With his shaven head, bookish round glasses and professor-like intonations, Bombay Bicycle Club singer Jack Steadman is just a utility belt, moustache and pith helmet away from resembling Phileas Fogg. He has the adventuring spirit, too. The band’s global textures were inspired by his travels in Turkey and India. He once wrote and recorded a solo album during a round-the-world expedition by land and sea, setting up portable studios in cabins on the Trans-Siberian Railway and Pacific cargo ships. And his art has kept pace with his inexorable forward motion. Geographically and creatively, staying still is not an option.
“Evolve or die,” he nods intently, as if, mid-interview, he’s stumbled across his life’s essential ethos. The group’s red-bearded guitarist, Jamie MacColl, agrees. “We were probably, at least from our generation, one of the earliest genre-less bands,” he argues, settled at a bench outside the north London rehearsal studio where the band – completed by bassist Ed Nash and drummer Suren de Saram – are preparing for further globetrotting adventures on a tour of the UK and Europe. “Because we made four albums within five years that are all quite different to one another, 10 years ago, we’re not bound down by genre in a way that a lot of our contemporaries were.”
