It would’ve been easy to write off Bombay Bicycle Club’s comeback before it even began.
After all, the story itself is nothing new. A successful British indie band decide that they’ve had enough and call it a day after a decade that featured a slew of top ten albums, an NME Award, and a surprise appearance from Pink Floyd‘s David Gilmour at their biggest headline show to date.
They release a statement announcing that ‘[they] thought it was time for all of [them] to try something else’. The singer and the bass player both solo, the drummer disappears from the face of the earth, and the guitarist gets a degree in War Studies.
It’s textbook stuff, really.
The thing is, we always knew that Bombay Bicycle Club would be back.
After spending ten years building up a reputation as one of British indie’s sharpest outfits, we figured that there was precisely zero chance of them staying quiet for long when the world around them was, for all intents and purposes, going to shit.
The problem was, we weren’t quite sure whether they’d ever be back to their best. Let’s not beat around the bush: you know as well as we do that some much-loved guitar heroes once returned to a flurry of media frenzy and heightened expectations, only to deliver a sub-par comeback album and a set of half-arsed festival headline slots.
(Not that we’re naming any names.)
So, you can forgive us for being mildly apprehensive when the news broke that North London’s favourite Indie boys would be getting back together for a new album and subsequent run of UK tour dates.
Fortunately, it turns out that we had precisely nothing to worry about. Not only did their new album, Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, turn out to be bloody brilliant; but, when we caught their live show, we remembered exactly why we fell in love with them in the first place.
You see, Bombay Bicycle Club were never like the rest of the mid-Noughties British indie scene. Their songs were never designed to be hollered along to by a bunch of pissed-up lager louts in the middle of a campsite; nor did they ever attempt to build an entire career off the back of one football terrace-ready refrain.
Instead, they chose to focus on writing precisely the kind of smart, nuanced, and catchy guitar-pop bangers that Landfill Indie was sorely missing; and, on a cold Friday night at the tail end of January, they brought them all to Cardiff’s Great Hall.
Seriously, though: when we say that they brought all of the bangers, we mean that they brought all of the bangers.
How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep? Check. Luna? Well, check. Oh, and a closing one-two of Everything Else Has Gone Wrong and the omni-catchy Always Like This? Yep, you guessed it – check.
What was mildly surprising, though, was that the it was the New Songs that turned out to be the highlights of the set. We’ll admit it: there was a part of us that wondered whether band and crowd alike might only wake up for a rousing closing rendition of Always Like This and merely phone it in for the rest of the set. Yet, to our pleasant surprise, it was the likes of Is It Real, Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You), and I Worry Bout You that served up the biggest singalongs of the night.
Were we expecting that? Well, no. But, we do love to be surprised; and, not even these haggard old journalists could resist cracking a smile at the sight of a roomful of twenty-somethings belting back every word, to every song, from an album that only came out a week before this very show.
So, if you had any qualms about a Bombay Bicycle Club reunion, then consider them quashed.
Not only have they arrived bearing one of the best albums of their career, but they’ve also brought along a reinvigorated live show, the same razor-tight musicianship that made us fall in love with them in the first place, and a new generation of fans who are more than willing to scream their hearts out for ninety minutes whenever these four North London boys step onto a stage.
Now that, dear reader, is what we call a comeback.