Big Band of Boom

A weekly deadline in lockdown

The band started as an obligation rather than a plan. Through the pandemic, guitarist Tom Duffy and trombone and sousaphone player Charlie Lancaster belonged to a songwriting group that demanded a finished song each week, and most of what came out of it stayed an exercise. One track did not. Speaking to Rock Era Magazine in January 2022, the pair described how "Big Bad Voodoo" grew past the brief — the original intention had been a single with a B-side, and instead it turned into a band with an album's worth of material ahead of it.

Big Band of Boom formed properly in 2022, and the first version of the name was Big Band of Doom, dropped once it became clear the music had nothing to do with doom metal. Assembling twelve players in Birmingham was less difficult than it sounds: the horn section largely knew one another from the jazz course at Birmingham Conservatoire, while the rhythm section had met on the festival circuit. Several members arrived with roughly a decade of electro-swing stages behind them, which shaped how the songs were built — written for movement first, with an understanding of how a crowd actually behaves in front of a horn section.

That understanding was tested at the first gig, which took place at a vintage festival in front of an audience that had turned up to swing dance. By the end of the set, the swing dancers were moshing.

Four years of singles and stages

The recorded output came out in single-sized pieces. "Big Bad Voodoo" was followed by "Behind the 8 Ball", co-written with friends based in Brooklyn who also sang on it, pulling swing, blues and hip-hop into the arrangement. "M.I.A." and "Back to the Circus" came after. By 2025 the booking agency Midnight Mango, which handles the band across the UK and Ireland, was listing the early tracks as having passed 100,000 streams between them — modest numbers for a band whose case was being made almost entirely in fields and rooms rather than on playlists.

The festival bookings did the heavy lifting. Boomtown, Camp Bestival, Twinwood and Shambala all came before the album, along with Rudolstadt in Germany, and the band ended up curating their own stage at Shambala rather than simply playing it. The most consequential booking was a smaller one: BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Craig Charles saw them at Moseley Jazz Festival and airplay followed. His verdict, carried on the band's agent listing, was that they tore the place apart. Richard Shawcross, who directs Swingamajig and runs Ragtime Records, went further in the same press material, calling them the best band to come out of Birmingham since Sabbath — a claim worth noting mainly because Shawcross then signed them.

A greenhouse, an abandoned church and a debut album

The self-titled debut arrived on Ragtime Records on 13 March 2026, fourteen tracks with two covers among them. The recording methods were dictated by the problem of getting twelve players to sound like one object. The horns were tracked as a section inside an abandoned church, then each instrument was double-tracked again with a close microphone to restore the punch that the room's reverb softened. The drums were recorded in a greenhouse, using the glass for natural resonance. The two guitars were deliberately mismatched: one double-tracked with humbuckers through Neural DSP amp simulations, the other on single coils through a Rat pedal into a Blackstar.

The writing leans on satire more than volume. Josh Wunderlich handles lyrics, and the lead single "Stupid Filthy Rich" is about billionaire excess, delivered with enough dark comedy to survive repeated listens. "Doomscrolling" and "Anxiety Universe" work the same territory of contemporary nerve damage, the first of them routed through the saxophones. "Earthquake", "Energy Vampire", "Knock at the Door", "One Night Only" and "Thanks Humans" fill out the run, with the ballad "Not Today" and the closer "The Longest of Goodbyes" providing the only real pauses. The two covers are Pendulum's "Propane Nightmares", rebuilt as drum and brass, and System of a Down's "Toxicity", where the horn arrangement does the work the original left to guitars.

What the reviews said

The rock press received it warmly and reached for the same comparisons. Jason Ritchie at Get Ready to Rock gave it three and a half stars, summarising the record as the Kill Bill soundtrack played by Rage Against the Machine with an orchestra, and hearing Diablo Swing Orchestra in the swing passages and Michael Bublé somewhere inside "Not Today". Jon Deaux at Ever Metal scored it 8 out of 10 on 11 March 2026 and described the band as a controlled explosion with a horn section and a God complex, singling out the horns as a force rather than a garnish.

Matthew Williams at The Razor's Edge, reviewing in March 2026, read the album as one long party and thought the brass added weight to "Toxicity" that the original did not have. The RingMaster Review, writing on 14 May 2026, took the band's own juggernaut framing at face value and advised lighting the touch paper and standing well back. Across all four, the recurring observation was the same: the record is a transcription of the live act rather than a studio construction, which is both the compliment and the limit.

The band also submitted to The Razor's Edge's Devil's Island questionnaire on 6 March 2026, where the album chosen for the desert island was Muse's 1997 debut Showbiz — picked because the band member in question lived near Teignmouth while Muse were coming up.

Where they stand now

Six months after release, the band have spent 2026 almost entirely on the road, with roughly twelve festival dates confirmed at the outset and more added as the season ran. The Great Escape in Brighton opened it in May, followed by DART Fest in Dartmouth, Northside in Denmark, Tunes in the Dunes, Into the Valley, Sidmouth Fringe and Farmer Phil's. Kendal Calling came on 31 July 2026, Boomtown on 14 August, and Shambala on 27 August, where they played the Swingamajig stage. Le Bon Scén'Art in France and Twinwood filled in around them.

Indoor shows bracket that run. February 2026 took in the 100 Club in London on the 4th, the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on the 27th and the Head of Steam in Newcastle on the 28th, with the Exchange in Bristol on 13 March, the day the album landed. The next headline date is The Crescent in York on 16 October 2026, followed by a hometown show at the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath on 27 November, and a return to the Exchange in Bristol on 12 March 2027. Tickets for all three are listed on the band's own site.

The act on stage

The band are direct about the fact that the songs were designed to be performed rather than recorded, and the arrangements bear it out — the horn lines are written to be seen as well as heard, six players moving as a block behind the guitars. Production has escalated with the size of the stage; flamethrowers have featured in the Boomtown set.

The stated aim is participation rather than spectacle for its own sake. The band have repeatedly framed their approach against acts that take themselves too seriously, and the measure of a good night, by their own account, is how much of the room is moving. The vintage-festival debut, where a swing-dancing crowd ended up in a pit, remains the template.