After a sold out show at Postbahnhof earlier this year and a stunning performance at Hurricane/Southside Festival, Bombay Bicycle Club return to Berlin once more. Their latest record, So Long, See You Tomorrow, has just been nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize and it’s been my album of the summer. What better way is there to chase the cold and rainy days from your mind than hearing it live once again?
The album captures the results of singer Jack Steadman’s picaresque adventures in the likes of Turkey and India throughout 2013. Joyously escapist, its electronic-inflected and Bollywood-referencing sound made good on the Eastern promise, as it went straight to Number 1 in the UK album charts and reached silver status in record time. In songwriting terms Bombay Bicycle Club, who are still only 24 years old, posses a kind of dynamism that few other indie bands have. They have mastered the melodic, the melancholic and at the same time, the euphoric.
A snapshot of Bombay Bicycle Club’s history throws up revelations of a band who have quietly become one of the most successful young British bands of their generation. They released their first album I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose in 2008 and shortly afterwards won the NME New Band Award beating The XX and Mumford & Sons. They followed this up midway through 2010 with Flaws’, which was nominated for an Ivor Novello. Their third record, A Different Kind Of Fix, was released in August 2011 and like its predecessors, went gold seeing the band’s fan base increase exponentially, culminating in various major main stage festival slots including the Reading and Leeds Festival and a sold out Alexandra Palace headline show.
