Friendly Fires
A bunch of fourteen year olds went to school in St Albans, and played in a post hardcore band who were not called Friendly Fires. Now, they deliver an unstoppable onslaught of funky monkey beats, and certainly are called Friendly Fires.
Taking their name from the first track on Section 25’s Always Now LP (they’re cool like that0< they’re not the same band they were when they were 14, but they are the same people – namely singer Ed Macfarlane, guitarist Ed Gibson, and drummer Jack Savidge. The Friendly Fires thing has been a full time concern since university, though Ed Macfarlane has been known to dabble in solo electronica from time to time, as the discographies of Skam and Precinct Recordings attest.
The first friendly fires release was the now rare as hen’s teeth Photobooth EP in 2006, followed a year later by the Cross The Line EP and a remix record. Very nice they were for setting a bit of a buzz going too, though when the time came to unleash ‘Paris’, right at the end of ’07, that buzz became an unbearable din – twas all the music press could do to not bestow the title of ‘saviours of everything’ upon these gents, given that it was, indeed, a right f**king corker of a tune.
It takes pride of place on their debut, self titled LP, released via XL Recordings (home to Dizzee Rascal, Devendra Banhart, Beck and Radiohead amongst others) this month. And it’s as good a dance orientated party record to have come out of these fair isles as any in living memory.
MYSPACE.COM/FRIENDLYFIRES: Taking the place of an official site (which nobody seems to need anymore anyway), Friendly Fires’ MySpace page offers a very generous ten tracks (might that even be the whole album?) to stream, alongside everything you’d usually expect from a social networking profile for an up and coming indie trio these days.
XLRECORDINGS.COM/FRIENDLYFIRES: The XL Recordings page for the band basically collects every net based piece of Friendly Fires information you could ever want. It made us wonder why we were making this list ourselves, so we’ll just stop now. We’re not lazy, we just know when we’re beaten.
LIVE IN BRISTOL 1: “It ended with a cacophony of instruments and samples, as the guys pooled all their resources together to build a psychedelic soundscape that blew the audience away…” – the thoughts of Bristolite Sian Norris there.
LIVE IN BRISTOL 2: “They seem to communicate seamlessly and have an intuitive feeling towards each other and the audience…”, thought Sian once more.
PARIS:
ON BOARD:
JUMP IN THE POOL: