‘We’ve really missed this,’ Bombay Bicycle Club singer Jack Steadman tells the audience at York Barbican. It’s only the band’s second gig of 2025.

By Miles Salter

Photos by Stuart Duthie

After Divorce opened the night, the headliners took to the stage.

The backdrop looks like a kids’ party, with clusters of large colourful balloons. The words ‘My Big Day’ are suspended over the stage – also the title of a new, sixth album. The evening does, indeed, have a celebratory feel about it. The band and its audience have a child-like giddiness, a revelling in being alive and in the moment.

An expanded line-up takes the four-piece band, who have been together since 2020, to nine musicians on stage. They play with this dynamic frequently, which gives them a chameleon-like ability to change the sound. It’s very postmodern. One minute there’s a brass section and a decidedly ‘dance’ feel, the next they move to industrial rock with drums, bass, two guitars and vocals. The dance tracks are genuinely infectious. The audience snakes and grooves, pints glistening in the dark.

Other songs are less impressive. The band has a thing for mantras and repeated phrases – repetition is a big part of pop music, but these don’t always snarl the listener. Matilda Mann takes centre stage for Lights Out, Words Gone, which is introduced by brass and congas – a fantastic, fresh moment that I wanted to last longer.

The band are not afraid of their own oddities – at one point Steadman tells the audience that they have three songs about sleep, but with the eccentricities comes a winning accessibility. Their website includes an ‘Ask The Band’ section where fans can send in inquiries, albeit with the proviso of ‘interesting questions’, so it’s perhaps best not to ask them what they like for breakfast.  It’s refreshing to see a band that are so open to exploring different approaches to music and so thrilled by the live experience. Like a kids’ party, but for grownups. But then, as somebody once said, adults are just children with money.      

Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. He fronts the band ‘Miles and The Chain Gang.’

Divorce and Bombay Bicycle Club played at York Barbican on Friday 22 August 2025.