Q&A with Bombay Bicycle Club

Amidst shaky reception, (the band is currently on tour in Seattle and were on a tour bus during the interview) unexpected external sound intrusions (old pipes in flat groaning) and lost-in-accent translations (the boys are from Crouch End in London) I managed to get a few questions across and managed to decipher most of the answers during our 10-minute interview.

In the past fans of yours have been very interactive and lively, jumping on stage while you were performing, often in quite a destructive way. How important do you think crowd interaction is? What is the plan for your SA performances?

Ed Nash: We just try to be energetic and play the songs the same way, every way. In the past, people would like to break stuff and smash stuff, but that doesn't really happen anymore.

What can SA festival-goers expect from your set list; a mix of old and new?

Yeah, yeah completely. We try to play songs from all of our albums and they're all completely different to each other, so now we will play a track from our first album and a track from our second album and we'll play something from our latest album. 'A Different Kind of Fix' and our newest album ('So Long See You Tomorrow') blend in quite well together. So there will be something for everyone.

Speaking of having quite diverse-sounding albums, you have been both criticised and praised for not having a particularly fixed sound from album to album; what are your thoughts on this, do you feel like you have found your voice with latest album, 'So Long See You Tomorrow', or will BBC always be an evolution?

We're more of an evolution you know. The fourth album is more of an evolution in the way that it incorporates everything we have done previously and takes it a bit further. Songs like Lights Out and Shuffle have a similar electronic instrumentation and we've just taken it further. We never really know what we're going to do next.

What was it like being thrust into the limelight when you were still teenagers? How have you grown as a band and as people?

Yeah, it was quite strange. I guess the time we've been in the band is the time we change the most in real life. We started the band when we were 15 and we're 24 now. We were teenagers then and we're different people now and the band is a different band to what it was. When we were at school we would gig at the weekend and then go back to the normal school week and it kinda felt like the best of both you know.

If you had to describe your sound and the band as a meal, what would it be and why?

It would probably be like a sample meal where you have a lot of small portions, maybe like a cheeseboard with lots of different cheeses, so hopefully if someone doesn't like something there will be something else they like. Something very varied.

Your name originally came from a chain of Indian restaurants. Do you know we have our own Bombay Bicycle Club restaurant in Cape Town? I would highly recommend a visit.

Yeah, I'm definitely gonna go visit it. Every place we go on tour we try to get a curry.

Bombay Bicycle Club will be headlining at Sounds Wild on Friday, 28 November at Marks Park in Emmarentia and Synergy Live, which takes place on 28, 29 and 30 November, 2014, at Theewaterskloof Dam, near Franschhoek, Western Cape. Tickets available via Webtickets.

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