The band, travelling through Japan, are unreachable for reasons unknown, causing the interview to be pushed back an hour. When I finally get in contact with drummer Suren De Salem, his youth shines through as he broods into the phone. After some jested stirring, De Salem explains his mope. “Basically we’re just doing some travelling in Japan and we’ve had a bit of an issue with these interviews. Our manager is very angry at us because people haven’t been able to get hold of us”. I feel obligated to apologise for interrupting the band’s attempt at tourism, which he brushes off in a deep laugh, “Don’t worry it, it’s cool”.
BBC will be heading to our shores for the first time this March in support of fellow Brits Elbow, which may seem surprising for a band that have three albums to their name, and De Salem has no idea what to expect. “We’ve had a few people ask us to come on like Twitter or whatever, which is obviously a good sign. Hopefully there will be a lot of people at the gigs jumping around and going crazy. I don’t know why it’s taken us so long, well actually I kind of do; we haven’t really been a big touring band until recently. We’re on our third album now, but our first two we didn’t really tour all that much at all. We didn’t really get outside Europe. It’s only this latest album that the touring has become more intensive and we’re going to many more exciting places”.
We get onto the subject of the band’s latest release, A Different Kind Of Fix, and I suggest it sounds like what would happen if their first two albums were to mate and give birth, causing De Salem to give a hearty British chuckle. “That’s quite a good a description. I’d say that A Different Kind Of Fix is probably my favourite album that we’ve made so far, partly for that reason. Our first albums were so different from each other, and I think this latest one is kind of broadened. You can definitely hear influences from both the previous two albums, and you can recognise certain songs that would fit in on both the previous two albums, but we’ve also tried to introduce a new element too – like the whole electronic kind of sampling thing, as you can hear on a song like Shuffle. That piano loop is from an old jazz song, and there’s kind of other songs where you can hear that electronic influence as well.”
For those that aren’t familiar with BBC, many would find the band’s first two albums to be unrecognisable from each other. One a searing burst of guitar heavy indie pop, the other a folky, stripped back, gentle assortment of lullabies. “[Flaws] was never really meant to be our proper second album. Well at least that’s not how we envisioned it anyway. Jack our singer; he’s the main songwriter. After the first album was released he just happened to get into writing more stripped back acoustic songs, just voice and guitar”. De Salem continues to detail his surprise at Flaws’ success. “We didn’t expect it to grow into what it did grow into at all, like it went Top 10 in the UK, which was completely kind of hocus seeing as our first album didn’t get anyway near that at all”.
BY PERRI CASSIE
