Biffy Clyro have spent the past week getting back in touch with their younger selves for their rapturously-received A Celebration Of Beginnings shows, a series of gigs seeing the Scottish trio perform their first three albums in order. That era of the band, when they were signed to an indie record company in Beggars and yet to become hit-making, major label arena-dwelling rock behemoths, was a hugely formative one for the three-piece. As frontman Simon Neil told this writer a few years ago, it was a period that still cast a huge shadow over everything they do.
“In our minds, I think the band’s early days still feel like the biggest chapter of our band,” he said. It was, the singer reflected, when they worked a few things out about what to do and what not to do. A big not, he said, was talking about a band show immediately after it had happened. “That’s how bands break up,” he laughed. “We’ve done that a few times ourself and I’ve sworn I’m never gonna talk to the boys again and they’ve been the same with me. But we learnt that early on. A couple of times at the end of a show, if I was mad about something, I’d start smashing Ben’s gear or James’ gear.”
The frontman said one of the toughest times in the band came not in the early days, but in the period after their initial wave of success following the release of 2007’s breakthrough Puzzle. “In the late 00s - 2007, 2008, 2009 - that was where we just didn’t have the balance right,” he remembered. “We partied way too much and everything was kind of leading towards the party for a long time and that ended up manifested itself in the band kind of splintering in certain ways. If we weren’t such good friends, there were points where I could see where if we hadn’t known each other for a decade or a couple of decades, we would’ve been like, ‘Fuck you’. But that’s the bonus of being in a band with your friends. You can make up with your friends.”
Now that they have wrapped up their triumphant little trip back to their early days, here’s hoping Biffy knuckle down and get working on a new record – their last new effort was 2021’s The Myth Of The Happily Ever After.
