As life took the members of Biffy Clyro in different directions, they found themselves teetering on the edge of collapse. To find out how the trio hauled themselves back to deliver their brilliant new album Futique, we headed to Scotland and found a band stronger than ever…
In the summer of 2024, Simon Neil was ready to switch his attention from one band with a weird name to another. After wrapping up a tour with his side-project Empire State Bastard, on August 4 at the Woodside Halls in Glasgow, the then-44-year-old returned to Ayrshire with the intention of relaunching the good ship Biffy Clyro. Along with momentum, he had to hand over a batch of new songs that he loved, hoping that his bandmates, twin brothers Ben and James Johnston, would feel the same way.
“I think I came back in a certain frame of mind,” he says. “And because it’s the first time we’ve not been doing similar things since the start of the band… I guess we didn’t see eye to eye.”
For sure, the twins had been living a different life from the bandmate and friend they first met when they were seven years old. They’d been playing a bit of music, but they’d also been spending time with their partners, tending to their gardens, and dealing with family members in moments of crisis. The change of pace came at a cost. In getting comfortable with a routine that had nothing to do with stage times and soundchecks, the Johnstons had grown a bit… puffy. Reconvening with Simon felt like a bumpy first date. For a band long defined by unity and purpose, Biffy Clyro had no swing.
“Simon was on a different frequency, because he’d been working really hard, touring, playing to people, getting that feeling of being a rock star,” explains Ben. “He had momentum. And we probably were suffering from a little bit of imposter syndrome at that point. We were both hibernating. We’d both gotten a bit musically lazy.”
You wouldn’t know it today. Like a flower that blooms in only the most vibrant and unusual colours, Biffy Clyro’s new album Futique sets the standard for what a long-established band can achieve in a meaningful sense. At a stage in their career where other groups have surrendered the focus and creativity that propelled them to prominence in the first place, the trio with a name that takes an awful lot of getting used to continue to go about their business with an artistry and precision that belies their many years of dedicated service.
“I want our band to stay as this special thing, where whatever we’re saying next has as much value as what we were saying 15 years ago,” Simon says. “But I’m not an idiot. I know that at some point a group runs out of creative steam, and songwriters run out of creative steam, too.”
In the months before Futique knocked the silly idea out cold, last year, it looked as if this moment of reckoning had at last arrived for Biffy Clyro. James didn’t want to work on new material; Simon very much did. After a two-year break, he couldn’t understand why the batteries were still empty. He also palled at the prospect of becoming a nostalgia act. In an impasse that is today referred to as “the conversation”, thoughts turned to drastic actions. As the warmth of summer gave way to darkness and cold, a prospect that had once seemed unthinkable was spoken out loud for the very first time.
“We did have a conversation to see if this is the end,” Ben admits. “Because there’s that point where [you ask], ‘How much fun are we having?’ But we’re so privileged to be here, and it would be ridiculous to end it because it’s not as much fun as it was 10 years ago. But it’s a job, at the end of the day, even if it is the best job in the world.”
“Also,” James adds, “that was the first time in 20 years that we had a big break. It’s a period of reflection that you don’t otherwise get. You don’t get the chance to stop for a long time and then be faced with asking who you are as an individual. It seems a bit silly, at 45, to be talking about growing up. But when you’re in a state of perpetual adolescence, and then that suddenly stops, you’ve got a period of adjustment, and of, I think, growing up. And for me, I found there were some growing pains.”
On the subject of perpetual adolescence, there are people within the group’s orbit who refer to them as “the Biffy Boys”. Isn’t that cute? “But we’re not boys,” Simon says, “we’re fucking men.”
Men, it might be added, who repaired their engines mid-flight while cruising at altitudes of which most others can only dream. Here, too, they’ve bucked a trend. Instead of losing a step, as is the norm, the conquest of ardour and inertia has made them better.
Seated in a photographic studio in Parkhead, in the East End of Glasgow, Simon Neil casts his gaze upon the vast cantilever stands of Celtic Park. As a supporter of cross-city rivals Rangers, at age 10, in November 1989, his father took him to an Old Firm derby at which Mo Johnston, the first Catholic to wear the blue and white of Rangers, scored a late winner in his debut against his former club, Celtic. Outside the ground, Protestant hardliners were burning their season tickets; inside, it was bedlam. As the ball hit the onion bag, Gordon Neil’s excitement was such that for a moment it seemed as if he might launch his young son onto the pitch.
In a vision of blissful youthful love, the front cover of Futique bears a photograph of his father cheek-to-cheek with his late wife, Eleanor. In a tacit acknowledgement of the spring day in 2004 on which his mother died, the same image is tattooed on Simon’s arm. Twenty-one years ago, he was gigging in Belfast when his brother called to tell him that the time for goodbyes was upon them. By the time he reached Scotland, Eleanor Neil was no longer conscious. The piercing grief of it all provided the grist for Biffy Clyro’s breakthrough album, Puzzle, from 2007.
Looking down at the picture on his forearm, Simon says that “this is kind of where Futique came from. I had this tattooed and then I didn’t look at family pictures for about 15 years. It felt like a box of grief rather than a box of memories.”
He asked for his father’s permission to reproduce the picture. “Aye son,” replied the 77-year-old, with moisture in his eyes, before popping into the kitchen to put on the kettle.
“Last summer was the first time I dived into the box of old family photos,” Simon continues. “I felt strong enough and I had a clear mind. And when I saw that picture again it was pure joy I saw in it.”
In a room that feels hotter than a kiln, to Simon’s right sit the Johnstons. With his windswept hair and pipe cleaner frame, James, the eldest twin, resembles a man for whom time has forgotten to apply the established rules of ageing. His companionable brother is seated opposite. With a pronounced accent and ginger moustache, the news may yet emerge that Ben is the son of Groundskeeper Willie.
James is the band’s stoic, its spirit-level, the goalkeeper who keeps watch over the field of play. When his brother reached a nadir of alcoholism, in a messy incident during the recording of Opposites in 2012, he took care to repair the pair’s relationship, and thus the wellbeing of Biffy. When Simon Neil endured a breakdown on the road in support of the same album, in Canada and the United States, the bassist raised his voice to urge his friend to cancel the tour for the good of his health. That’s the way it works, you see; it’s the way it always has.
Last year, though, the question arose: who cares for the carer?
“I’ve always been slow to receive help,” James admits. “I’ve always been, ‘I’m fine!’ And I know now that that’s wrong. It doesn’t get you anywhere. I’ve always felt that I’ve had to be fine because I’m looking after other people, so I don’t need looking after, which is almost fucking arrogant.”
As Biffy Clyro attempted to gun their engines, James wasn’t fine. In what sounds like a gruelling period in late autumn and early winter, Ben and Simon were given cause to worry when their bandmate failed to appear at a rehearsal at the Ayrshire farmhouse in which the trio twist songs into unusual shapes. The drummer placed a call: “Where are you?” In bed, was the answer. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.
“I was like, ‘That’s not my brother,’” Ben says. In a manner somehow touching, he adds that, “Simon was equally worried.”
In the clinical sense of the word, James was depressed. In making his life smaller, regardless of the hour, bed was where he wanted to be. Evidently, work was required to help him get better. Asked today to estimate how close he is to regaining an optimum state of mind, the answer comes, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
If this sounds less than encouraging, more hopeful is a new sense of self-awareness that will aid his recovery.
“I became so good at hiding what was going on from the world that I was able to hide it from myself,” James says. “And I had to acknowledge that this is part of my make-up.”
But while James today recognises the dangers of suffering in solitude, back in the shortening gloom of last year, poor communication clogged the channels. If he’d spoken of his distress, Biffy Clyro might well have decided to take a break; there would have been no problem with that, Simon says. Instead, in the days before James admitted – to himself and to others – that he was living with depression, his repeated declarations that everything was “fine” led to the decision to proceed with the recording of Futique. That things weren’t entirely fine was obvious, of course, but if a person is unwilling to admit light, the chances of appraising the true scale of a problem through honest communication are naught. James said he was he good to go, so pick the bones out of that.
“That was when I was really struggling to deal with it and to acknowledge it and to action anything to make my life better,” he says. “Simon’s champing at the bit, he’s written loads of great songs, and he wants to fucking go. There was just a mismatch there, I suppose.”
“We’d all agreed that [recording would begin] in January so we were locked in at that point,” Simon continues. “We would never go and make a record if one of us wasn’t well. But because we hadn’t had the open communication it almost fell apart just before we went into the studio, and that was the point when we were already committed to everything.”
So off they went, Ben and Simon and their burdened bandmate, to record an album that sounds like the work of an entirely harmonious band operating at the summit of their powers. For his part, on songs such as A Thousand And One and Shot One, James pulled his weight as one half of a rhythm section so perfectly unified that one imagines its synchronicity was born of two heartbeats in the womb. He does, though, admit to being “nervous going into it, and probably manic during it, because there was a sense of relief that I was doing it.”
James is asked if he’s proud to have overcome his fears about recording the album.
“Yeah,” he nods. Then, “Well, you know… I did it. I did it. And I’m glad I did.”
In one of Futique’s innumerable highlights, on the exquisite and sophisticated Woe Is Me, Wow Is You, Simon deftly undertakes the devilishly tricky task of singing about his own band. In verses that refuse to shy away from the travails of making a life in music, he sings, ‘No, I’m not coming home / I’ll be out here ’til I’m done / And I won’t ever settle… This is too special.’ Tellingly, in choruses bejewelled with jubilant defiance, the lyric moves from first to third person. ‘We believe in the concept,’ he sings, ‘We defy the impossible… This ship is built to last.’
“It’s worth it,” is how James describes the responsibilities of being in a band that accepts nothing but the very best for itself. “It’s worth it.”
To gain the sharpest insight on the things that are occupying his muse, when writing material for an album, Simon clears the decks of works-in-progress and fragments of lyrics. Daunting though it may be, he starts from scratch. Reviewing his latest batch of songs, his wife Francesca told him that Futique was a reflection of his life, and of relationships, and that he should proceed without censoring himself.
Francesca and Simon live in a two-person, three-canine household an hour away from Glasgow in which he writes music that is as precious to him as children. Describing his wife as his “everything”, he says that, “I would rather spend the rest of my life with Francesca and not have [children] and be happy, because the two of us are peas in a pod.”
The pair have tried to start a family, but life had other plans. “The thing is,” he says, “you share that sadness together.”
If his wife is his “sounding board”, the singular attention to detail comes from his father. As well as refusing to eat anything but Sugar Puffs until he was 12 years old, his dad’s dedication to crown green bowls saw him represent his country at international level. He officiated for the sport on behalf his nation, too. With equivalent thoroughness, today, the patriarch runs the Ayr Indoor Bowling Green. Just last year, after injuring himself in a fall, Gordon Neil insisted the ambulance taking him to hospital stop first at the home of a family member to hand over the keys so the facility could open on time.
While his son has forged a life from pieces of lumber fashioned into Fender Stratocasters, rather than bowling woods, the similarities between the two men seem striking.
“This is going to sound like a therapy session,” Simon begins, “but I’ve got this almost unhealthy relationship with my music, and with my commitment to my music, because I can’t now create something that isn’t absolutely everything I’ve got. And that can be tough for the [Johnstons] because I approach everything with a level of intensity.”
As we have seen, things were tough on the Johnstons, but the Johnstons answered the call. Working to the blueprint of their bandmate’s songs, with heightened and inventive musicality, they provided what was required for their band to break yet more new ground.
Today, with Futique by their side, the three of them are stronger than all. One should also regard James’ uncommonly candid admission that his return from mental injury is an ongoing process as further evidence of the group’s fortitude. Certainly, it’s a good deal better than insisting that everything is fine.
In other words, the Best Band In Britain remain a thing of living beauty. And thank goodness for that, too, because breaking up, their drummer says, “was not something that I ever wanted to entertain. For me it wasn’t an option… That future’s too bleak. I feel sick even thinking about it.”
At this, with only a tincture of self-conscious humour, Biffy Clyro come together once more. As the three members say the words “I love you” to each other, Ben wipes a tear from his eye.
Futique is out now via Warner. Biffy Clyro tour the UK and Ireland from January 9, 2026 – get your tickets here. This interview originally appeared in the autumn 2025 issue of the magazine.
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