This article was originally published on beingtheremag.com, an independent music and film magazine that ran from 2004 to 2007. It is presented here as part of the Being There Magazine archive.
By Adam Anklewicz | Being There Magazine, September/October 2006
Long-time staples of Toronto’s indie-scene, The Bicycles finally released their debut record to both an anticipated local audience and an unsuspecting mass. The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly is perhaps one of the best fitting names for a record I have heard in a long time. The songs can be hit or miss, but the high points are truly high. Songs like …Luck of Love,… …Paris Be Mine,… …B-B-Bicycles,… …Australia… and …Longjohns and Toques… are fantastic examples of what good pop music can be, and their cover of …Cuddly Toy… shows The Bicycles don’t fear showing their fandom of The Monkees. Unfortunately there are two tracks classifiable as …bad,… but two duds out of seventeen is impressive for a debut record.
The quintet’s pop songs are so addictive that after the first time seeing them live, I couldn’t get their song …Two Girls From Montreal… out of my head. Matt Beckett and Drew Smith share songwriting duties in the band and vocally cover the band’s higher register. Learning from the best pop from the late-fifties to the mid-seventies, The Bicycles take it all in to create a record that stands apart from their contemporaries.
The Bicycles have developed a loyal following in Toronto’s indie scene, but more impressive is the devotion their fellow musicians have shown towards their music. The likes of Sloan’s Jay Ferguson, Gentleman Reg, José Miguel Contreras of By Divine Right and many others have spoken praise for The Bicycles, even joining them onstage at their CD release party.
I sat down with The Bicycles after returning from their first tour to promote their latest album, The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly . We talked about music, side projects, touring and signing breasts.
Being There : Who are you, and who are The Bicycles?
Matt Beckett : I’m Matt Beckett, I sing and play guitar. I write half the songs.
BT : How would you describe The Bicycles?
Matt : If the singer-songwriters of the ’60s and ’70s had a rock band.
Drew Smith : Pop band.
Matt: ’60s/70’s bubblegum.
BT : Randy?
Randy Lee : I’m the bass player, that’s what I do on stage. [I also play] the violins and strings on the album.
BT : What are The Bicycles in your opinion?
Randy : Same thing as what Matt said; cutesy, wimpy band.
BT : Dana?
Dana Snell : I’m the drummer and I do some vocals and I play flute on one song. I’d say The Bicycles are … my band that I’m in.
Drew : I’m Drew, I play some guitar, do some singing. Everyone sings. The Bicycles are a pop band… a rock and roll band! We’re a rock and roll band.
Randy : Should we introduce Andrew Scott even though he’s not here?
Dana : Hi, I’m Andrew I play …
All The Bicycles (as Andrew) : Trumpet, trombone, keys, rhythm guitar.
Dana (as Andrew) : I’m the glue that holds the band together; right now I’m in Portugal. I would describe The Bicycles as a musical journey, into the heart.
Drew : Of darkness?
Dana (as Andrew) : Into each of us.
Randy : That’s a good Andrew response actually, that’s something that Andrew would say.
Drew : It would be longer.
BT : How long have The Bicycles been around?
Drew : We did our first …demo thing… in October of ’99. So it’s coming up seven years.
Matt : It started out with Drew and I about six or seven years now. Dana’s been in the band for six years and Randy and Andrew five years.
BT : What has made The Bicycles develop such a loyal following without an album?
Dana : If we do have a following, it’s because we’ve been around for so long. People have been wondering when the album was going to happen, we’ve been dangling it in front of them like a carrot.
Drew : We’re a cock-tease.
Matt : We also play a lot. For a band that never had a record, we still get asked to play in Toronto once a month or so… over six years.
Dana : Odds are if you live in Toronto, you’ve probably seen the band… by default.
Drew : I’ve had people say, …you play every fucking week so I don’t even bother, but I hear it’s a good band….
BT : For years now, you’ve been saying that an album was imminent. What took so long?
Randy : Perfection.
Dana : I’m gonna be Andrew now. In the beginning we went down to North Carolina; that was about three years ago.
Drew : You didn’t go, Andrew!
Randy : That was before Andrew.
Dana : Oh, right, shit! Okay, this is Dana. So then we finished it up, and everything takes a while because we want it to be perfect. After that we were wondering what to do after the North Carolina sessions.
Randy : I think we recorded about 21 songs in the span of a week. We only used five songs [from the North Carolina sessions].
BT : What was the problem with the remaining tracks?
Matt : They sucked too much.
Randy : It’s not that they sucked; they just didn’t fit in with the album.
Matt : Our tastes changed.
Drew : And we got better as players, not much, but enough that you don’t want to suck that much. We didn’t do anything for about a year.
Dana : It took us a while for us to get our morale and energy up to try again. When we did, we were doing it all ourselves, so there was a lot of learning involved.
BT : Were you recording at home?
Dana : Yeah.
BT : What can those fans who are used to the live shows expect on this album?
Matt : More quiet songs. When you play live, the instinct is to do a rock show, or the closest that we can.
Drew : But we also have the side that wants to take the panties down gently. [The rock ones we] rip and pillage and plunder.
BT : What can the fans of the album expect from a live show?
Drew : Sometimes when I hear a record I imagine who sings what, and when you see them you’re disappointed.
BT : Is that The Bicycles?
Dana : That guy sings that high?
Drew : They’re that old?
BT : What place in today’s world does bubblegum pop serve?
Matt : None. Isn’t twee the new bubblegum? That’s the cool bubblegum. Belle & Sebastian, Beulah.
Randy : Of Montreal.
Matt : The official bubblegum would be N.E.R.D.
Dana : Boy bands are still going strong.
BT : It used to be that music like yours was sold to the preteen market. Who is the general Bicycles fan?
Drew : Severely immature adults.
Dana : I don’t know that we have an audience yet. We have people in Toronto that know us and like us. It’s hard to tell because we haven’t had an album to promote.
Matt : All the people on the Boys Likely To tour were all twee.
Dana : That’s what I imagine our audience would be, but we don’t know.
Matt : They all liked it.
BT : Andrew, it’s starting to get confusing. Sloan has a drummer who shares your name, The Meligrove Band has a multi-instrumentalist who again shares your name. To make it worse, you and the Andrew Scott in The Meligrove Band look identical. Have you thought about changing your name, or perhaps your appearance? Is there an easy way to tell you two apart?
Dana (as Andrew) : Well, that guy’s a shameless showman who wears tiny little green shorts and freaky Larry Bird-style outfits, he’s crazy. I don’t want anything to do with him, my twin brother. He’s an exhibitionist, and it’s wrong.
Randy : And he has big nuts.
BT : How can people tell you two apart then?
Dana (still filling in for Andrew) : The Meligrove Band has visible testicles and are sometimes naked. The large concave depression in his chest…
Randy : Which he can use to open beer bottles.
Dana (as Andrew) : The Bicycles’ Andrew is an intelligent, sensitive man who wears a …B… shirt, and his balls are nowhere to be seen.
BT : A bit more seriously, as we all know that it’s the same person. Is there a rivalry between The Meligrove Band and The Bicycles, as to who gets Andrew Scott?
Dana: He gets more girls in The Meligrove Band, so we’re in trouble there. However, he gets to sing more in our band.
Randy : He gets more of a say in The Bicycles, and plus it’s younger girls with us.
Matt : He signed his first boob on our tour. His first time was with The Bicycles.
Dana : In The Meligrove Band, the other guys tend to get more attention, but in The Bicycles he gets the most attention.
BT : I don’t see The Bicycles as being the type of band that signs breasts.
Randy : I sign breasts all the time.
Drew : I don’t think you should be duped by the music because we’re tit-fiends… even Dana. (Singing) I love to squeeze ’em, I love to shake ’em, put my head between ’em.
BT : What’s the story behind …The Defeat…?
Matt : Andrew did this riff and we turned it into an intro to …Luck Of Love….
Drew : It’s the same riff [as The Meligrove Band’s …Victory…] slowed down.
Matt : I didn’t know it was the same riff, or even a Meligroves song, until three months ago.
Drew : Just the da-da-dalala da-da-dalala, just that’s The Meligroves.
Randy : It’s in a different key, it’s not the same. That’s why we call it …The Defeat,… The Meligrove Band’s song is called …Victory.
BT : The Cars are reforming and Todd Rundgren is taking Ric Ocasek’s place. If The Bicycles were to reform in 30 years, which of your contemporaries would take each of your places?
Randy : It’s gonna be all synth.
Matt: I think Pharrell.
Dana : I think Meg White will replace me.
Drew : [Sloan’s]Andrew Scott?
BT : Is …Paris Be Mine… an ode to Feist?
Matt : Oh shit! I was doing that shit before… ahhh, not before Feist. That song was written, maybe four years ago.
BT : So it’s just a weird fascination between Canadians and Paris?
Matt : No, just me and Paris. If anything, it’s an ode to Jonathan Richman, it’s modelled after that and Henry Miller books.
BT : Dana, who are the Adorables?
Dana : It’s a fun side project that we started to do, it’s a big band with lots of people. We have members of Spitfires and Mayflowers. We started playing for fun, even made an album. It’s the band that I like to think of as the band where you can do everything you can’t do in other bands, like sucking. It’s okay, it’s the side band.
BT : With The Adorables gaining in popularity and having to restrict admittance to their monthly free show, is the line between side project and primary focus blurring?
Dana : I finally had a conflict, it was the first time ever and it kind of sucked, but I’ve managed to go this far without having one, so I think it’s good.
BT : What other side projects do you all have going on?
Dana : Well we just practiced with Niall Fynes. We’re his backing band, Township Expansion.
Randy : They’re great, Niall’s great.
Matt : He doesn’t play often, but he has an awesome record.
Dana : Slowly breaking people’s hearts.
BT : After touring North America, what’s a tour with The Bicycles like? Do you still like each other?
Dana : We like each other even more!
Drew : Still? Like? Still hate.
Dana : I wanna do more tours. It was fun, but I wanna do another one because I think we can learn from the last one, see new places. Buy maps of the cities; maybe get a hotel room before you show up to the place, stuff like that. That would be the details that would make it even better.
Matt : I wanna do a Canadian tour.
Randy : We haven’t done any tour, we’ve done the one tour and that was it. It was pretty awesome, 12 cities in 15 days.
Dana : We’ve been back a week, so we’re ready to hit the road again.
Matt : I don’t know if we’ll be playing The Knitting Factory on our next tour. We might play that knitting thing on Queen Street.
Randy : The Knitting Café.
The Bicycles debut, The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly , is out now on Fuzzy Logic Recordings. Visit the band on the web at http://www.thebicycles.ca/