Bohicas. To the unaware it sounds like the name of a Hawaiian-themed bar or a sickly sweet cocktail served with a tiny umbrella. Actually, it’s an acronym – BOHICA, which stands for ‘Bend Over, Here It Comes Again’.
“I think it’s funny,” says The Bohicas frontman Dominic McGuinness, “and it’s kind of naughty. I like it. I think my favourite word in there is ‘again’.”
What’s coming again, according to the English four-piece, is some gritty and immediate rock’n’roll, picking up where the early albums by The Strokes, Kings Of Leon and The White Stripes left off. Rock rejuvenated for a new generation.
“It’s a self-aware title for ourselves,” says McGuinness. “It’s a world full of rock bands where there’s always new bands cropping up and getting this hype and build-up. All this stuff happens when the next favourite band comes along. Well, here it is again. Here’s another rock band.”
A slew of singles over the past year has left those mourning the too-soon demise of indie rock bent over, metaphorically at least, in anticipation of The Bohicas’ debut album. ‘XXX’ has an ominous riff that never stops (“We wanted to write a song using just one chord. It’s actually two chords – we compromised!”). ‘Where You At’, ‘Swarm’ and ‘To Die For’ are similarly riff-driven.
“All the songs have that edginess, the gutsy guitar and gutsy drums,” says McGuinness. Indeed, these songs might have been pulled from a time capsule buried during the early-’00s guitar band revival era.
“We met when we were 12 or so, and that was the time of all those great albums, where there’s a dead solid identity of four or five guys just playing simple, down the line rock’n’roll. But they re-energised and reinvented the genre. It got kids picking up guitars again.”
Kids like McGuinness and his bandmates – drummer Brendan Heaney, guitarist Dom John and bassist Ady Acolatse – who met at school on the outskirts of East London. It’s a place where the city meets the suburbs of the neighbouring county of Essex, a culturally barren area (unless you count it being the location of TV show The Only Way Is Essex) with no ‘scene’ to speak of.
“It’s pretty plain,” says McGuinness. “It’s like any other suburban place I’ve been, full of families and pubs and high streets. It’s nothing remarkable. There was no bubbling atmosphere of live music or anything.
“When we started hanging out and playing together, there wasn’t any other bands or musicians at school. If there were kids playing instruments, they were just going through the motions on the violin or something. They weren’t enjoying it. It seemed like we were the only ones having fun with our instruments.”
After developing their own brand of edgy indie rock over a number of years, The Bohicas were signed to Domino Records in 2013. It was their labelmate Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys who once proclaimed: “Rock’n’roll will never die.” McGuinness can’t help but agree.
“As long as you record it and write in a way that’s still new and fresh, there’s no reason why it dies,” he says. “To keep it alive, you have to make sure you revamp. It’s easy to replicate an old sound. It’s about pushing rock as an influence rather than pulling from it. There’s no tricks here.”
The Bohicas’ debut, The Making Of – out this week – isn’t purely rock, however. There are more subtle moments too.
“What’s unexplored on the singles is the more kind of mid-tempo melodic thing,” says McGuinness. “There’s a lot more vocal harmonies and softness than people might be anticipating. The way I write, I’ll do these guitar things, rock band stuff, but that’s only one part to it. There are other influences that we can’t deny ourselves. A lot of the writing and recording is centred around trusting instinct and going with your innate natural way rather than trying too hard to steer it in another direction.”
Nevertheless, in the true rock tradition, the songs centre around ‘the girl’, heartbreak and being bloody upset about it all. A mini-film made to promote ‘XXX’ and ‘Swarm’ depicts the protagonist having his heart literally pulled out of his chest and dragged through gravel.
“As far as I can tell, it’s all fiction,” McGuinness says, “but maybe a therapist in 50 years will tell me otherwise. I found that when writing these hard, fast, fizzy, electric songs, I naturally gravitated to singing about those things. I matched the rage or whatever. It seemed to makes sense. Love and all that stuff, at the moment that’s the only thing that’s worth singing about. And if it ain’t broke…”
It isn’t. And the legions of fans they’re picking up wherever they go, which has been all over the world in recent months, seem to agree. So grab your ankles – The Bohicas are eager to return to these shores after playing two dates here last year. “It’s on the cards,” says McGuinness. “It would be amazing to. If this record connects with people there the same way the singles have, it should be a wonderful thing to do.”
Needless to say, they’re enjoying every moment – erm, really enjoying it. “This time right now in the band, our album’s coming out, the live reception is great. This is this time I’m most excited about. It’s very cock-teasing for me.”
[The Bohicas photo by Gael Leberi]
