Reinventing the wheel

As Bombay Bicycle Club gear up to release their sixth album My Big Day, the 00s indie heroes look back on their career, collaborating with Damon Albarn and inspiring a new generation of artists

- Nick Reilly

‘I think we’ve realised that we are probably the best people to be making our records because no one’s harder on ourselves than we are,” admits Bombay Bicycle Club’s Jack Steadman over lunch.

IT'S A BALMY Tuesday in late July, and Steadman and bandmate Jamie MacColl are sitting in a north London greasy spoon near their rehearsal space. They’re explaining how, for their upcoming sixth album My Big Day, they’ve gone it alone.

“I think the amount of effort and work that we put into this is almost like 10 times the last one, just by the fact that it’s us doing it all,” says Steadman.

Not for the first time, the group have ditched mixing-desk twiddlers from the outside world and delivered a record that is entirely their own creation — and it sounds all the better for it. The added work might be daunting for some artists, but you sense that the deep-lying friendships between these north London lads have no doubt helped them see it through.

More than 20 years after they first met as school friends and shared late-night MSN Messenger sessions about their desire to form a band, Bombay Bicycle Club’s close ties have led to them becoming indie royalty.

There’s a legion of first-time fans whose formative teenage moments were soundtracked by their debut I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, but as Steadman explains, album collaborators such as Holly Humberstone and Beabadoobee have said they’re proving to be an important voice for Gen Z and beyond too.

“We keep doing this because the band is a tight vehicle, and we’re all pretty open-minded about what the band is. It never has to become boring,” says Steadman.