Bombay Bicycle Club's Jamie MacColl reveals they sold their equipment months before reuniting

Today (3 September), Bombay Bicycle Club followed up their comeback single "Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You)" with news of their long-awaited fifth album, Everything Else Has Gone Wrong.

Speaking to NME, MacColl has shared stories from behind the scenes of the band's hiatus and reunion.

When asked if their new album is finished, MacColl explains, "Actually no! We’ve done about four or five songs and are about to go out to LA to finish the other seven or eight. We’re in a very compressed timeframe at the moment, which doesn’t leave that much room for things to go wrong, so basically we just need to nail it."

MacColl was the only member of Bombay Bicycle Club that didn't go on to work on other music projects. Vocalist Jack Steadman went on to do music as Mr Jukes, and bassist Ed Nash launched his Toothless project with drummer Suren de Saram.

Speaking about his time away, MacColl says, "My time away was very different to being the guitarist in an indie band, that’s for sure. I wanted to [be in the band] again, but I thought it was pretty unrealistic. A few months before we started talking about doing it again, we sold all our equipment. To all intents and purposes, we had broken up. There weren’t plans to do any more music, or do any touring, until we actually had the conversation about 18 months ago."

He goes on to reveal what brought them back together, "The initial prompt was the 10 year anniversary of I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, and we thought we could do that tour as a one-off, because that album meant a lot to a lot of people, and it’d be a fun thing to do. But then we realised that we’re still in our late ’20s, and it feels a bit weird to come back to do a one-off anniversary gig, like a heritage act would do. We still felt like we had a lot of ideas and a lot to give, so the conversation pretty quickly turned to the idea of releasing new music and do something more exciting."