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🎥 biffy_clyro: Scenes from Finsbury Park

Biffy Clyro

Art to choke hearts

From cult acclaim to growing commercial success; this year Biffy Clyro are set to go supernova. This is what it’s like in the eye of the storm…

Words: Simon Young Photos: Ashley Maile

SIMON NEIL and the Johnston twins drop their bags on the concrete floor of a West London photo studio and walk towards a large black backdrop. Everywhere you look, there’s maniacally-scribbled, chalky equations and strange symbols scrawled across thick, dark paper.

Before dropping out of university to make Biffy Clyro his deafening full-time concern, Neil spent days writing and deciphering equations as part of his electronics and music course at Glasgow University. In five minutes, he’ll take his shirt off and will spend an hour having numbers and symbols inked onto his back and arms.

“This is giving me some serious flashbacks,” he says. “What if you accidentally wrote an equation for the meaning of life and no-one knew? Imagine that.”

Biffy look shattered. They played three shows yesterday: an acoustic showcase in the afternoon, a set at Brixton Academy supporting Bloc Party and a glorious 1am gig in a tiny bar at the Kerrang!-sponsored Camden Crawl. Neil ended the band’s triumphant set by hurling himself headlong into the crowd just as the police were threatening their soundman with arrest for breaking the noise curfew.

“Last night was amazing,” says the frontman. “It reaffirmed our faith in what we do. It was great to see our fans up close and feel their excitement.”

Once their forthcoming album ‘Puzzle’ hits the shelves next month, it’s difficult to predict when the band will play a tiny venue again.

Biffy Clyro are about to become massive. It’s about time.

TWO DAYS later, we join the band at La Carrière in Saint-Herblain, a short drive away from Nantes on the west coast of France.

They’re special guests on Bloc Party’s European dates and are enjoying the chance to tour extensively without having the responsibility of headlining. That’s not to say the band are getting royally hammered before they play. They’d rather spend their time fishing at the lake in front of the venue or flying remote-controlled planes around the catering hall. These are the sort of things that Mötley Crüe never had time to do on the ‘Girls Girls Girls’ tour.

But then, Biffy don’t really do rock ’n’ roll excess: indeed when ‘Puzzle’ producer Garth Richardson suggested bringing in some strippers for a hot tub party towards the end of the album sessions, the band insisted he send the girls back home.

It’s just not the Biffy way: during band downtime you’ll find Simon watching ‘24’, reading or writing complicated riffs. Bassist James can often be seen cycling through the hills in Ayrshire armed with a flask of tea and a couple of sandwiches. His drummer brother, meanwhile, likes to take in a round of golf when the weather’s nice. If it’s pissing down – as it seems to do in Scotland all the fucking time – he’ll put his pyjamas on and play PlayStation2 until his eyes hurt.

“It’s boring getting wrecked every day,” says Neil, nursing a cheeky drop of red wine. “If you tour all the time and cane it every night, you’ll burn out in no time at all. We’re not 16 anymore.”

BIFFY CLYRO began recording ‘Puzzle’ in Vancouver with Garth Richardson in September 2006. But their new songs started to come together much earlier, before the band had actually finished touring their last album, 2003’s ‘Infinity Land’. The band’s growing cult success had not gone unnoticed in the music industry, and they found themselves caught up in a protracted legal process while they made the sticky transition from indie label Beggars Banquet to 14th Floor, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. To a band who were used to releasing an album every 15 months – they famously recorded their 2003 album ‘The Vertigo Of Bliss’ in a day – the delays seemed like an eternity.

But when the legal smoke finally cleared and the band were told they had three months to record their major label debut they grasped the opportunity with both hands.

“With the other albums, we’d have absolutely everything planned down to the last detail because of time constraints,” says Neil. “With this album, we took our time and took full advantage of all the opportunities we had been given. We could have recorded four albums in the time we were there, but we really worked on every aspect of the album, right until the last day.

“We’d waited for so long to record these songs,” he adds. “We had all these great opportunities and a great producer, a new label and we put more pressure on ourselves than anyone ever could.”

“We had four days left booked in the studio and Garth wanted to postpone finishing the album,” laughs James. “We’d worked so hard for so long on the album, he was losing his mind. We almost broke the man who gave Timmy C a nosebleed from stress while Rage Against The Machine were recording an album! We like to work hard.”

It was only in December, when the final tracks of ‘Puzzle’ were being mixed in a New York studio – by Andy Wallace, who pushed some buttons on some album called ‘Nevermind’ – that the band were able to actually properly listen to what they’d created. Bug-eyed and possibly a little hysterical from three months of intense hard work, it began to dawn on the three childhood friends that, after almost three years of monumental heartache, grief and uncertainty, they’d recorded the album of their lives.

Before preparing for tonight’s show – vocal warm-ups, a glass of red wine and a roll-up – the band crowd around their tour manager Neil’s laptop to check out the final draft of the album’s unsettling artwork, created by conceptual artist Storm Thorgerson (Pink Floyd, The Mars Volta, Muse). The album has been finished for five months now: the wait to release it is killing them.

“It’s like Christmas has been postponed,” says James. “We know major labels like to do things a little differently. But we’re so proud of this album, it’s just frustrating waiting all this time. We just want to get it out there so people can hear it.”

“WE’VE HAD TO FIGHT EVERY STEP OF THE WAY.” BEN JOHNSTON

THOSE WHO have heard ‘Puzzle’, are enthusiastically telling everyone they know that this is the album of the year. The experimental, prog-like flourishes which have characterised their previous three albums are still there, but have been reined in to make way for a joyously inventive yet accessible 13-track effort that is free of filler.

The album’s last single, the anthemic ‘Saturday Superhouse’ entered the singles chart at number 13 in March and this week’s release ‘Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies’ – a suspense-laden masterpiece layered with spiralling strings and a celestial choir – looks set to do similar damage. The band nervously laugh when it’s mentioned that this album could well be the one to propel them into the premier league. But how will mainstream success affect the band?

“We could be heading for a big fall talking about that,” smiles Simon. “But I don’t think success would change us. We got that out of the way when we released our first EP. We had the cockiest attitude ever.”

“But we quickly realised that we had to fight our corner and play constantly to get anywhere,” adds Ben. “We’ve had to fight every step of the way.”

James recalls the time their single ‘27’ was awarded ‘Single Of The Week’ by largely forgotten nu-metallers Taproot in 2001 [K!847}.

“I was getting ready to wash my car when Ben brought the magazine into the house,” he laughs. “We couldn’t believe it and started running around the house screaming. When I calmed down, I thought, ‘Well… better clean the car, then’. We’re from Kilmarnock and no-one gives a shit. It helps keep your feet on the ground.”

What, then, if one member starts acting like the big rock star? What would you do?

“If anyone started playing up, the other two would have to give them a spanking,” laughs Ben. “None of us are limelight seekers at all. It would create friction. I’m glad we’re not like Fall Out Boy.”

“I think it’s intrinsic to people’s personality,” says Simon. “It’s weird when a band’s celebrity overshadows the music. People like Pete Wentz, for example. He probably wants to be the centre of attention. There’s no danger of that happening, because it’s so far removed from what we are.”

2007 IS shaping up to be the band’s most exciting year yet. But for Neil, the year will be full of bittersweet memories as his mother will never get to see the success her son worked so hard to achieve.

Eleanor Neil passed away suddenly in March 2004 while Biffy were touring Ireland with Hundred Reasons. Dropping everything, the band flew back to Scotland and Simon was able to see his mother one last time in hospital before she passed away.

In a music scene choked with bands peddling theatrical angst as a means of entertainment, ‘Puzzle’ is a brutally honest album of genuine depth and emotion: it’s about a young man having his heart broken and his attempts to rebuild his life. Neil’s lyrics across the 13 tracks aren’t swathed in metaphors. They’re from the heart and uncomfortably so.

The album’s opening track ‘Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies’ is about losing your faith in everything (‘I met God and he had nothing to say to me.’) and conjures up heartbreaking imagery (‘I pray to God that you’re right before my eyes, bathed in white light with halos in your eyes.’). The bludgeoning ‘Semi-Mental’ deals with grief (‘I smoke my face in night after night, to numb the pain and stop the world spinning round and round’), while the quietly introspective closing track ‘Machines’ finds some sort of acceptance and attempts to face the future (‘Take the pieces and build them skywards…’).

“IF YOU TOUR ALL THE TIME AND CANE IT EVERY NIGHT, YOU’LL BURN OUT IN NO TIME AT ALL. WE’RE NOT 16 ANYMORE.” SIMON NEIL

THE FOLLOWING day, we join the band at Lille’s L’Aeronef venue. In the blazing sunshine, we find a shaded spot in the sunny courtyard. Simon is surprisingly open about his loss.

He admits that when their third album ‘Infinity Land’ was released shortly after her death, they threw themselves into an intensive touring schedule to delay dealing with the reality of his loss. In hindsight, Neil wishes he put the band on hold to cope with his grief properly.

“I really regret that,” says Neil quietly. “I wish we’d taken a year off but I think I wasn’t of sound enough mind to say I wanted to be at home and be with my dad and brother. We’re all quite manly men in my family and there were times I wish we weren’t so stiff-upper-lip about everything. In different cultures, if a family loses someone, they’re so open with their grief. I think it’s healthy.”

And when the band’s legal woes started to slow things down to a halt, Neil began to channel his grief, anger and confusion into his songwriting and page after page of moving, confessional lyrics.

“I kept writing and writing,” he notes. “The songs were very raw.”

ELEANOR NEIL was incredibly supportive of the band. But she worried, like all mothers would do, when her son announced he was dropping out of university to concentrate on Biffy Clyro.

“She saw it in my eyes when I told her how much playing in the band meant to me,” he smiles. “We were playing together since we were 15 and she was always pleased when we were doing well.

“The worst time I remember was when we played in Glasgow a while afterwards,” he adds. “My dad and brother came to watch and that was one of the saddest times of my life. I knew my mum would have been so proud. We’d be doing well and there was this cloud following me around. It was tough for the other guys because they didn’t know how to deal with me. I was up and down all the time.”

Neil brightens when I mention ‘Folding Stars’, is a moving tribute to his mother.

“She really liked the quiet songs, so I wrote the song for her,” he says. “It’s the kind of song she’d like and although it was really tough to record, I’m immensely proud of it. It makes me happy when people say they connect with the song but I’m not sure if we’ll ever play it live. Not any time soon, anyway.”

Predictably, the label love ‘Folding Stars’ and there’s talk of it being released as a single in the future. It’s something that’s causing Neil some concern.

“It makes me feel uneasy,” he says, pausing to collect his thoughts. “I knew that by being on a major label it would happen, it’s their job to sell the music and not be so concerned with the artistic integrity behind the songs. I know we’re lucky to have a label that believes in us but it makes me feel weird.”

What do his dad and brother think of the album?

“I’m actually too scared to let them hear the full album yet,” he admits. “I feel guilty, because I don’t know if they see music as just entertainment. I don’t want them to think of it as it like that and get the wrong idea about why I’m singing about my mum. I know there’s a couple of songs on it that’ll make them really upset and I’m trying to delay that happening.”

All eyes will be on Biffy Clyro this year. Whatever sales they clock up, ‘Puzzle’ is an incredible artistic triumph and, perhaps most importantly to the three young men who created it, a magnificent tribute to Eleanor Neil.

“There’ll always be days when I’ll feel sadness,” he says quietly. “I don’t think anyone truly gets over something like this, do they? I’m happy to talk about this with you, but once the album comes out, I’m not going to talk about it anymore. This year is going to be weird, I think.”

‘PUZZLE’ WILL BE RELEASED ON JUNE 4 VIA 14TH FLOOR. THE NEW SINGLE ‘LIVING IS A PROBLEM BECAUSE EVERYTHING DIES’, IS OUT NOW.

’MON THE BIFFY!’

SIMON PICKS 10 TRACKS FOR THE ESSENTIAL BIFFY MIX-TAPE

‘JUSTBOY’ “That’s one of the first songs I ever wrote that I thought was quite good. I had discovered bands like Far and Mineral and this song was a product of that.” FIND IT: ‘Blackened Sky’ (album, 2002)

‘HERO MANAGEMENT’ “Arrangement-wise, that’s probably one of the most complex songs on the first record. It was the first time we’d played a song and realised there were no rules, basically.” FIND IT: ‘Blackened Sky’ (album, 2002)

‘BODIES IN FLIGHT’ “After our first album, people thought we were grunge or something. When people heard this song, it made people realise we were doing something a bit different.” FIND IT: ‘The Vertigo Of Bliss’ (album, 2003)

‘TOYS TOYS TOYS CHOKE TOYS TOYS TOYS’ “This was the first song that was written for ‘The Vertigo Of Bliss’. We’ve got lots of back-and-forth vocals and has got a crazy break-down section. It’s almost quintessential Biffy, I guess.” FIND IT: ‘The Vertigo Of Bliss’ (album, 2003)

‘SOME KIND OF WIZARD’ “This was a really tricky one to learn how to play because the guitar parts were really hard. At that point, I hope we were managing to meld the pop song to something more complex. It was fresh for us and full of things we’d never tried before.” FIND IT: ‘Infinity Land’ (album, 2004)

‘GOT WRONG’ “That was down-tuned to C. I was playing around with the tuning and the song came straight out. Initially, we thought that was going to be a single and was our poppiest moment to date. It was poppy yet really heavy.” FIND IT: ‘Infinity Land’ (album, 2004)

‘LIVING IS A PROBLEM BECAUSE EVERYTHING DIES’ “This sums up the new record and shows that we’re not happy to plough the same kind of furrow as we’ve done before. We wanted something epic and over-the-top and something the three of us would find hard to do.” FIND IT: ‘Puzzle’ (album, 2007)

‘FOLDING STARS’ “Personally, it’s a very important song to me. It’s the most straight pop ballad – I hate the word ‘ballad’ – let’s say slow song we’ve done. It turned out perfectly. It’s a sweet song and is a balance to the craziness.” FIND IT: ‘Puzzle’ (album, 2007)

‘MACHINES’ “This is the sparsest song on the new album. It’s nice for us to have a tune that isn’t all about dynamics and blowing people’s faces off. It’s got lyrics people can connect with and it’s very satisfying to play.” FIND IT: ‘Puzzle’ (album, 2007)

‘AND WITH THE SCISSORKICK IS VICTORIOUS’ “We almost put this on ‘Vertigo…’. It was one of our favourite songs but it didn’t quite fit in with the album we wanted to make. It’s got a really galloping feel and lots of screaming. It’s quite Iron Maiden-y.” FIND IT: ‘The Ideal Height’ B-side (single, 2003)

Biffy Clyro

UNFOLD THE PUZZLE OF LIFE...

Biffy Clyro on the front cover of Kerrang! (May 19th, 2007)

‘We’re the best band in the world!’

How art-rock sorcerers BIFFY CLYRO conquered grief, violence and poverty to become Britain’s best loved cult.

WORDS: IAN WINDWOOD PHOTOS: PAUL HARRIES

LOOK LADS, you say to them, you’ve got to make this look realistic. Understand? You can’t be half-hearted about it, because that’s no good. So when we say “go!” you’ve got to, you know, go.

“Aye, right.”

You’ve got to make it look like you mean it.

“Aye.”

Because if you don’t you’re going to look daft.

“Okay, right.”

The three members of Biffy Clyro are holding plastic toy instruments. They’re in a photographic studio on London’s Shepherd’s Bush Road, 13 shopping days before Christmas. Outside it’s a winter’s day, a deep and dark December. Inside in Studio C there are half a dozen beautiful models manoeuvring themselves in and out of a hundred different outfits. We’re in Studio B. In here there are three Scots twanging about on fluorescent toys.

Go!

Biffy Clyro smash up their instruments, with a fury that looks like a tornado tucking into a toy shop. Brittle plastic flies about at violent speed. Drummer Ben Johnston clatters a cymbal across the white concrete floor. His twin brother James – Biffy bassist throws his instrument into the sky. Frontman Simon Neil arcs his guitar to the ground. Its innards fly loose like splintered teeth.

A few years back Biffy Clyro opened for Sum 41 at the Glasgow Barrowland, Britain’s most celebrated and notorious venue. In a deliberately provocative gesture the trio opened with ‘Hope For An Angel’, their slowest, gentlest number. By the end of the song Simon was soaked in spit. He was, he says, “ready to fight every c**t in the place.” Instead, the three of them dug in, persevered and won the affections of three quarters of Sum 41’s audience. They did this with determination and talent. They did this by looking like they meant it.

Today, smashing up plastic toys, Biffy Clyro still look like they mean it.

“We’re not fashion fuckers,” says Neil, the one with the boy band eyes. “If Kate Moss goes to see a band play at the Camden Barfly then that band already has a higher profile than ours. We’re not interested in that. We’re not interested in non-music lovers buying our music. We’re for people who live for music and who love music. Because we love music and we live for music.”

Sweating from their efforts, Ben and James Johnston and Simon Neil look at the floor and the mess they’ve created. They then go and collect brooms, brushes, dustpans and a bin and they clean it all up.

LET’S GET to the blood and guts of the story: Biffy Clyro are a fabulously good band. This is worth saying not only because it’s true but because you might not know it. In 2005 the band’s operation slowed to a halt. This was due to an unseemly tussle to free themselves from their former record label (for whom they recorded three albums: 2002’s ‘Blackened Sky’, 2003’s ‘The Vertigo Of Bliss’ and, a year later, the much applauded ‘Infinity Land’), in order to sign for their new label, the Warner Brothers-affiliated 14th Floor Records. This is hardly an unusual story, and 18 months is not that long an absence. But for Biffy Clyro it is. This is a band who released an album every 15 months. This is a band who played hundreds of gigs each year.

When asked, there’s barely a town in the whole of the United Kingdom the Kilmarnock and Ayr-based trio cannot recall visiting. They’ve played the Tunbridge Wells Forum, the Stornoway Sea Angling Club. They once played in Manchester and were refused admission because they were too scruffy. By the time they talked their way inside, they realised their audience had also been refused entry, so they played to 11 people. Oh, and the fourth time they performed at Edinburgh’s T In The Park festival – the fourth time – the Johnston twins had spent their week earning a wage digging up roads in Dundee.

“Bands who have a quick ascent tend to have a quick descent,” says James Johnston. James’ voice sounds exactly the same as his twin brother’s. The only reason I know it’s him speaking is because he kindly lowers his head and says “James” into my tape recorder prior to each statement. “And these bands, they’re left with fuck all. If you take everything away from us we’ll still have our fans. Without our fans we have nothing.”

“Hard work has earned us that fan-base,” says his brother. Ben has short hair and wears a blue and white Kilmarnock football scarf. He’s deliberately piled on a stone and a half in 10 weeks because he was getting too thin. “We’ve never had our name in the fashionable media. Instead we went out gigging. We worked our arses off.”

If you had your time again, would you call yourself Biffy Clyro?

To a man and in an instant: “Aye.”

Why?

“Because it sorts out the fucking dongs from the music lovers,” says Simon. “If anyone is going to dislike the band’s music because of our name then we don’t want them as fans anyway.”

They describe themselves as the kind of group that enjoys a challenge, and the past 18 months has been one. Up until then Biffy Clyro were gathering pace. Finally they were headlining the kinds of places in which they’d previously appeared as support bands (to Weezer and Feeder, among others). They didn’t get mentioned on ‘Popworld’ or lauded by the beautiful people who write vanity columns, but they kept on keeping on and the fans they came. By the end of its run, ‘Infinity Land’ had sold 50,000 copies. And only those who cared noticed.

“The people who like our band,” says Ben, “tend to really, really like us.”

But then the wheels stopped. As the lawyers busied themselves in the confusion of litigation, Biffy Clyro dug themselves in for a long wait and did one of the few things they could do: they wrote music. Simon Neil realises now that this enforced hiatus was “a real blessing”. But at the time? God, no. As the legal fog cleared the band shifted themselves to British Columbia and made ‘Puzzle’, their fourth album. They worked with one time Rage Against The Machine producer Garth Richardson.

This three piece whose stock in trade was once bile and snarl recruited the Seattle Symphony Orchestra to contribute to a couple of tunes (Simon: “How much does it cost to hire an orchestra?… about 10 grand”). They then moved to New York and mixed the album with technician Andy Wallace (Slayer, Nirvana). They spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars, all in. They stayed in a high rise apartment block, although Simon has to keep the curtains closed because he’s scared of heights. Which is a shame because his band might be about to fly.

‘Puzzle’ is brilliant. You’ll hear it in the spring.

“We’ve made fuck all money from doing this,” says the singer. He says this sitting around a table inside a Manhattan recording studio. Work on ‘Puzzle’ wrapped yesterday and he and the twins have fuzzy, nagging hangovers. Outside on the corner of 5th Avenue and 21st Street New York obligingly slips into darkness. In three hours time they’ll enjoy a $1000 meal at an upscale midtown restaurant that will give at least two members of a party of seven diarrhoea. “But look around us,” he says. “We’ve made our fourth album. We’re still here. We got where we are through hard work. We got where we are by pushing ourselves in every direction we know. To me, we’re still the best band in the world.”

If you had to rank ‘Puzzle’ out of 10 how many would you give it?

They answer in unison, and the collective score amounts to 30. Once again, they sound like they mean it.

“We’re not fashion fuckers.” Simon Neil

THE NEXT day, Biffy Clyro fly back to where they came from. Simon Neil lives in Ayr, 15 miles “door to practice room door” from Kilmarnock, where the Johnston’s are based. Simon says he wouldn’t go out in Ayr of a weekend “because [he’d] get [his] head kicked in”. The twins say they wouldn’t venture out into Kilmarnock on any night, and don’t much like doing so in the day. Why? “Because it’s as rough as fuck.” Just three nights ago a young man was killed half a mile from their home. A gang of “NEDS” (Non Educated Delinquents) asked the lad for a slug of his tonic wine. Since he refused, his assailants chose to stab him to death with a screwdriver.

“It’s really, really horrible,” says James. “There’s a lot of drugs and not many jobs.”

But it was here, in the mid 1990s, that Simon, Ben and their friends would rehearse in a garage. They would get one of their tall mates to buy them some booze and they’d all merry off and get loaded.

Back then they were called Screwfish, and the band’s membership could best have been described as flexible. They’d booked session time at Toucan Studios in Irving, but shortly before this date one of the members threw a punch at Simon. No reason, he just did it. So James joined the band instead; not only that but he learned to play the bass in a fortnight. The group recorded three songs (‘Is It Me?’, ‘I Know’ and ‘Cul-de-sac’) and sold 500 copies of the tape. They’d play lunchtime concerts at their school and people would tell them they were pish.

But from that, came this. Via disastrous gigs in working men’s’ clubs, via record companies who wouldn’t give them the time of night because they didn’t sound like Oasis (“this was the height of Brit Pop,” says Simon, “we fucking hated Oasis”), slowly it grew. They played student unions to 50 people. They played King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut to 300 people. They played the Barrowland to 2000 people. And now they’re here.

Ask Biffy Clyro what their environment has given them and they all answer: “perspective.”

“It puts things into perspective when you see a woman stumbling about the streets pushing a pram going to find drugs,” says Ben.

“People talk about drug problems,” says Simon. “Unless you’ve sat in an alley without a penny to your name shooting up smack then you haven’t had drug problems. Being in the gutter, not having a home and being down to your last penny – that’s a serious drug problem. Enjoying a party is not a serious drug problem.”

And drinking?

“If you’re having a drink at breakfast, then you’ve got a drinking problem. But some [people in bands] have a drink at six o’ clock in the evening and claim they’re alcoholics.”

“We’re not getting at any band in particular,” says Ben.

“No,” says Simon, with a wink of a smile. “We’re getting at Americans as a whole.”

“Unless you’ve sat in an alley shooting smack then you haven’t had drug problems.” Simon Neil

IN 2004, Simon Neil’s mother died. Biffy Clyro were on tour in Ireland when he received a call. The three of them flew back to Scotland that day, and although Eleanor Neil had lost consciousness her son was able to see his mother a final time before the end. He declines to offer specifics but will say that there was a history of heart illness prior to that day. Anyway, there she was, and there she died. She was 54 years old.

Unprepared for what had happened, for months he failed to deal with his grief. He was prescribed Prozac. It worked, at least as much as it could be expected to. For about a month the drug made him sick, physically ill. But he realised it wasn’t allowing him to be himself. After six months he stopped the course of treatment. Instead, his loss turned its face toward music. For what it’s worth (and to Simon Neil it’s worth everything) ‘Puzzle’ is the work of his mother’s son.

“I was very close to my mum,” he says. “Even things such as the fact that I look loads like her. I look in the mirror and I’m angry at myself because I see her in myself. [Her death] has made me the person I am today, for good or ill. So the whole album is about that, and how I reacted.”

You don’t need to know this to understand how good Biffy Clyro are. But there are bands who tell you about their pain by screaming about being in pain, and that’s all the art there is to it. It’s as if writing a song about a serious subject qualifies them as being a serious act. It doesn’t, and this is one of the reasons that some bands last and some bands don’t.

Musically, ‘Puzzle’ is a peach, already a contender for album of the year. As inventive as Muse and as vigorous as Fugazi, this is the work of a group who manage to be both original and familiar. As intricate and unusual as many of the arrangements or structures may be, you will still find yourself humming the chorus of one of their songs you didn’t hear on the radio. Lyrically you might find yourself enchanted, excited, confused or even concerned. What does it mean? It means there are things to listen to here. It means there is room to breathe.

“We’ve been away a wee while,” says Simon Neil. “But we’ve put that time to good use. We’re a better band than we’ve ever been. We’re still hungry and we still feel like it’s us against the world, which are the two things we need to feel. If we didn’t feel these things, we’d suck. We feel like we’re 19 years old, even though we’re in our mid-20s. We put every single part of ourselves into the music we make. This still means the world to us.”

BIFFY CLYRO HEADLINE THE KERRANG! 2007 TOUR THIS WEEK. ‘PUZZLE’ IS OUT IN MAY.

Biffy Clyro: the story so far

1995 Band form after Simon Neil, Ben Johnston and James Johnston meet at school. Supposedly their band name is a mangled reference to a personalised Cliff Richard (‘Cliffy’) biro, but the band now dispute this. Their earliest influences are Nirvana, Weezer and Korn.

1999 First single ‘Iname’ is released on Babi Yaga Records. When it receives a scathing review in a music weekly, the writer in question receives death threats from obsessive fans.

2000 The trio release their debut EP, ‘Thekidswhopoptodaywillrocktomorrow’. “’Mon the Biffy” becomes a regular chant at gigs, a tradition that still persists.

2002 Band release debut album ‘Blackened Sky’ on Beggars Banquet.

2003 Second album ‘The Vertigo Of Bliss’ is released. It’s cover art, which features a woman masturbating, prompts complaints from retailers.

2004 Third album ‘Infinity Land’ is unveiled to much acclaim. Kerrang! declare Biffy Clyro ‘the future of British rock’. A mysterious side-project, Marmaduke Duke, appears the same year.

2005 Biffy are involved in legal tussles with former label Beggars Banquet, keeping them out of action for a year.

2006 Band sign with 14th Floor Records, home of mainstream acts such as David Gray. They also contribute a cover of Weezer’s classic ‘Buddy Holly’ for Kerrang!’s 25th anniversary issue cover-mounted CD, ‘High Voltage – A Brief History Of Rock’.

2007 Biffy Clyro complete ‘Puzzle’, their fourth album, which promises to elevate them from cult noiseniks to major league stars…

5 HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NEW ALBUM

Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies ‘Puzzle’’s potential opening track, this one keeps you waiting, as the da-nas and da-na-nas clatter around you. But when it does start, it’s worth the wait. Featuring the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, don’t you know.

As Dust Dances This song begins with the tale of a man on a corner who is selling bones, and builds to a refrain that tells you that life is ‘such a lonely ride.’ Evocative and majestic.

Who Gotta Match One of ‘Puzzle’s more immediate pieces, ‘Who Gotta Match’ is a ragged piece of pop glory. Underpinned by a marching beat and a kooky guitar riff, the lyric tells of a fire that is going to ‘burn, burn, burn tonight’.

Get Fucked Stud A live favourite in the making. This is the sound of a power trio at work. Shows what can be done with voice, bass, drums and guitar.

9/15th This is such an odd song that at the start you could almost imagine it playing over the opening credits to a terrifying film. ‘We’re on a house slide, help us, help us,’ they sing, over and over again.

Translator's Note: This is for someone in a Discord server that I'm in that asked if I could scan for any Biffy Clyro content that I find in the magazines. Hope you enjoy it!

Biffy Clyro

THIS BAND WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Biffy Clyro on the front cover of Kerrang! (January 13th, 2007)