Not many bands can claim to still practise in a farmhouse that’s a stones throw away from the house they grew up in. Not many bands the size of Biffy Clyro anyway…

There’s something rather homely about the hard rocking Scottish three-piece. The furthest any member has moved from Kilmarnock - where the band grew up - is Glasgow, where bass player, James Johnston now lives. Front man, Simon Neil, hasn’t moved from the town he was born in.

Their career was already three albums old before the band achieved the massive commercial success of 2007 with the release of the gold-selling, Puzzle, Biffy Clyro have been together since 1995. November will see the release of their fifth studio album, Only Revolutions, and the journey the band have undertaken to get to where they are today is evident in the mild mannered way they deal with the gargantuan commercial success that is already assured with the coming release.

“It’s really tranquil,” says Johnston, of the rustic rehearsal space. “No body bothers us there so when we go there we are just there to make music; we’re not there to hang out or to meet other bands or anything like that. It’s a nice place to go and kind of escape, especially when you are spending a lot of time in hotels and on tour, just to have that little bit of freedom to concentrate on the music.
“We’re never really very far from home. Although we spend time in Los Angeles, your home town always supports you as a person and I think that’s very important.”

The last few months have seen Biffy Clyro spending a lot of time in LA. The latest album was recorded there under the guidance of Puzzle producer and official “part of the Biffy family”, Garth Richardson (Rage Against The Machine, Red Hot Chilli Peppers). Made in the Los Angeles sunshine and with an overwhelming feeling of positivity radiating from the band, Only Revolutions, feels like a declaration of intent from the outset. A reaction to the sombre mood that hung over the writing and recording of Puzzle, the record is a statement from a band that is moving on, feeling good and looking to the future.

“Puzzle is so heavily about sadness and depression and being in a really horrible part of your life that everybody will go through,” says front man, Simon Neil. “This one just felt immediately more hopeful. I think all good music and good art is a reflection of how the creator is feeling at that certain point.”

Written as a reaction to the loss of the singer’s mother and recorded whilst “stuck out in the woods in British Columbia”, Puzzle was an introspective, brooding and deeply unhappy album. In contrast, Only Revolution is euphoric. With its three singles to date, ‘Mountains’, ‘That Golden Rule’ and most notably, ‘The Captain’, the band are waving the Biffy colours with unabashed, carefree confidence. Soaring pop choruses, marching drums and massive, surging guitars make this a powerful and joyous affair from start to finish. This is a band that has been through its dark place, and emerged in the sun.

“I think that sort of sadness is always going to inform your life,” says Johnston of the change in mindset between the last two albums, “and it’s always going to be there at some point in everybody’s life, “But I think you can learn to deal with it and move on, and in that regard things are a lot more positive on this record and we’re really looking towards the future a lot more rather than looking back on the past.
“Everything’s developed on this album. We’ve actually got a Theremin on a couple of the tracks which isn’t something we’d have normally agreed to. Someone just came up with the idea and it really worked. We don’t want people to just put it on and go ‘oh, yeah, another Biffy record’. We want to come up with something new every time.”

Having worked with Richardson on the previous release, the band now feels at one with the producer, but the relationship wasn’t quite as rosy to begin with. Having clashed on Puzzle, as a result of the producer “perhaps being used to working with bands who didn’t really know what they wanted, where as we knew exactly what we wanted,” says Johnston, Biffy now consider Garth part of the family.

“Last time we butted heads a lot,” admits Neil. “We got in each other’s faces trying to feel each other out. This time I think he trusts us a lot more, we trust him a lot more. Last time Garth didn’t understand why we were doing weird things with the songs. It’s what we do! But he nailed it, it’s amazing.”

And you can feel a unity between the production and the song-writing on Only Revolution, which translates into a sense of simplicity and a natural flow to the songs.

While the album was written with the concept of telling two sides of a love story in mind (something Neil took from the Mark Danielewski novel, Only Revolutions), the overriding feeling on the record remains that of the band’s journey towards their ‘happy place’.

Asking Johnston of the prevalent emotions at play when making the record, one memory stands out... “Excitement,” he tells me. “We were really proud of the songs before we went in and we were fairly sure that they were going to turn out well.
“It was nice being in Los Angeles where the sun was shining. We had a nice little house and a car to get around in. It was very different to being stuck in the woods in British Columbia, which is how we made the last record. This time around it was really great fun, you know. We had a lot of laughs. It was really hard work, but really rewarding ultimately.

And is this your most important record? “I think if you’re in a band that cares about what you’re doing then every new record you make is the most important one to date. I think it’s important to be always moving forward. It’s important on many different levels but it’s important for us to move forward musically and I think we’ve achieved that.”

As a band that is “formed around the basis of playing live and keeps that at its heart”, for Biffy Clyro the long road to major commercial success was not really an issue. Clearly now a lot richer than they were during the first ten years together, it really does appear that not much has changed since the meteoric success that came in 2007. Despite regular visits to LA and a great deal of time spent touring, the band still live in their beloved Scotland (Connery, Connolly et al take note) and if they succumb to any of the usual rock and roll excesses they keep it well hid. So then, when I’m told, “We always wanted to be more like one person’s most important band than a band that lots and lots of people thought were okay,” I’m inclined to believe it.

Johnston says Biffy have always felt successful on their own terms, despite only achieving their current level of major success in terms of album sales relatively recently.

“If somebody had offered us a million pounds on our first record and said we were going to be top of the pops we would have taken it and that would have been a mistake,” he says. “I think it took us time to grow as a band and become good at what we do.

“I think that’s the same with a lot of bands. It must be difficult when you get a lot of success on your first record. I think it’s been nice for us actually. I just can’t believe that we’re still doing it. We just made our fifth record and a lot of our favourite bands broke up after two records so it is really cool for us.”

Biffy Clyro are a band at ease with their own success. Having gained the sort of notoriety that’s secured a collaboration with Josh Homme on a track on the upcoming record, they are truly one of the major players in British rock. Appealing to mainstream and hard rock audiences alike, they’re one of those bands that you just can’t help but love. Despite the Theremin…