Friday, May 13, 2011

Friendly Fires swap Paris for Pala ? and a butterfly centre in St Albans

Dance-rockers lived it up at fashion parties, flew over Rio in a helicopter, then returned to the garage for follow-up to the Mercury-nominated Friendly Fires

See the feature as it appears in The Guide here

Jack Savidge, the mild-mannered drummer of Friendly Fires, is red with chagrin. Last week someone on Twitter sent him a message: "Your band suck dick and you are fat." He's struggling to let it go. "I did some research on this guy," he says. "He had a MySpace for his really shit acoustic guitar-type stuff and I thought about going, 'Hey, do you fancy a support slot?' And hopefully he'd go something like, 'Oh, um, yeah.' And then I'd go, 'Course I don't want you to fucking support us, you fucking cunt!'"

"That is so Mark Corrigan," taunts singer Ed Macfarlane. "This is what I would have said ? in another reality." We're sitting a five-minute drive from Savidge's mum's house, in St Albans' Butterfly World. Their shirts may be well ironed but the boys smell really bad, like last week's packed lunch fermenting in the back of a Barfly. It turns out the pong's emanating from their hair, which has been smeared in rotten banana, a trick used to attract butterflies for our photo shoot.

So as not to offend crocodiles of schoolchildren with the foul stench and fouler language, we sit at a corner trestle table. Macfarlane doesn't waste the school-trip catering facilities, ordering a pasty, three sachets of ketchup and a Fanta. Savidge and guitarist Edd Gibson sip black coffees and look on enviously.

When Friendly Fires released their heady debut album in 2008 it painted a picture of a more glamorous lifestyle. It held the promise of a party that could go anywhere, from the Jacuzzi to the nightclubs of Paris. Even Photobooth, their punk-funk ode to getting frisky at the back of Woolworths, made St Albans sound like the Sunset Strip.

The album should have been underscored by interviews full of bombast and ambition but, in person, the middle-class band members struggled to capture the intensity of their music. When interviewers pushed them for a manifesto, it was all they could do to shuffle awkwardly in their chinos.

"It just seemed so forced, those bands making big statements, feeling conscious of how it was going to look on the cover of NME. I don't think that's very us," says Savidge. At the time it seemed like they were pulling another Corrigan, writing songs about nights that never stopped, while they were already on the last coach home. In fact, the band were affording themselves a little privacy: "I think by being missionless, it gave us the freedom to do what we want."

Refusing to be drawn into brash declarations of intent, these self-made suburbanites were free to pursue their rock'n'roll pipe dreams. "When I was younger I had a really superficial idea that being in a band would be hos in different area codes or flying around in your own private jet, you know, over-the-top things. It was the cheesy Jacuzzi dream," says Macfarlane.

'We got booked for this swanky Gucci gig at Ronnie Scott's. I had a conversation with Simon Le Bon about his ocarina!' Ed Macfarlane

Soon these cheesy dreams were to become reality. As their hedonistic pop took the fancy of those who already lived the high life, Friendly Fires got their first taste of it. "It started with the fashion shows," he continues. "For some reason that world connected with our music. So we got booked for this swanky Gucci gig at Ronnie Scott's. Backstage, I had a conversation with Simon Le Bon about his ocarina."

Then came the GQ Awards, where they had to suddenly forfeit their dressing room to David Cameron. Soon they were being flown around the world. In Rio, they got to fly in a helicopter round the statue of Christ The Redeemer. "I started throwing money out," says Savidge. "Not loads, but just a few notes. I think just to say that I did." Were they enjoying it? "Sort of," says Macfarlane. "I think, out of that whole period, the time I really loved, when I had actual tears of joy running down my face, was being able to play Lollapalooza and then bum around Chicago and behave like an idiot."

What did they do? "Acid," laughs Savidge. "We did a signing and I didn't notice but a fan, a classic Deadhead in bandana and tie-dye shirt, just gave us two a tab of acid. So then we just went around like idiots. It's was weird, like the whole ground was made of snakes. We ended up DJing at some club. I don't know how we pulled it off."

Their recent single, Live Those Days Tonight, is a brag about their party lifestyle and a middle-fingered salute to 90s ravers who think that no one will ever party hard as them. "I can't touch your precious past/ But I'll live those days tonight", sneers Macfarlane, confident he's having the time of his life.

But when Friendly Fires finally returned from touring last year, Macfarlane didn't like what was happening. It wasn't a crisis of conscience, that would be a tad vulgar, but the sessions in east London weren't working out ("It was too easy to just go out and get conkered"). So the band fled to Macfarlane's garage in St Albans; having been given the world on a plate, they'd lost their appetite.

'Just coming back to St Albans was important because, aside from playing to 20,000 fans at Glastonbury, my everyday life hasn't changed at all' Ed Macfarlane

Leaving the booze behind, they started work on Pala, their new album. Musically, it's a step forward: more complex then the post-punk jitters of its predecessor, drifting between Latin and tropical rhythms like a drunk teen at Womad. But lyrically it's a leap in a different direction. From the band that created aspirational indie, here's a record about loneliness and lost love underpinned by a nihilistic existentialism that says fight for every day even though perhaps you've already lost.

"The life span of bands can be so short. I've no idea how long this band will last, no one does," says Macfarlane. "It's important that we make the most of it. That applies to my friends too, in whatever jobs they do. Everything seems quite temporary these days. I think just coming back to St Albans and getting back in my garage was important because aside from playing to 20,000 fans at Glastonbury, my everyday life hasn't changed at all."

Part of Macfarlane's new outlook, he says, comes from reading Aldous Huxley's utopian novel Island. Set on the mystical land of Pala, Huxley's idea of paradise sounds like a mid-season episode of Skins, filled with magic mushrooms, children escaping their parents, and plenty of shagging around. So, how is that different from the rock'n'roll course they were already set on?

"It's not that I agree with all his ideas," he says. "He thinks men are better than woman for a start. But there are ideas about reaching an absolute state of absolute contentment in your life, that if the world were to end there and then, it wouldn't matter."

Is that how he feels about his own life? "I think it's relevant to my life. The first record was more escapist, about trying to be someone better than you are and how being in a band is your form of escape. This one is about living that lifestyle for a fair few years and then realising that maybe it isn't everything that you expected it to be, and maybe your real life and your friends back home are what you should be appreciating the most."

Friendly Fires test that theory later the same evening with a tiny gig at their local pub The Horn. "Last time we played here was three Christmases ago," recalls guitarist Edd Gibson. "I think we had about 15 people in the crowd. We had loads of fake snow which just turned into a lethal layer of slime so we kept falling over all the time."

Tonight it's the crowd's turn to take tumbles as they clamber to get closer to a band half of them used to go to school with. Macfarlane handles the intimacy well, staring straight into the eyes of the front row. But, flanked by a horn section and singing songs called Hawaiian Air and Running Away, all the grubby hometown setting really does is hold them back. These are songs that demand to be played in the beaming sunshine of festival stages, in the nightclubs of South America, indeed at the pool parties of the rich and famous.

So is it time Friendly Fires quit St Albans for Pala? Macfarlane reflects: "I suppose there's room for a broad spectrum. When you're a successful band you sometimes get to do things that are mind-blowingly opulent. But you can always come back home and get covered in rotting bananas at a children's attraction."


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/14/friendly-fires-pala-paris

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