Biffy Clyro interview: 'We wanted to be the opposite of Oasis'

In the autumn of 2004, Biffy Clyro offered me a job as a roadie. It was an unpaid short-term position that consisted of just one task: ferrying a small stack of white towels and several bottles of chilled water to the stage of the Barrowland Ballroom in the east end of Glasgow.

“These towels and bottles here?”

“The very same,” I was told.

The band were due onstage in five minutes. As I scurried to the drum-riser, front of house a crowd of almost 2000 people chanted “Mon the Biff! Mon the Biff!” – RP translation: “come on the Biffy Clyro” – with a startling and thunderous unity. The noise was so overwhelming that I barely dared sneak a look in the direction of the faces making it. To this day, it remains one of the most intimidating experiences of my life.

“Welcome to my world, man,” says Simon Neil, the band’s singer and guitarist.

I arrived in Scotland believing Biffy Clyro to be a capable alternative rock band of little overall significance. But as the “Barrowlands” emptied and its staff began to clear its wooden dance-floor of thousands of plastic pint pots, it was obvious that Something Was Happening. I wondered if a group with such a terrible name could become truly popular. Don’t worry, I was told, you’ll get used to it. Fifteen years later, I did.

Today Biffy Clyro are one of the most popular bands in Britain. They’re also its best. At the time of writing, the group’s latest album, A Celebration Of Endings, released last week, has sold 25,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone. In the digital age, in the midst of a pandemic, this is big beer. Barring the unforeseen, Biffy’s new LP will join its two predecessors in entering the chart at number one.

“I want to remind people what rock music is all about,” says Neil. “I think this is a vibrant guitar record and I don’t feel that I’ve heard a lot of them over the last few years.”

The top spot will be deserved. Equipped with a forensic attention to detail, the band’s eighth album is a seamless mixture of rock, pop and metal that boasts a wing-span of which others can only dream. At times this is a collection that sparks with violence; at others it is the home of the unusual lullaby. Melodies abound. When the billionaire-class ballad Space is unveiled as a stand-alone track in the autumn, it will surely dominate the rest of the year.

A Celebration Of Endings was originally scheduled for release in May. But “it would have been insensitive and difficult to talk about a record with this thing going around the world,” says drummer Ben Johnston. Only now, in the dog days of summer, have the trio decided that enough is enough. In doing so, Biffy Clyro are the first Major League rock act to break cover in the Covid age.

“This album is us sharing our moment of joy,” says James Johnston, the group’s bassist and Ben’s twin brother. Both men are smiling from my computer screen. “There’s been so much guilt attached to having joy in your life. But I think we’ve got to have these moments because I do believe that’s the only way that humankind can exist amid all this darkness."

“I think people are ready to have music back in their lives again,” says Ben Johnston. “I know I am.”

As London braces itself for a heat wave, Simon Neil sits at a table in a rooftop hotel bar in the centre of the city. With a smile that could span the Clyde, his manner is dependably sunny-side up; even a day of press cannot extinguish the buoyancy of forward momentum. The last time I saw him, in February, he was wearing a winter coat. As a different kind of frigidity descended in the spring, he began scaling the walls.

“When lockdown started, me and Ben and James didn’t even feel like we were in a band,” he says. “Our default setting is a lack of self-esteem; we kind of need to be doing [something] to feel confident. So four months of not doing anything, and of having the album postponed, it really made us uneasy. It’s hard to put in to words. We’re more secure when it’s just the three of us making music, and we didn’t have that.”

When Biffy Clyro formed, in 1995, they were a band defined by what they did not want to be. As Britpop soaked the United Kingdom, bemused audiences in venues as far-flung as the Stornaway Sea Angling Club asked the trio if they might consider playing a song like Wonderwall or Live Forever. Fat chance. Simon Neil’s answer was never over-produced. “We f______ hate Oasis,” he told me in 2009.

“It made me want to do the exact opposite,” he says. “It instilled in us a feeling that exists to this day – that it’s good to make things difficult for ourselves. Back then, even the bands that didn’t sound like Oasis would, after six months, start to the change their sound in that direction. They thought that this was the best option. But I knew… that a whole different word existed.”

Simon Neil knew this, he says, because he read the rock press. He knew that in 1994 the US group Pantera had released Far Beyond Driven – “f___ you and your college dream, fact is we’re stronger than all” – an album that set new standards for the amount of agro one band could pack onto a compact disc. He also knew that – remarkably - the LP had debuted in the United States at number one. He knew there was another way.

Biffy Clyro never imagined themselves being anything other than a gang of three, a state of mind from which they have declined to decouple. The group released three albums on Beggars Banquet Records, an independent label that allowed them to do their growing up away from the public eye. They refused to move to London. In concert they declined, even, to say hello to their audience. The first time they did so, really, was supporting Muse at Wembley Stadium.

“I noticed what a difference going on and saying ‘Hi, we’re Biffy Clyro’ made,” says Neil. “In the past we’d walk out as if we were the ones doing them the favour. That’s how na?ve we were. But that obstinate streak is still within us, it’s just that now we know when to engage it.”

Just when Biffy Clyro appeared too awkward for their own good, Alex Gilbert, an attentive A&R person at Warner Bros., listened to the noise and morse-code time signatures and discerned pop music struggling to be heard. The Scots flew to New York to record their fourth album. Such were the improvements in circumstances that Ben Johnston marveled at studio technicians replacing his drum skins between takes.

Released in June 2007, Puzzle opened the second act of Biffy Clyro by elevating them to the majors. With a sleeve designed by Storm Thorgerson, the album was an exercise in alchemy; it took the grief felt by Simon Neil following the death of his mother, Eleanor, and transformed it into an oblique and superior work of art. Despite remaining an often challenging proposition, the LP debuted in the UK charts at number two.

“Even when we stepped into the big leagues, I still felt that we were the underdogs,” says Neil. “There were a handful of bands who were being written about as the next big things, and we were never ever described in that way. And that suited us… But what I did know is that I felt our band was special, and that we were as good if not better than other groups.”

In this, he’s right. Come the summer of 2007, acts such as Bloc Party, Klaxons, Kaiser Chiefs and The Horrors were being loudly extolled as the Future of British Guitar Music by excitable members of the Fourth Estate. But only the equally independently-minded Arctic Monkeys can be said to have realised their full potential with the scope and execution of Biffy Clyro.

They were just getting started. In 2009, the band reached the top 10 with a single bearing the strange title Many Of Horror. The following year, the singer Matt Cardle used the song to croon his way to victory on the television talent show The X-Factor. Released in the penultimate week of 2010, Cardle’s polished cover version, re-titled When We Collide, became the 59th Christmas UK number one.

Biffy Clyro topped the bill at open-air happenings all over Britain. The band headlined the Leeds and Reading Festivals, Download at Donington Park, Sonisphere at Knebworth House, and the Isle of Wight Festival. “There’s no other band that has appeared at so many different festivals,” says James Johnston.

“Liam and Noel [Gallagher] are lovely people now that we know them,” says Simon Neil.

But the underdog spirit remains. I recall being aboard the band’s tour bus en route to the Leeds Festival, in 2013, and listening in silent wonder as the members expressed pleasant surprise that Warner Bros. had exercised their option for at least another album. “Your last one went to number one,” I thought. “Why would they do anything else?”

“I think it’s part of the beating heart of this band that we don’t really feel at home anywhere,” says James Johnston. “And we’re quite happy not exactly fitting in anywhere. I like that we’re slightly too heavy for the pop crowd and slightly too poppy for the metal crowd, too. But at the same time we’re capable of headlining all these festivals.”

In any year other than that in which we find ourselves, the second act of the band’s album cycle would now begin. The trio would rehearse for upcoming concerts in Britain’s largest arenas – the 02 in London, the SSE Hydro in Glasgow – in sizeable halls in Europe, and in clubs and theatres in the United States. They would board a tour bus or, if circumstances required it, a van. A road crew would be amassed. Passports would be stamped.

But in the absence of an ideal world, last week Biffy Clyro did manage to launch A Celebration Of Endings in style. Appearing at a mid-sized venue in Scotland, the group performed a live-streamed concert from a stage, a dance-floor, and from within the confines of a mirrored cube. Directed by Oscar Sansom, the hour-long set also featured contributions from touring musicians Mike Vennart and Richard Ingram as well as orchestration from the Cairn String Quartet.

Over the course of an hour, Ben Johnston played on four different kits. The other half of Britain’s finest rhythm section – “we’re the funkiest gingers in the west coast of Scotland,” says the drummer – James Johnston somehow locked into a murderous groove while wearing a jumpsuit that may or may not have been purchased from Monki.

“I think this will be our modus operandi going from now on,” says the bassist. “It’s no good dwelling on the things you can’t do; you’ve got to try and find positives in the things you can do. In the coming months, that’s going to be the way to go.”

For the final number of the night, Biffy Clyro unveiled Cop Syrup. The most remarkable track on A Celebrations Of Endings, the six-minute song starts like an explosion in a shouting factory only to pivot into an extended instrumental section of extraordinary delicacy and finesse.

In the calmness of the song’s second act, Simon Neil strode away from the rest of the band. Playing a Fender Stratocaster guitar, he walked down the two flights of stairs that leads to the entrance of the venue. In the street outside, he stood with his back to the hall that housed the twin brothers he has known since he was seven years old. Above him an illuminated sign read, Barrowland.

A Celebration Of Endings by Biffy Clyro is available now from 14th Floor Records/Warner Bros