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Report: Rockfeedback @ iTunes Festival Night 15 – Friendly Fires, 15/7/09

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By: Tim Smith

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 This year, Rockfeedback is delighted to be the official blog partner for the rather exciting iTunes Festival, taking place at London’s Roundhouse every night in July.  Over the course of the festival, we’ll not be missing a night, delivering morning-after reports on everyone from Oasis and Bloc Party to Franz Ferdinand and Kasabian playing intimate sets to fans lucky enough to have won tickets to the shows. 

From entrance to performance, it takes a while for Friendly Fires come on stage. It requires 5 sound checkers crowded around frontman Ed Macfarlane’s synthesizer to get it working, all this happening in the shadows of the two drum kits towering over the stage. The main drum kit and the percussion look so exotic, alien shapes soon to make alien noises for a British indie band. A decade ago, in a gig like this, only very few bands could pull such a set up off. The bands that wanted to make a big deal out of using “live” percussion were bands like Faithless - ‘dance’ bands.  Only now very few bands can pull off “live percussion” (that being percussion extra to your standard drum kit), but it remains  bloody exciting seeing more than a tambourine and maybe an egg shaker if you’re lucky.

The drums look awesome. On a little riser of their own to the right of the stage, the set up screams attention, which it will undoubtedly get, but also gives sticksman Jack Savidge a chance to show off and find himself tucked away at the back of the stage hidden behind the front man’s neo-Jagger clubland swagger.  But however rhythmic Friendly Fires are, it’s always supported with a subtle but omnipresent and occasionally euphoric guitar. This sound sinks into the synths and rhythms and emerges itself within the cacophony, lifting up the melodies and heightening the intensity of the build ups.

A sustained note emerges from the blue light of the stage. For about 2 minutes the expectation grows and grows as does the intensity of the keys. The band arrives, charging out on stage with their accomplices on extra rhythm and bass guitar. To the delight of the crowd, Friendly Fires are also joined by a trumpeter and a saxophonist (a fella reminiscent of a Muppet, in all honesty, sporting two random streaks of grey hair either side of his head). The synth seems to extinguish as it comes to the end of its fuse; the whole band’s and the whole venue’s eyes turn to drummer Jack Savidge who draws away from crashing symbols to launch us into ‘Lovesick’.  Warmingly, everyone is surprised by how everyone else knows the words. There is a huge grin on the band’s faces and all of a sudden the big gig nerves seem to melt away, or be sweated out of frontman Macfarlane.

The intensity rises with the humongous ‘Jump in the Pool’, arriving with anostalgia within nostalgia as the ‘oohs’ and the ‘ahhhs’ of Macfarlane’s emotional summer holiday run their course. The brass and the extended bars of bongo made the song come to life again after begin played in every indie disco in the past year.  And next, in ‘Skeleton Boy’, the crowd realised how much they’d begun to sweat, and as such decided to groove rather than jump.

Seeing this, Macfarlane only dances more.  His hips sway in time with every single beat created by his band. ‘In The Hospital’ continues to make everyone feel a little bit cooler than they actually are. No one now feels awkward or ashamed of dancing.  The spiky, sharp ‘White Diamonds’ is preceded by the smooth tech laden textures of ‘Strobe’, sensitively reliving one of Macfarlane’s dancefloor memories with Booka Shade beeps resonating over the chorus.

 Unlike The Magistrates before them this evening, Friendly Fires were able to convert the alluring rhythmic verses, intros and fills with a final blow of a chorus, with words you don’t really know but noises you can reinterpret and get away with. It’s a perfect recipe for any band, be they a pop group or or anything else.

Amazingly, by this point they’ve not even dropped ‘Photobooth’, ‘On Board’ or ‘Paris’.  The crowd rapturously sing every word of the latter, even getting the slightly confusing “I’ll find you that French boy” bit right. The brass dispersing through the song and the whole set adds a whole new dimension to the songs, beefing them up considerably. There is something about the arrangements tonight, especially with regards the brass, that makes you wonder whether you’re witnessing “that” gig, the one at which Friendly Fires became something more important

Artists in this article: Friendly Fires

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