Bombay Bicycle Club

Midway up Holloway Road in North London with a small queue snaking past the window is Nambucca. Walking in, past the bar and up several steps you’ll find a low stage with a flag of Holloway Gaels, a local female Gaelic football team on the back wall. Here tonight to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a band, Bombay Bicycle Club are about to come on stage. 

Before they do, the curious among you may want to know why a band that last headlined All Points East is now in a small 300 capacity venue. Well, the band wanted to give something back to a couple of the venues that gave them a start all those years ago, and to raise money for a music education charity for children. Tickets to the shows could be won from a prize draw with proceeds going to fund Universal Music UK Sound Foundation. Support for the shows also comes from the winners of an online Battle of the Bands to help tee up new talent.

Tonight is the final night of 4 nights split between Nambucca and Camden Assembly Rooms (formerly Barfly), with the sets focused on music from their early EPs and MySpace demos.

They stride sprightly onto the low stage, Jack Steadman in an orange shirt, with his cheerful grin and an enthusiastic crowd of ticket winners in front of them. They kick off and get us bouncing with ‘How Are You’ from their 2007 EP How We Are. They move onto ‘Open House’ with Jamie MacColl’s catchy guitar riffs. 

Steadman says that “it feels nostalgic to be playing here now, all these years later”, but jokingly reflects that “my 17 year old self was singing about being nostalgic about no longer being 16”. This is a very neat segue into ‘Sixteen’, from the Boy I Used to Be EP, the audience singing along to the repetitive chorus lines “you realise, you realise, it’s real life, it’s real life”.

Steadman seems surprised and impressed that the room knows the lyrics to their old back catalogue. 

Next up is ‘Ghost’ from 2009’s I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, showcasing MacColl’s delicate guitar work. Between the songs Steadman is cheerful, possibly the most cheerful frontman of a band that I’ve seen. There do seem to be some of their friends in the crowd and Jack, smiling again, says “this is like having a concert in our front room”. 

Just over half way they eke out the long pause at the end of ‘Evening/Morning’ with the effect of the crowd getting louder and baying for more. Steadman’s though, is paused, grinning with mischief holding the crowd waiting until Suren de Saram smashes the drums and the riff belts out from MacColl. The crowd is bouncing in the air, the temperature rises: it’s starting to get sweaty in here.

They move onto the calmer ‘Maybe More’, another track from How We Are, everyone around me is singing the chorus, “will you decide to put this behind you?” It’s noticeable that throughout this set the fans are singing, they know all the words. Even when there are no words they sing along and echo the guitar and bass riffs.

During a small break, Steadman introduces their friend, Jose Junior, who was on keyboards. I’m not sure where he’s appeared from, he seems to have suddenly appeared behind Ed Nash. He gives a cheerful wave to the crowd. Jack says that he’s playing on the original keyboard that they used for those early EPs.

They can’t really leave the stage for an encore, as there’s nowhere for them to go to, so they leave us with ‘Always Like this’, one of their big early tunes. The band, the crowd, everyone is all sweaty. Singing the words and joining in with Nash’s bass hook.  And that’s it, the encore is done. 

For me, it feels like I’ve stepped into a time machine and gone back 20 years for a bit of a musical history lesson, the uplifting songs giving me the sense that this is a band that could go somewhere. And they have!

But what’s this? Steadman is chatting with MacColl, we can’t make out the words. They turn to de Saram and Nash; they all nod in agreement. 

‘As it’s the last show’, Steadman announces, “we’re going to do one more” and they launch into ‘Eat, Sleep, Wake’ from 2020’s Everything Else Has Gone Wrong.  I love this song. The entire room is jumping, singing and sweating together. At the end, beaming, the band gather together arm in arm and do a joint bow to a room full of applause. The memories of all that has gone before flickering over their faces, it’s wonderful to see.

Judging by the enthusiasm around me, I’m an outlier when it comes to their deep cuts, but I was surprised at how catchy their songs are and how easy it was to join in with everyone else. It’s a very well put together set list of songs that didn’t lose the interest of a casual fan, every other song keeping the enjoyment going. I think it’s great that they’ve been able to do this and it would be great to see more artists showing off their less well known music to fans in small venues and supporting music charities in the process.

Bombay Bicycle Club are scheduled for the Lido Festival on 14th June where they’ll be playing I Had The Blues and Flaws in full.