Neu Bos Angeles: ‘The Last Twelve Months Have Been Insane’

Bos Angeles seem like a loveable bunch. Even if you disregarded their music, you’d probably still want to give them a hug. The band from Boscombe – the seaside town from which they got their name – seem modest and genuinely amazed by the attention they’ve had so far.

“The last 12 months have been insane,” Rich tells me – and you would imagine that he’s not exaggerating. After all, the three of them (Rich, guitar/vocals; Ben, bass; George, drums) have only been together for just over a year (before which they worked as ice cream men on the beach) and now they find their name perched triumphantly on the tip of every dedicated new music fan’s tongue.

“It was a huge surprise,” says Rich of the popularity of their song ‘Beach Slalom’ (which, thanks to its in-your-face surf pop meets post-punk urgency and unnatural levels of catchiness, quickly found itself hyped by swathes of bloggers back in March). “I never thought it would do anything apart from sit on our MySpace page and get a few plays. It was a great big mind f**k. But a good one. An enjoyable one.”

As well as being a “mind f**k,” Rich says that the success of the track also improved the trio’s attitude towards the music. “At that time we had about 18 or 20 songs that were fairly finished. After seeing all the attention ‘Beach Slalom’ got we got rid of all our songs except for two and started again. It more or less changed everything. It drove us to get better.”

But of the adoring words that bloggers worldwide have to say about them? “We read it and it’s all really exciting – though we tend to take it with a pinch of salt. We like to keep our heads straight and concentrate on what we like to do,” Rich adds. “If we believed the hype it would have gone awry long ago.” And gone awry things certainly have not; they may be taking things slowly but they’re still most certainly going strong, with two confirmed releases – a single out on Jamie Fullerton’s Roundtable, and an EP out on the increasingly impressive Art Is Hard Records.

Guitar music doesn’t need saving. But if it did, the hero of the hour wouldn’t be the bl**dy Vaccines, it’d be Bos Angeles – and they probably wouldn’t be aware that they’d even done anything.

Bos Angeles’ debut single ‘Days Of Youth’ / ‘Beach Slalom’ is out now via Roundtable Records.

Taken from the Winter 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.