Surge Music Gig Guide

Call Boy Kill Boys debut album Civilian anything you like epic, ravenous, doomy, electrified, billowing, bilious, brilliant what leaps out is just how brazenly alive it is. Listen: how Ivy Parker stands triumphantly on its monitor and thumps its chest. How Back Again races Hells highways on Beelzebubs own flaming Harley. How Suzie and On And On karate-punch pop musics still-beating heart out of its chest and devour it, cackling. For all its grandiosity, this kind of defiance, confidence, preen and pomp doesnt come from a pampered middle class semi-mansion background in Buckinghamshire. Those sorts of kids make music like Athlete and Keane. No, this sort of thunderous self-belief, like the best art throughout history, is spawned from the deepest desperation. The best music, its said, is made by those whove seen the worst of life.

Witness Chris Peck circa 2004, dawdling in the doldrums of Theydon Bois, too far East of London. Hed tried college, didnt really work, hed tried jobs, didnt really work and he’d tried playing post-Britpop spaccy, quirky, silly music in a band with his schoolmate drummer Shaz but we never concentrated on the music, we just got pissed for three years basically. And as his band hit the skids and The Future loomed like a McJob-clutching vulture, he did what every self-respecting rock waster would do. He did a bellyflop into The Abyss..

There were a few months where we all lost the plot, he says. When any band splits up its always difficult because you sacrifice a lot to do anything like this, you put your whole waking hours into it, it becomes your wife and your bread and butter, your everything, so when it stops going you’re lost, you totally don’t know what to do. I was stripped naked of my passion, I didn’t have any outlet for what I was used to. Going up onstage and screaming and shouting is the best therapy in the world, when you’re not doing that you’re lost..

Wallowing in self-pity, however, didn’t really work. A few months in he was slapped in the chops by rocknroll. Again..

We went through some rough times and had a couple of months out, he recalls, and there was one night when a switch was just flicked in me. I thought what the fuck have we been doing, poncing around like this? Were not being honest to what were feeling. Id had a total wake-up call I realised wed been thinking too much about what we were doing along the way, almost working to some sort of formula, as it were, whereas this time we haven’t been working to any formula and we’ve opened the floodgates..

Thus were born Boy Kill Boy - named when Chris mis-heard a mate talking about a band called Boy Called Roy (But obviously I don’t want to fucking go on about Boy Called Roy forever, I don’t know who the fuck they are or whatever the fuck they do), and drunk on the gory synthrock epic ness of The Cure and Depeche Mode. Recruiting bassist Kevin Chase at a house party to join Chris, Shaz and keyboardist Pete Carr, they set about melding Chris doomy electro upbringing and teenage Faith No More obsession with Shazs Britpop tunefulness (he cant let go of 92), wrapping the resulting mega-tonnage of skyscraping mood pop in natty military jackets and birdnest hair and waiting for the world to fall at their feet..

Which took about a month. Their first gig - a support slot at the Bull & Gate - was cancelled at the last minute and replaced with a support the following week where the band played under a then-unknown but hotly-tipped Hard-Fi. The queue of BKBs already-devoted fans around the block kept the industry in the room, and the A&R hordes found they had stumbled accidentally across the best new band in Britain..

After an initial limited edition release of their poppiest track Suzie on Fierce Panda, BKB were snapped up by Mercury Records and set about paying their dues in earnest, touring extensively for the next year (supporting Hard-Fi on occasion, ironically) and sharpening the teeth of their early pop concoctions (see their first BKB composition Cheaper, the b-side to Back Again) into ravenous snarls..

We had this bloodthirsty spirit, says Chris, and the music started feeling more like that, more edgy but still kinda poppy. You’ve got to do what feels right at the time and its a natural part to us. We all get off on pop melodies and we all get off on more sinister elements, and that’s where the band name came in. We wanted a kind of Jekyll And Hyde name that captured the way we were feeling. There are more than a few different personalities in what were doing..

And their alternative personas quickly unravelled. Suzie’s chirpy 80s Julian Cope-isms gave way to the capencathedral hugeness of Civil Sin. That songs dark, monumental rock grabbed the attention of XFMs John Kennedy and Radio 1s Zane Lowe who pronounced it, according to Chris, the most important record on earth or something. Hence, by the time its bat-out-of-Harlow sister piece Back Again provided BKBs first full single release in Feb