the city on Thursday.
“We’ve basically been quite lazy in the past as we have quite short attention spans.”
Lazy? I think not! This is the band that has recorded three very different albums in only three years: 2009’s spiky indie debut I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose; 2010’s stripped-down Flaws; and 2011’s aforementioned A Different Kind Of Fix, which switched the electricity back on and added haunting electronica and harmonies courtesy of Lucy Rose.
The new live show will incorporate songs from all three, which may strike you as an obvious statement, but isn’t.
“For a long time, we didn’t mix songs from the second album with the others. For a while, we kept them completely separate and played that album in specifically acoustic sets,” says Suren.
“Now we’re playing Ivy & Gold and Rinse Me Down from Flaws, but they’re the only two as it was an entirely acoustic album.
“Hopefully there’ll be something for everyone to enjoy on Thursday. There’ll be lots from the first album, plenty from the latest, and we’ll be playing a song that we’ve never played live before, though I don’t know if I want to say what it is.”
York Twenty4Seven tried to push Suren into revealing more, but all he would say was: “It is a song that has been released but it’s not on the latest record.”
Under the leadership of singer, guitarist and principal songwriter Jack Steadman, Bombay Bicycle Band keep on moving and progressing.
“Jack’s extremely talented and interested in doing a wide range of music, and I love that. I’d definitely get bored in a more straightforward band that just played standard indie rock songs all the time,” says Suren.
“Variation keeps us interested as musicians, so we’ll go from a downbeat, quiet moment to big rocking moments. Our live set is basically a bit schizophrenic – but that’s a good thing rather than a bad thing, I would say.”
One change will ensue after the tour: Lucy Rose will be leaving the band.
“She’s been touring with us for a while, ever since she worked on Flaws with us, but this will be her last one because she has her own material to work on, though she will be doing a few festivals with us in the summer,” reveals Suren.
“We’ve now signed up another girl, called Amber Wilson I think, who’ll join us later in the year.”
Suren does not envisage returning to the recording studio in 2012. “We’ll probably be touring for the rest of the year, playing Europe before the festival season and possibly Asia in September,” he says “We’ve just got back from Australia, which was really great, and we’d love to go back as we had a lot of fun. It was our first time there and we didn’t know what to expect but it went really well.”
Anywhere else? “We’re doing a lot of stuff in America, where we released the album late last year. We have a little tour coming up in the summer and another one later in the year,” says Suren.
What about Bombay, or Mumbai, as we should now call it?
“We haven’t ever played Bombay; we’ve never even been to India, but I’m sure we will one day,” says Suren, whose band name is derived from a chain of Indian restaurants.
“It’s a completely ridiculous name for a band but they did give us a free curry – only once.”
• Bombay Bicycle Club play York Barbican on Thursday; sold out; doors open at 7pm. They will be on the Main Stage at Leeds Festival, Bramham Park, on August 25.
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