Buffalo 77

Even the very best bands must first emerge from the most humble of beginnings. Here is a snapshot of a couple of years past: it is a cold winter's night, and Jay Leighton and Pete Ainge are driving the 200 miles from their Leicester home to Bristol to play a show at the city's Fleece and Firkin. It takes them ages, and the petrol is hardly cheap, but it's a gig and they are keen, and so it is worth it. But when they eventually arrive, a surly promoter tells them they've been double booked, and unceremoniously pushed. A mistake, apologies; goodbye.
"It was not," Jay says now, "one of our better moments."
And then it got promptly worse. As they stood there outside the venue wondering what to do next, a seagull flew over and shat on Pete's head, a moment painfully redolent of a bad sitcom in which the hero is revealed a laughing stock.
"We drove the 200 miles home, poor Pete still covered in shit, and spent the entire time discussing the state of our lives and wondering quite what the hell it was we were doing. The acts we had been in were going nowhere. We needed a change, a new band, a different direction, a fresh incentive."
Thus immobilised, Jay soon put his house on the market, the proceeds of the sale going towards funding their new project, which would now also feature Pete's younger brother Graham on piano and keyboards. They would call themselves Buffalo 77, and it would be the making of them.
Two years on, and the gamble appears to be paying off. Buffalo 77 have just completed their debut album. It's called Memento and it's an uncommonly rich collection of pop-rock tunes that recall U2’s widescreen emotion and Keane at their most strident, but with more grit, more muscle and, in Jay's case, more facial hair: "If I shave, I look 12," he points out.
It's early days yet, but 2009 might just have found its best new band already. Jay, 26, Pete, 25, and Graham, 23, grew up in and around the Midlands. They've been friends since schooldays, and have spent the better part of a decade playing in a succession of bands that taught them not just how to sing and play their instruments, but also just why a smaller band is better than a larger one.
"Three members," says Jay, "fit into a minivan much better than five..."
Jay had been obsessed with music since his midteens, and claims his personal turning point came the moment he first saw Nirvana on television.
"I remember watching their MTV Unplugged performance and being blown away," he recalls. "And that was it for me. I knew that music was what I wanted to do with my life, all thanks, pretty much, to Kurt Cobain."
He is being slightly disingenuous here, because there was another band before Nirvana that also meant the world to him. But we'll come to this particular act (from Norway, if you're asking) later.
After school, he and Pete spent their evening plying their trade in various local acts which were influenced, variously, by punk and emo and straight-ahead rock, while Jay worked in bars by days, and Pete for his father selling pumps for oil rigs. Demo tapes were regularly sent out, which prompted enthusiastic responses from the likes of Steve Lamacq and Island Records, each encouragement enough to keep their dream alive.
But it was only when they formed Buffalo 77, named with a nod of honour to Jay's all-time favourite movie Buffalo 66, that they finally came good on all their by now highly honed potential. The inclusion of Graham Ainge, and his collection of keyboards, immediately leant Buffalo 77 an irresistible allure, as did Jay's increasingly romantic way with a pop lyric.
"Well, after 10 years of near constant songwriting, I hope by now I know how to write a good song,"
he says. He certainly does. Many of the songs on Memento are informed by grand topics such as love and life and our very reason for being, and tracks like Won’t Forget and Cheap Champagne soar with a bruised but beautiful melancholy, while Happiness & Good Intentions is an exquisitely limpid ballad that confirms Jay’s skill in crafting the kind of sad songs that cannot help but uplift the listener. You will want to listen to it time and again. And if many of the songs here are so pregnant with 1980s-coloured melody that they practically float, it’s because that the other band that so informed Jay's formative songwriting years were none other than A-Ha.
"Let's face it, A-Ha really did write the most wonderful pop songs, didn't they?" he says of the band Coldplay and The Feeling also cite as major inspirations. "I know I went on to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, but I'd be lying if I said A-Ha didn't hold a special place in my heart."
But unlike A-Ha, Buffalo 77 have an extra dimension to them, something that is revealed when they play live. Suddenly, that exquisite pop sensibility gives way to brawn and muscle, and the wall of sound that these three young men produce suggests that they also harbour a soft spot for the likes of Foo Fighters.
"We always like to give a little bit more on stage, to sound more ragged," Jay says. "I mean, what's the point of perfectly reproducing your album in a live setting? People want more than that, don't they? We try to deliver more."
They succeed. In February, the band will release Memento on the Autonomy label, perhaps the best debut album ever to be funded by the sale of a Midlands house. These are songs that were born for heavy rotation, songs that could become national anthems, songs that could well run and run.
"As I get older," Jay says, "I get increasingly obsessed with the passing of time. I very strongly feel that we are only here once and that we shouldn't waste a single moment of our lives, which is why time is such a massive element in all my songs. I hope, if nothing else, that strikes a certain chord."
This seems entirely likely. Memento is a wonderful record and Buffalo 77, finally, have arrived.