More about: Bob Vylan

Let me introduce you to Bob Vylan. No, not Dylan. Vylan. The very best of grime-punk. Don’t get confused. You’ve probably seen them live already, since they spent the last year working their way up and down the country. Bobby Vylan on vocal duty, Bobbie Vylan on drums. Again, don’t get confused.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing one of their game-changing live performances yet, then get ready to meet your new favourite band. The Bobs have taken the incendiary roots of punk and mixed it with the fresh attitude of grime to turn the music industry on its head—something that’s been a long time coming. We spoke to them in their brief moment of peace between the most hectic touring schedule you can imagine and the release of their second album, Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life.

When live music made its tentative return to glory last summer, Bob Vylan wasted no time in getting back out on the road: “We’d been locked down, we’d done nothing,” says Bobbie. “We’d played no shows and definitely made up for all of the shows we missed during the second half”. First on the list was a headline tour across the UK. Then, without stopping to catch their breath, it was time for the post-pandemic festival renaissance, including some massive sets at Reading & Leeds last summer. Then followed two colossal support slots, accompanying both Biffy Clyro and The Offspring on tour, two artists that Bobbie describes as being “so inspirational to what [they] do now”, bringing their grime-punk to academy and arena-sized audiences across the country, where they found new fans in audiences and in the headliners themselves.

“Noodles [lead guitarist of The Offspring] was saying that a couple of his friends that he surfs with put him on to our music. That was cool to feel like we were there off of merit”, Bobby reveals. And he’s just one of the punk rock legends that Bob Vylan counts amongst their fans, having already found radio support from none other than Iggy Pop.

Their journey in the last twelve months is one that most bands would envy – a headline tour, festivals and support slots that put them on stage in front of up to 20,000 people. You’d be right to say that Bob Vylan have done well for themselves, but Bobby is strangely reluctant around the word ‘success’: “I don’t want to say successful because there’s so much more that we want to do with it…I’m careful; what is ‘successful’?”. In a year of firsts, it was a learning curve for the band and their team, says Bobby: “It was a lot for everybody to learn and come to grips with on the job. And that was the thing we kept saying, we’re all learning on the job. Which is nice because you feel like nobody is more seasoned than anybody else on the bus. We’re all figuring this out”.

But it wasn’t all positive. Although they had a great time with the bands (describing Biffy Clyro as “the nicest guys”), Bob Vylan exists to challenge the audience with songs that explicitly deal with racism, police brutality and the sorry state of England today—and not everybody is ready to hear it. “It was up and down!” Bobbie laughs. “It was more divisive than it usually is. There was no ‘oh you’re okay’, there was ‘we love you and come to every show you do’ or ‘get these motherfuckers off the stage’”. You can imagine, then, that a crowd hearing Bob Vylan’s music for the first time could cause some trouble. The most notable incident was the first night of their tour with Biffy Clyro when, Bobbie reveals, “somebody bit a security guard because they were angry at the show”.

Now, every music fan has had support acts that we don’t click with. While most of us would take that as an opportunity to get a drink at the bar or hit the smoking area, Bob Vylan found that some audience members were more…committed to making their views known. “It was the first date of the tour, we step out, did maybe two songs and then throughout the rest of the set I just hear one person, just one person in the audience: ‘BOOOOO! BOOOOO!’. Throughout the whole set. I can hear him when I’m doing the lyrics, I can hear him over the music, that is how committed he was to booing us” says Bobby. Thankfully, the rest of the fans had quickly had enough of the disruption and alerted staff, at which point the perpetrator’s partner bit a member of the security team.

It’s always going to a more difficult winning over an audience in a support slot than it is on a headline tour, but the duo were shocked by the reaction they got on that first night: “it happened in Liverpool, where they aren’t really known for being sympathetic to police and stuff so I don’t understand where that all happened!” says Bobbie. “Super angry about saying ‘fuck the police’, super angry about stuff about the queen, I don’t know any Liverpudlian that’s like that!”. Still, they haven’t been put off by just one incident, and a much larger number in the crowd were supportive of the band. “People are not turning up for [Bob Vylan] but then they get introduced to it and they find something that they maybe feel has been missing. The majority of it was good”. Sure enough, take a look in the comments section on their YouTube channel and you’ll find a new wave of fans brought into the fold by their performances with Biffy and The Offspring.

 It’s nothing new for punk bands—from The Sex Pistols to IDLES—to challenge our beliefs or to make statements that the general public might deem shocking. The music industry isn’t always ready to back these artists, but they’ve always found a community in front of a rock audience. So when Bob Vylan get such a negative reaction from the same audience, it’s time for us to face up to deep-rooted flaws in the community. Bobby maintains that the same message would be received much better if it was coming from another band: “I think sometimes it’s not the message, it’s the messenger. I think that could be the thing that people take issue with, with regards to our music. It’s not necessarily the message, it could be who’s delivering the message”. The punk audience might brand themselves as inclusive and revolutionary, but when there are people in the audience so perturbed by the presence of two Black men on the stage, it’s time to accept the fact that racism is still prevalent in the community.

“We could be up there singing love songs,” he continues. “Even if we were just a rock band—not necessarily political—some people would still find something wrong with it”. Bobbie goes on to explain that they don’t let it get to them, because this kind of resistance has been there since day one: “I think that to have this kind of show you need to know what you’re saying and be ready for the fact that people will be upset about stuff. Obviously, you don’t want it to be that people get that angry, but if it happens it happens”.

Although a lot of commentators believe that this mixture of grime and punk was unimaginable before Bob Vylan project We Live Here, this meeting of genres has always been perfectly natural to the duo. “Punk, and I say grime to encapsulate the other side of it, are both about getting yourself onto level footing and having things be fairer, having unfair systems taken down,” Bobbie explains. “Even though there wasn’t a lot of mixing between the rock world and the rap/grime world, the punk kids were the ones who meshed more with the kids who liked rap or grime”.  But they do recognise that their own experience has affected how they approach this style of music. The key, Bobby says, is that they aren’t doing it just because grime is cool now: “It’s one thing to take the sonics of a music but then it’s another thing to really blend the cultures together. Whether it’s the language, the terminology, the sense of fashion and style and even with punk and grime there comes a political element that’s blended together”.

“It’s coming from an authentic place and we’re not rock kids that never listen to grime or vice versa. We grew up listening to both so [we] found a nice way to blend them. And sometimes it turns out to be like a GDP song where it’s rock instrumentation, but the vocals are delivered in a very rap way and other times it’s just straight grime, or straight rap or straight rock because in that instance it just didn’t work to blend those two together. Never feeling forced that every song has to be rap-rock”.

When Bobby goes into detail about the origins of grime in UK music culture, you can really see the parallels with the early days of punk. “Especially when you think of grime being birthed out of UK garage culture and those young kids not being able to afford the designer clothes and the champagne and the tables in the clubs, so they can’t get in there. So, they’re in their tracksuits and whatever and they go off and make their own genre of music outside of this fancy, flashy champagne lifestyle garage music”. It’s hardly worlds away from the early days of punk.

The Price Of Life, like all of Bob Vylan’s previous records, was made without a label. While a lot of artists would shy away from making music in lockdown without the support of a label, they maintain that it was actually easier to work independently. “I feel like everything is made harder with label support. Meddling in your shit”. Instead, they got to make an album free from the single-based industry expectation that you have to put out music every eight weeks to stay relevant or that only certain tracks will work as a single. It also gave them the freedom to do what we were all trying to do: get through lockdown. “It allowed us to be free and a lot of the time we spent not really making music but just spending time with family and finding other things to enjoy”.

They both agree that “so much of the industry is making you think that you can’t do it yourself”, or that “you need them for it”, as Bobbie adds. It wasn’t necessarily the plan all along that they would go forward without a label, but Bob Vylan certainly wouldn’t be what it is today if the duo were under the control of a higher power. “It worked out well, but if somebody would have offered a really great record deal right at the start, maybe it would be different,” says Bobbie. “But things worked out this way and also, having everything in-house now has been really beneficial because there’s nobody to answer to for anything. Nobody to say ‘no, you’ve got to redraft that album’. Nobody to say ‘no, you can’t put out merch now’. It’s worked out as being good for us”.

The album, naturally, is magnificent. It’s their longest release to date and takes on the difficult subjects that most artists are afraid to approach: police brutality, racism and poverty all appear in an unflinching portrait of the real England. The spoken word intro ‘Walter Speaks’ opens the album with the line “People in their day to day lives will know what it means to be living in a period of economic crisis”, which is the exact focus of The Price Of Life: injustice told through the stories of people who have experienced it first-hand. That doesn’t mean that the main message is one of hopelessness; the album is peppered with the reassurance that it is possible to make change, even when it feels impossible.

The cherry on top of The Price Of Life is ‘Health Is Wealth’, a genuinely educational track about clean living and the sociological obstacles that deny it to the working class. ‘Health Is Wealth’ at first glance isn’t what you expect to hear on a Bob Vylan record, but it’s three words that really make Bobby light up and has him speaking animatedly and at length how important the song is to him (and how happy he is that Gigwise brought it up).

Think about the healthy eating education you got for all those years at school. About how you had to eat your five a day and exercise for x-number of hours a week. Well, in ‘Health Is Wealth’, Bob Vylan have done it better, and they’ve done it in under three minutes. The Bobs note that outside of reggae, healthy living isn’t really promoted in the music industry—nor is its political side. “If you look at the working-class community and you look at the areas that we populate and the accessibility to healthy food and organic produce, it’s almost non-existent,” says Bobby. “In some places in the world and even in this country, it’s non-existent. Food deserts are a real thing. That’s insane. No one should not be able to get fresh produce”.

He quotes the song’s first line: “The killing of kids with £2 chicken and chips is a tactic of war waged on the poor” explaining that this inaccessibility specifically affects the working class for a reason. “I wholeheartedly believe that a government doesn’t have to worry about killing off people if you are killing off yourself. Even the access to betting shops in certain communities—why is it so easy in poorer communities to place bets than it is in other communities where they have all the money? All of these things are in our communities for a reason”.

Bobby and Bobbie want to lead by example: between the two of them, skateboarding, football, jogging, kickboxing and weight training are listed as staples in their lives. “We came from a community and a lifestyle of drinking and eating this way and that way and we’re no different to anybody else. If we can quit drinking and quit eating takeout and kebabs and burgers and get active, get healthy and find something that works for us then anybody can. Hopefully people take that away from that song”. This is the main essence of ‘Health Is Wealth’: that clean living is not just possible, but it’s an essential and revolutionary act in working-class communities. As Bobbie says, “What you fuel yourself with really does matter a lot”. 

When Bobby and Bobbie first approached music industry figures with We Live Here, they were told that the album was “too extreme” to support. “One particular PR company told us outright: ‘I love the album, but the track ‘Pulled Pork’, I can’t back that because I’ve got friends that are police officers’”, Bobby remembers. This time around, they’ve had no resistance; simply because they’ve avoided anyone that could give it to them: “you can only tell us no if you’re the one controlling the purse”. Today, they have complete control over their marketing, singles, videos and merch. “We get to decide all of that ourselves and I think there’s a lot of power in releasing the music this way”.

What they have noticed, however, is that those same people that told them “no” are now posting black squares on Instagram in a low-effort gesture of solidarity for the Black Lives Matter movement. “So many of them are just doing the bare minimum. In an industry—especially in the genre and the subculture that we operate in–the industry is not diverse and it’s not necessarily inclusive. You don’t have to do much to look like you’re leading the fucking way. Post a black square, that’s it. Bravo”. Although the music industry seems like it’s trying to do better, Bobby isn’t optimistic about its motives or its future: “the second that it slips out of peoples’ minds that we need inclusivity and we need diversity and we need voices to be heard, that shit will just go,” he says. “And it will just revert straight back to how it was”.

Bobby is understandably frustrated by this constant hypocrisy, which he says is more prevalent in the rock community than in the rap, where more people of colour are making decisions. “It’s upsetting because this is people’s lives,” he concludes “It’s not a trendy thing, it’s not something you do so your company looks like it’s not racist or it looks inclusive. It’s people’s lives. This shit affects me, it affects my family and my community. I feel strongly about it and within this genre it’s even more rampant”.

Another theme that pops up throughout The Price Of Life is writing songs for the radio—or not, in Bob Vylan’s case. They do have one fan on the radio, says Bobbie: “one of the few people that did put us on was Iggy who was really into it. But, like, that’s Iggy Pop, he don’t give a fuck about what anybody says so he can do what he wants”. Well, if you can only have one person playing your music on the radio, it might as well be Iggy Pop. But he doesn’t think that this attitude is ever going to translate to mainstream radio stations. “They don’t want to stick their neck out and have people talking about “fuck the police” on their radio show and then get pulled up on it, or have people call up and be upset about it”.

So, we’re stuck with inoffensive love songs on the drive to work for the foreseeable (“I find them nothing but offensive!” Bobby cuts in). If you want to listen to the radio, they say, make it something like Radio 6 that’s “created for the weirdos [who] don’t want to listen to the love songs”.

Instead of trying to appease the radio stations and music industry figures on high, they’re building more meaningful connections with their fans. And by doing so, they’ve had some really special interactions within the community, including their work with Mr Cooke Customz (@mrcookecustomz on Instagram) who made the duo a bespoke Bob Vylan action figure, which they will be raffling off with pr-eorders of the new record. “Personally I feel very blessed that I get to interact with people with these talents and that they feel moved by something we do to immortalise us in doll form”.

You’ve probably worked out by now that this isn’t a Bob Dylan tribute band (even if Alexa hasn’t: “If Alexa plays ‘Blowing in the Wind’ one more time when I’m trying to play ‘We Live Here’, I’m going to lose it” has become a common complaint among Vylan fans). One YouTube comment on ‘Pretty Songs’ reads: “came here expecting a Bob Dylan tribute act. I’m pleasantly surprised”. So even if they aren’t what you came for, you might find the music that’s been missing all along. Do yourself a favour—turn off the radio and check out Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life.

Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life is out now.

Grab your copy of the Gigwise print magazine here.

More about: Bob Vylan