To say that I was not expecting anything even remotely like what I saw when Bombadil played live would be an understatement.  A massive one.  I hate terms like blown away because they are so overused, but I don’t know what else to say.  Giddy?  Exhilarated?  Thrilled to bits?  I don’t know, but even listening to the album now I am taken back to this live show and start giggling, bouncing up and down and wishing I could tell absolutely everyone to go and see this band should they ever get half a chance.  Yes, it was that good; a joyous performance, and a complete celebration of what live music can be.  I saw it almost a week ago now, and I am still bubbling when I think back and try and write about it.

To begin with, though, here’s a little bit of a video that mixes the performance at Pickathon with a bit of live footage as well and, although it’s a bit sketchy, is not bad for a first try.  The songs themselves in their entirety are posted at the bottom of the page.

Bombadil’s album is, I suppose, more raucous than I’d realised.  Listening to it again, I can hear the same songs, and I can see the basis for the live performance, but it is still a relatively studied work of craftsmanship.  It’s a deliberate record, which is the direct opposite of the live performance which is, whilst not poorly executed, just a helter-skelter carnival of chaos and delight.  Stuart plays the piano upside down and back to front, whilst sitting underneath it, Brian and Daniel come within inches of knocking one another flying on numerous occasions, James drums like he’s trying to beat his kit to death,and the whole crazy business so infects the audience with glee that they get a standing ovation and an encore.  At a festival.  I have never seen anything like it.

Bombadil Interview with Song, by Toad from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.

Quite how you harness something like that enough to record an album, much less one so considered, is beyond me, frankly.  It must be like two different bands.

Brian agrees that it’s a very different beast.  “We tried to make the record different from the live experience.  We found that if you go into the studio and just thrash around really hard and stuff then it doesn’t really translate on tape.  We just kinda tried to make sounds that we liked recorded, and it just came out maybe more focussed than the live stuff does.

“I think one thing that we all appreciate in records is variety.  I once heard the Broken Social Scene guy say that what they were trying to do was make mixtapes, almost, for their albums and I kinda like that idea.  You try to get collections of songs unified around something, just to keep things interesting and explore different corners

Harnessing the live energy enough to actually create a controlled recording should, you’d think, take something out of the music.  Listening to the album though, that really doesn’t seem to be the case.  They’re different beasts, definitely, but neither one animal is the lesser for it.

Daniel confesses that it can be difficult to adjust to the two mindsets though:  “We struggle trying to get the energy right in the studio.  It’s really hard to try to find if you’re not performing with anyone, or for anyone.  It’s really hard, at least for me, to get the feelings that I need to get going.  But a lot of the songs always start off more how they are on the record than how they are live, but a lot of times they have to change from record to live.”

That much is true, because the show really does get more and more mental as it progresses.  Actually, it’s a real shame that Mrs. Toad and I only decided to video the first couple of songs of the set to include with the interview videos.  We did it that way partly to keep things simple, and partly so we could still sit back and enjoy the performances we were videoing and not just be at work all the time.  In retrospect I would have loved to be able to show you some of the later songs like Johnny or the truly inspired Cavalier’s Har Hum, but I really had no idea what we were in for.  Next time, we’ll know.

The band was born in a rather unusual way.  When I first read the story on their website about their meeting whilst studying in Bolivia I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t just a massive piss-take.  Apparently not though.  Daniel tells the story like so:

“We were both [himself and Brian] just studying down there, living with families, studying anthropology.  We only had classes a few days a week so we had a lot of off time.  So half the time was spent travelling and and a lot of it was spent learning to play Andean instruments which was the sampone (SP?) which was those pan pipes, and the charango (SP?) which is a ten-string instrument similar to the mandolin.  And we decided that one of our goals was to record an album while we were down there to bring back to the States. So we recorded it in a children’s music school in Bolivia, and they had all the equipment there, and we recorded it just on a computer.”

The educational backgrounds of the band members (“I was a religion major, Stu was economics, Brian was public policy and James was history”) perhaps seems to explain bizarre songs about martyred saints like Julian of Norwich and the distinctly unusual Kuala Lumpur, which constantly flirts with morphing into a deranged nursery rhyme.  There’s a little more to it than that – or less, I suppose you could say.  James the drummer’s explanation of the latter song swiftly punctures any false impressions of excessively scholarly pretensions that it might be easy to project upon the band.

“That song is the result of us spending way too much time in a van, and finding ways to amuse ourselves and it eventually turned into a song.  It initially started with us making up jingles for different things.  We made up jingles for mustard – Stuart’s got a great mustard jingle – there’s a mayonnaise jingle, soy sauce – it’s the only sauce you can soy.  My parents gave me a world atlas that we put in the car for Christmas and we were flipping through it, and Kuala Lumpur was a nice word.”

Stuart adds “I really like the way it sounds.  It’s fun to add extra Ls when you’re saying it – it kinda helps a long van ride go by.”

It must be said that this kind of silliness fits well with the playful nature of the stage show. Who else but a band that writes pop songs with their roots in mustard jingles would play the piano backwards and take to the stage dressed some in suits, some in bizarre tunics covered in fleurs-de-lis?

“I think it was a marching band outfit or something, from a local high school” explains Brian.  “We’re trying to hone in and match the outfits somehow with the music I guess, and channel the sounds that we’re trying to make into some sort of visual representation.”

James jumps in: “I find it really helps me cut loose too, that we go before the show and we change into wacky clothes that represent our band.  That gets me like, time to go, time to get fired up and time to bring it.”

The performance energy seems to be something that they keep coming back to.  In the UK you go to a gig to see a particular band, and you don’t talk through the thing or otherwise fail to pay attention, on penalty of huffy shushes from other audience members.  In the States, live music seems to be very much part of the furniture in many bars, meaning that the obligation to actually listen is rather less.  Personally, I can’t imagine the frustration of playing to a bar full of people talking through your show with their backs to you, but acutally for a band with the kind of performance instincts that Bombadil seem to possess, this is not a problem really.  In fact, James seems to prefer it that way, and his reasoning makes sense:

“We play in some rooms in different towns called listening rooms where everyone’s seated and staring at you and that’s like ‘Whoah, what’s going on here!’  Whereas a loud bar, while it can be frustrating sometimes it can also be extremely rewarding because if you can get a group together and get them really fired up and moving together and having a really good time, there’s no better feeling than that.”

I can’t imagine anyone talking through their kind of show for very long.  Quite how they don’t knock one another out is a miracle.  Numerous times during the Galaxy Barn show Brian and Daniel in particular seem to be within a whisker of a major collision.  There have been more than a few bumps and bruises along the way though, so it seems they aren’t always quite so fortunate.

“My first show with the band actually, we were playing Rosetta Stone I think for the first time, and Daniel came rocking back at me to count in an intro or something, and tripped on a cord and took out half my drum set.  We finished the song though, but with a new drum part.”

Even during their unplugged set, up in the tranquil, leafy setting of the Woods Stage, there was mayhem.  “Stuart managed to knock my snare drum over mid-song and had to hold it for me.  It worked out though.  We’ve had several people tell us that that’s the favourite moment of any of our sets, you know, us breaking stuff.”

Brian agrees: “That’s actually my favourite moment in live shows these days is like when some sort of sound shortage happens and people are looking at each other, or some microphone falls down.”

He’s right actually.  You find out so much more about a band when things start to go a little awry.  Any band too thrown by technical or practical problems can seem not to have sufficient command of the music.  Given that they wrote the songs, that seems an absurd thing to say, but it’s true.  Bombadil on the other hand seem to embrace this with truly impressive confidence.  I go back to the album, and it’s just impossible to project from that just how much this band embrace the vagaries and chaos that they generate.  They seem to revel in cutting loose and operating on the verge of losing control altogether and that, I suppose, is what makes them so incredibly exhilarating.

Toad’s Pickathon pictures | Toad Vimeo page | Other Pickathon Features

Bombadil – Cavalier’s Har Hum
Bombadil – Rosetta Stone

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