An Interview With Blue Bayou Post George Tavern

I met with Blue Bayou the day after their show at the George Tavern in London on Aug 18, 2025. We met up at Primrose Hill on an unexpectedly windy day to talk more about their music. With members from the quite infamous London band Dura Mater, Blue Bayou’s music is a completely different animal. Though it keeps the sporadic, chaotic energy of their more orchestral, hardcore band Dura Mater, the sound of Blue Bayou is much more funk inspired. 

Blue Bayou by Luke Jin

The rest of the band is made up of bassist Will Lamb, Tarun Pass on the trumpet, and Momo Ueda on the violin and keys. The band has been working in full formation since 2023. With only two singles released, December Flowers and Hide & Seek,  the band has many more future releases under their belt. 

Frank described their sound, saying, “ I think that even though [our] music holds a lot of old music, the way of thinking about it feels quite new– or not new, but current. It's quite fragmented. I think it’s going to be challenging to put an album away when the time comes. Because even the live set at the moment, there’s so much whiplash at times. You know, you’re going from something that’s really quick and sometimes loud, to something that’s quiet.”

As a young band, they are still determining the direction of their sound. “There's a couple different directions that we want to move in musically at the same time. When we’re working on them, we try to do different things per song,” Greg explained. Greg went further, describing the music the band is working on as “A kind of chamber pot of odd pop. [We create] ballads that are orchestrated in a quite lush way and then energetic ones but I think if you can see all that at once, then you know what the project is.”

Like many bands, Blue Bayou is able to use their difference in tastes to their advantage. “I think we have very different leanings. I think we have quite different orientations which is nice. I think you get a lot of bands where everyone loves the same thing. What that creates is the same song like nine times every live set. And that's actually not a bad thing. It’s quite convincing. It just doesn’t sound much different to what’s already out there,” Frank admitted.

Blue Bayou is changing in more ways than just sonically. “This probably isn’t even the final form,” Frank admitted of the members currently in the band.  “And it looks like Will might be going to Amsterdam,” Greg revealed. My asking what they plan to do about this resulted in this exchange:

GREG: We could all move to Amsterdam! We could be in a house–

FRANK: Well we couldn’t because that’s not how the world works 

GREG: (laughs) Let me dream!

FRANK: we would be there for like three months then we’d get arrested. 

NOIZE: Yeah. I've heard it’s a bit hard to move up there as a band. 

FRANK: It seems like quite an interesting scene. It seems like there’s a lot of funding, which is great. And that’s all I’ll say. That’s all I can say right now. 

GREG: It’s been really pleasant developing with this grouping. Like you spend a certain amount of time rather than just playing the songs, starting to come up with all sorts of new things and the musical chemistry [is hard to replace]. 

They described the changes in their sound over time as a “shift”. When asked if they believe this shift was for the better, Frank said,

“It's a funny one because in a way we can’t answer that. Because obviously for us it feels better. There’s a reason it made a shift because that’s what we like. So that’s a question for other people. But it seems to have gone down pretty well. And I think that some of the ballads do command a lot of attention, which is really nice. It's really nice and quite weird to play a song and the audience is silent. That never happens. But that started happening, which is really exciting. It feels really nice. Like, oh shit people are really listening to what we’re doing.”

The members of Blue Bayou are pulled in lots of different directions. With Frank and Greg also being in Dura Mater– a mashup of Blue Bayou and House Arrest members– and the possibility of Will leaving, the band still has a lot to figure out. Blue Bayou expresses something different than the music of their other bands, though the niche of their sound hasn’t been found yet and isn’t fully developed. For now, the band is taking time to figure out their sound, which, so far, has a lot of potential