Music

Bombay Bicycle Club don't want you to romanticize the past... or the UK

by Anne T. Donahue

Bombay Bicycle Club want to play music for you. They don’t really care about much else. While their romanticized English background may have garnered listeners for other reasons (“There are some bands—and I don’t want to name any names—that are doing quite well because they’re English and not because they make good music,” says bassist Ed Nash), the release of their recent record A Different Kind of Fix sees the group dismissing claims that the current landscape lacks the authenticity or heart of generations past.

“It kind of annoys me when people are like, ‘There’s no good music now’ because there is, you have to look for it,” says Nash. “I see how it was back then, but people don’t look back and remember the shit things, they look back and remember the good things. I’m sure there were tons of bad journalism and tons of horrible bands. I think music is very strong at the moment, and it’s kind of annoying when people blame it on the ‘new’ scene.”

And part of “the ‘new’ scene” they are, having just come off the road in support of Two Door Cinema Club, and landing home just in time to embark on more dates in the UK. But despite their increasing international exposure, they’ve been vocal in their disinterest in deigning to industry stereotypes for the sake of drawing new audiences. That’s something they feel they can do just fine on their own.

“Now bands have only got one shot,” says Nash. “You get [one] album and if people don’t like it, you’re kind of done. So bands get built up to ridiculous heights before they’ve done anything. It seems that back in the day, bands had a lot more time to develop and they could put out album after album to reach their peak, which is what we’ve been trying to do.”

“We’re very proud of everything we’ve done,” he adds. “I don’t think we ever really thought about what we were going to do in the future, we just did what we were into at the time. It’s strange when you see bands that completely change everything to try and be cool.”