Bombay Bicycle Club - London Tommy Flynn's - 29/8/06
3/5
By: Toby L
'F**K PEACHES GELDOF!' goes the chant, midway through Bombay Bicycle Club's gig on a relative step in a deafening Camden boozer. Gelders doesn't stand a chance with this lot amidst a looming DJ set, post-Club. This really is a public catastrophe. Kids are getting recklessly ID-ed at the bar, turned away red-faced; pupils (even at this tender age) are not so much dilated as gaping (children, please); actor Rupert Everett to our right taps a foot, wearing a deft set of tracksuit bottoms; and proud parents of the band at the back are pleased it's this and not crime instead.
We'll save the 'something's in the school dinners' line; Bombay Bicycle Club are young, but they're not dumb. This is a considered and sensitive series of engulfing, melodic dynamic shifts that serge somewhere between Stephen Malkmus' strums and a lot of Bloc Party's, too. However, the real charm is in the youth and vitality of this enterprise - BBC are only 16 years old and have just completed their GCSE's. They share la meme ecole and year-group as fellow rockfeedback favourites Cajun Dance Party (a daft and dizzying, fizzing, pop sensation) and write tender, bittersweet songs which get torn to pieces live. It's little wonder they bagged the it-should-be-garish-but-fortunately-enough-decent-acts-enter-to-make-it-legit 'Road To V' battle of the bands honour; a multi-week rock assault-course in which our Blighty's finest (or most innocuous, and all in between) whack it out for the kids to see who shall be crowned with a first-on slot at the summer's recently past V Festival. Bombay reigned victorious, and lazy A&R have since united in attempts to cram themselves into this under-18 furore alongside the head-scratching hacks trying to make sense of it all.
So back to the scene, then. It's just weird. We're at the rear of a shoebox which has appallingly loud sound, and a hundred kids are jumping on each other's backs at the merest hint of a crashing chord. Microphones come tumbling down, band-members eagerly eye the crowd with a sense of mutual fear and pervy power, and smiles are worn like an unavoidable chemical outbreak.
'Can you all calm down a bit?' begs afro-ed guitarist Jamie, peering at us with a mixture of disbelief and artistic contempt. Isn't this what music's about? Group madness, celebration and ricocheting noises against all four walls that send us a bit loopy?
Yes, but there has to be something more, otherwise it's just mere surface follies. At this point in the BBC's reach, however, there is a touch more - the one they end with, and everyone seems to be calling for, 'The Hill', is a yearning call for distance and the sanctity which precedes adolescence and adulthood. 'I want to go back to old times,' singer Jack Steadman warbles, lank-haired and untrendy in his wanting to be anywhere other than 2006: home of the new rave what?-a-lution and all-conquering, global war. Elsewhere, 'What If?' is a lingering barrage of naοve, sumptuous noise, whilst its follower is the bearer of the most massive, crushing post-rock middle-eight we've heard for a tidy age. 'Open House' signifies further proof of something brewing, with its racing hooks and in-between vocal shudders and shakes.
Ramshackle and still forming, to bedazzle Bombay Bicycle Club with a mountain of hyperbole is possibly the last thing they need. More riotous gigs like this and a few less homework hours would be a good start. Impassioned and furious with raucous, unkempt splendour, this feels like that most joyous of things - a real start of something.
Artists in this article: Bombay Bicycle Club
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