Biffy Clyro might well be British rock’s most grounded titans. A trio who met aged eight, started playing music together aged 15 and, in the 30 years since, have scaled hurdle after hurdle — decimating Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage this summer with a career-peak penultimate headline set and landing their fourth No 1 shortly after with 10th LP, Futique — the essence of the East Ayrshire group has remained remarkably un-starry throughout.
There have been no line-up changes and no gossipy tabloid headlines; they all still live in Scotland as a purposeful way to keep their “male egos” in check away from the hubbub of the London industry. Which is why, when frontman Simon Neil begins reminiscing about the band’s recent afternoon out at north London party institution Rowans, you can imagine the piss-taking going on within camp. “We did daytime karaoke, got a little bit half cut, sang our own songs — all in the spirit of promoting the show,” he caveats. And how was that…? “It was exhilarating!” Neil grins. Turns out even if you’re in Biffy Clyro, it can be a pretty thrilling experience listening to Biffy Clyro.
The show in question happens next July, when the band — completed by twin brothers James and Ben Johnston, on bass and drums respectively — will upscale their karaoke sesh by about 10,000 times for the biggest headline gig of their career to date, around the corner in Finsbury Park itself. Neil is characteristically humble about the milestone. “I remember Oasis playing Finsbury Park. It was a fantasy gig that normal musicians didn’t ever do, so to finally have that in our calendar is really [crazy],” he enthuses. But realistically, it doesn’t feel like such a stretch for the group.
Biffy Clyro have been massive for ages, since the undeniable hooks of 2007’s fourth album Puzzle sent the former rock outliers hurtling into the mainstream, where they’ve stayed ever since. They even (sort of) scored a Christmas No 1 when X Factor winner Matt Cardle covered their 2010 track Many of Horror, with a Facebook counter-protest also sending the band’s original version to No 8 in an almost Swiftian feat of having the same song in the Top 10 twice. Having headlined everywhere from Download Festival to Reading and Leeds, selling out the O2 arena several times over (they’ll return there once more in January), Finsbury is well within their remit. But, following a rocky few years — the first time the three have ever truly questioned their future, not just as a band but as friends — next summer’s big gig clearly represents something more than just ticket sales.
“We sat down and went, ‘Is this it then? What, we can’t get on so we’re gonna stop hanging out and stop making music?’” Neil remembers. “And of course as soon as you say that, it’s like, well no. We’ve gone through deaths, breakdowns, addictions; we’ve gone through seven heads of record companies and a couple of managers [over the years]. Every cliché that a band could go through, we’ve done. But we’ve managed to withstand it all. And that’s what’s getting me so excited, and why Finsbury Park is going to be a f***ing celebration like you wouldn’t believe.”
“It was brutal, that era”
Futique — a portmanteau of “future antique” that distils its central tenet of appreciating what you’ve got in the moment — is in many ways a record about mental health; or, perhaps more accurately, a record that comes as the result of a period spent wrangling with it. When Biffy first started rising through the ranks in the early 2000s, the idea of blokes in rock bands writing about their internal journeys would have been laughed out of the room. “There was this attitude of ‘What’s wrong with you?’ if you showed any vulnerabilities,” Neil suggests. “It was brutal, that era.” But Biffy quickly learnt the hard way that they couldn’t operate like that.
In 2004, Neil’s mother passed away; it was the band’s subsequent big-hearted, connective songs about her on Puzzle that earned them their stripes. “We kind of closed ranks a little after that because already, from an early age, we had to deal with things that seemed a lot bigger than the band,” he says. Later, in the mid-2010s, Ben battled with alcoholism. “That was definitely the first time where we thought, ‘Is this band actually killing us?’ You know, is the band the cause of it?” Neil continues. “It turned out it wasn’t,” he notes, but when the frontman went through what he describes as “a bit of a nervous breakdown” himself, throwing all his energies into his work during the pandemic and creating their last two albums — 2020’s A Celebration of Endings and the following year’s The Myth of The Happily Ever After — concurrently, it was Biffy that needed to press pause.
Across Futique the band look this crossroads dead in the eye, and many of the record’s most exuberant moments — such as lead single A Little Love — revel in their choice to carry on. It certainly wasn’t a given. “I’m hoping long term that the couple of years we took off will help,” says Neil, “even though it didn’t help in the immediate aftermath because we just couldn’t see eye to eye.” But Biffy clearly want to put in the work and fight for the thing they’ve made together. “This ship is built to last,” goes the repeated refrain of poignant highlight Woe is Me, Wow is You. “I feel like we’ve renewed our vows at the white wedding chapel in Vegas,” Neil laughs now.
“I dived straight into the band after my mum died and I don’t think I ever fully processed”
The record, too, puts some of the final pieces of Puzzle together, almost 20 years on. Futique’s cover is a picture of Neil’s mother and father — a photograph that the singer has tattooed on his arm but “couldn’t look at for years”. “I dived straight into the band after my mum died and I don’t think I ever fully processed it because I put all that energy into the music and never stopped,” he says. “And I’ve still got this countdown clock in my brain because my mum passed when she was 54, and I’m under 10 years away from that. But also that picture really defines my entire journey to get to this point where I want to celebrate these things that make us who we are. And that we’re all just part of one big f***ing chain, and we’re lucky to even be here.”
And so, reincarnated from the turmoil of the past few years, the mood in Biffy Clyro HQ right now is one determined to find joy. For a start off, Neil is all too aware of how, against the looming threat of AI, bands like them are more necessary now than ever. “The worry for me is Warner Brothers, my record label, has just made a deal with an AI music-making company and I want to know: are my songs going to be f***ing training that AI?” he questions, pointedly. “But one thing I’ve been holding dear is that a band like Geese this year, you could never get an AI programme to make that music. Rosalía’s Lux — no AI’s making that. So where we explore as humans, that’s what’s so unique.”
In a world of uncertainty, Neil still believes in the power of music, and people, and the sheer force for good that can happen when you gather together — in Finsbury Park perhaps — and dance it out. “I do believe in rock ’n’ roll!” he grins. “You look at all these mad biohacking folk — these people that are spending so much money on their own f***ing longevity and they’re watching the world burn, and watching people die, and all they care about is outliving us all. It’s mad, but that’s why I’m trying to just hold on to the thrill of music: something human, something that has been in my life, for my whole life. That’s why I’m thrilled that something as simple as three old friends still making music together can pull people together. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”
Biffy Clyro play the O2 Arena on January 14 and Finsbury Park on July 3; biffyclyro.com
