St Albans trio Friendly Fires will look back on 2009 with fondness. Their debut, self-titled album just went gold, and the Mercury Prize nominations are cheekily alluring as they wait to be called on July 21 (read our tips HERE). You feel that this band of filthy basslines and epic choruses are about to rise to the next level. And they are quite flummoxed by their new landscape of success.
Clash quizzed singer Ed MacFarlane just before his band blazed a secret rooftop party at London’s Shoreditch House, as they brought Levi’s OnesToWatch 5 Night Revue to a successful close…
So you are having your album repackaged and re-launched with a new single… looks like a sleek package.
Yeah, the new single is out soon. It’s called ‘Kiss of Life’ – we’ve only just finished it, although we started it in January. It’s taken so long as we have been on the road so much and we’ve found it really hard to record anything properly. We didn’t actually write it to coincide with the album going gold; we were just going a bit crazy on the road and needed to do something. But I’m glad the album has gone gold! It’s all a bit unexpected, really. I never expected to have a gold record, as when we first started we were just really focussing on not getting dropped and selling just enough records to keep making music, really. It’s strange because people are paying a lot more attention to us now than they were when the album first came out.
You have a very strong reputation as a good live band now… would you say you are better live, or better on record?
(Laughs) People are always saying we are better live, and I’m never sure what way to take that, but I think as this is our first record we didn’t really know what we were doing. We were very new to the production game, and we couldn’t achieve the live aspect of Friendly Fires that we have now. With the new record, though, we’ll give it a go. We did a track with Paul Epworth, but for the album next year we might go back to producing and trying things out ourselves. When we first started we didn’t know anything… we didn’t use pop shields for the vocals, and nor did we know all the ins and outs of making things sound fat. Tracks like ‘Photobooth’ just sound really robotic and rigid to me now. Now we want everything to sound more live and human, and you can only really get that by doing things properly rather than like sticking a recording over a kick drum, for example.
Are you surprised how developed things have become?
Yeah, I am surprised that we’ve have done a proper world tour, and we are going back to do Australia, then the US and then Brazil. It’s more than we ever dreamt we’d do.
Do you think you’ll get nominated for the Mercury Prize?
We don’t know. It’d be great if we did, but I’m trying to think of who would get nominated… La Roux and Florence and the Machine, maybe? I don’t think we’re one of these bands that have shot up to the top so fast that it’s untrue. Our rise has been quite gentle. I am glad that’s the way we have done it, as it feels that people have got into us as a band for the right reasons.
If you had to award the Mercury, to anyone, who would get it?
(Instantly) Wild Beasts!* (Laughs) Their first album is absolutely superb, and they’re one of the last indie bands that I have been truly inspired by. We did a few shows with them and I was shitting my pants going on after them. It’s totally different to us, but I think it’s just so musical.
*It should be noted here that Wild Beasts’ ‘Limbo, Panto’ album is not eligible for the 2009 Mercury Prize, but their new LP ‘Two Dancers’ (REVIEW) should be in contention for next year’s award.
So you’re already looking towards your second album?
We are going to start recording in January, which means that we need to get writing new material around September time. We are all really hyped. We are going to do a split 12” with Holy Ghost. We aren’t sure what label it will come out on, it’d be cool if it could come out on DFA. We are covering each other’s songs.
Any idea on what direction you’d like to take the music in for the new album?
We have started on this whole samba thing and I like that, but we wouldn’t want to have a swathe of samba bacteria across the whole album. There’s no specific sound we are going for at the moment, so we are just going to get into the studio and see what happens. I hope it sounds as varied as the first album because I think we got a good spread of different stuff on there. I hope that we get that lush ‘Jump in the Pool’ / ‘Paris’ vibe going, and that it’s at the forefront of what we do.
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Friendly Fires play the Clash-partnered Dour Festival in Belgium this week. Find them on MySpace HERE.
