It’s crazy to think that Bombay Bicycle Club, the Crouch End indie foursome who’ve released an album every year since 2009, are still only in their early 20s. Crazier still, the band celebrate their seventh anniversary this week.

“That’s like a third of my life,” guitarist Jamie MacColl laughs, “That’s a long time.”
It’s longer than secondary school, I point out.
“That’s a weird thought! Yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that! I mean, for the first few years we were still at school and it didn’t really feel like a proper thing. So many people have school bands. I don’t think any of us ever thought at the start that this is what it would be right now. We feel kind of like old hands even though we’re still 22, despite the fact that we’re the youngest, we’re still the… sort of… veterans!”
Since last we met, MacColl and company have been on the road almost constantly – after tours in Canada, the US, Asia and now Australia, they’ve got their gig-goer stereotypes down pat.
“Most of them are true as well,” he laughs, “like the Japanese audiences are really polite in a weird way. They do move around and look engaged when you play, but as soon as you stop, there’s just silence and that’s really disconcerting. It’s like, ‘Fuck, did we do something wrong? Why are they staring so intently?’ But that’s probably the best part about being in a band, getting to find out stuff like that. It’s essentially a free travel pass to go and see the world.
“Most people this young haven’t had a chance to do what we’ve done as musicians, to be able to make and release three albums which are quite different and still have people like each one individually.”
It’s not like Bombay Bicycle Club have ever stuck to a blueprint, their back catalogue features feel-abouts in the genres of indie, acoustic folk and electronic rock. Given their musical mood swings, this is probably a silly question, but what’s next?
“I think we’d like to have a bit more order, just for like, our own sanity. I think it’ll be more like the songs that we were writing towards the end of the last album, songs like ‘Shuffle’, ‘Lights Out, Words Gone’, ‘How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep?’, the ones that were, for us, the most different from anything we’ve done before and the ones that really combined electronic music with the guitar music that we’d been making previously. Apart from anything else, it will be more like that just because of the nature of how we’re having to write now, on the road, doing stuff on laptops and iPads. We did quite a long flight recently and I got off the plane and Jack (Steadman, singer and guitarist) had made a whole song on his iPad, which actually sounded really good! I was like, ‘Shit, I’ve just been watching five films!’”
By now, BBC have got a handful of instantly recognisable tunes in their armory, but still, most people couldn’t pick them out on the street, or in the crowd at a Bombay Bicycle Club gig for that matter. This is where the ‘Jamie MacColl Appreciation Society’ comes in, a Facebook group whose main activity is Photoshopping MacColl’s face onto photographs of other, better known, celebrities.
“They’re called the MacCollers,” he explains, probably not as concerned as he should be. “A lot of them are Irish actually, there’s like a group of 16-year-old girls – if they read this and I’ve got their ages wrong, I apologise! – and they call me Jamie Christ, which is weird. They’re surprisingly witty though, it’s much better than a gang of One Direction fans.”
They did Photoshop the faces of Bombay Bicycle Club onto the bodies of One Direction, though.
“Yeah, I saw that. That just made me think, ‘Wow, One Direction are much better-looking than us!’”
Well, it would explain why they’re currently topping the Billboard charts in the States...
“I know that a couple of them are Bombay fans – it’s so easy to find out stuff like that now because of Twitter – so I’m not gonna badmouth them, but I couldn’t even badmouth them ‘cos I haven’t heard a song. But it’s a weird kind of rise, ‘cos it’s not really driven by having big singles, it’s more the product of social media.”
Bombay Bicycle Club are hardly the type of band to shut down a shopping mall, but MacColl is acutely aware of how the modern music-lover’s mind works.
“I think people’s attention spans just seem to be getting shorter,” he muses. “You kind of have to always be available and always have music there. You can’t really afford to go away anymore.”

Bombay Bicycle Club play the Olympia, Dublin on April 30. A Different Kind Of Fix is out now on Island.