Friendly Fires Discuss New R Kelly Inspired Album

Friendly Fires first assaulted airwaves via an effervescent ode to Paris but in a phone interview with drummer Jack Savidge it’s Glastonbury that has their hearts. Personal “holy shit!” moments aside, read on as Savidge explains why playing in America feels like banging your head against a wall, the band’s connection to Australia, the touring pitfalls of Swine flu and their R Kelly inspired sophomore album.

What’ve you been up to today? I’ve just been to the gym actually. I just came out. Sorry, that’s why you had to wait for me for five minutes because I was getting changed but yeah, I’ve just come out of the gym

I actually saw on your Twitter page that you only joined the gym, two days ago. Yeah I mean, we’ve just come back from America and so everyone is feeling a bit slack. Well, certainly, I am feeling a bit slack because in America, as you know, the food there is just pure cholesterol all day, every day. So yeah, I need to get back into shape really. And also we are kind of getting back into doing studio stuff and we kind of need sharp minds.

You just finished touring New York, you guys played with The XX What was the tour like? You know they are a band we like a lot, so it’s a pleasure to play with them really. I think it’s the crowd – we were a bit concerned about it in the beginning, putting two bands who are so contrasting together we thought it might not work for the crowd. But it worked really well because their style is so much on the ascent in the US so everyone is really excited to see them and it helps to get people quite hyped for our show

What were the highlights on the US tour? Do you feel like you’ve broken the market over there? It’s funny, when we were doing New York we were playing 2000 people venues but then we went to places that we hadn’t been to before like Austin and Sacramento and we played to just like 250 it’s quite an uneven experience touring the US. I think that’s where a lot of bands get a bit disheartened especially UK bands who’ve done really well in the UK – if you don’t kind of build up in America then you tend to feel like you are banging your head against the wall, because you are having to still play tiny gigs when you’ve been there four or five times.

Last time you were in Australia I heard reports that there was a possible Swine Flue outbreak in the band? I had Swine Flu at some point but it wasn’t in Australia, I think one of our guitar players had Swine Flu and got pulled off the flight or something because they screened him and he came up green on the kind of heat resistant – I mean not heat resistant, sort of the solar energy screen thing.

The latest recording that people have heard from you is “Alive”. That single came out of nowhere, because it wasn’t part of the album originally, was it just to support the re-release or was there more thinking behind it? Well we kind of out of had it in our minds because, some of the songs on our first album were quite old. They were things that had been released before and then they were put on the album as well. We kind of felt that it would be good to end the campaign with a totally new song to make sure that it ends on a high rather than…they released three singles fro an album or maybe four and then the third single of the album is just like, it doesn’t make any dent in anything and it’s just kind of like whatever, no one cares. So yeah we wanted to release a new song just to prove that we could still do it and as much to ourselves as to anyone else, for our own sanity really.

So you mentioned that you guys were looking at getting back into the studio at the moment and you’ve got to sharpen up your mind for that. Explain a bit about what the plans are for the future material? Yes, it’s going well, we are writing a lot, we are trying to do as many instrumentals as we can, instrumental ideas and then Ed takes some away and puts some vocals on top of them or he gets a vocal idea and then we revisit the arrangement because what Ed had done vocally changes how harmonically it should work. So yeah, it’s going well and we are all really keen to get in there and keep it moving along.

Can you describe the sound of what you have so far? It’s all pretty there to be honest, I guess we’ve got three ideas that are quite kind of ballady. The kind of love is in the air kind of vibe, you know, sort of a power ballad vibes going on. There’s a couple that’s kind of a bit more afro-y but they are kind of a bit more ethnic than you’d say afro. Certainly kind of afro-y drums and stuff like that. Funny drum patterns we’ve been mucking around with. There’s a good one that sounds really sort of classic housy. There’s another one that sounds maybe a bit more like early R. Kelly or Montell Jordan, New Jack Swing vibe. So yeah, it’s quite a mixed bag at the moment but I think it would be interesting to see how some of these turn out because, a lot of them probably won’t end up sounding how they sound right now. But at the moment it’s really, really varied and I think that’s what we’ve always set out to do as a band.

Have you guys found a producer for the album or will you be doing it yourselves? It’s just us at the moment, we are just getting ideas together and trying to write songs basically. Some of the stuff will not need a producer. I guess that’s kind of up in the air at the moment. We kind of intend to have it all finished by May and then, I mean that’s obviously if everything goes to plan and then have everything, perhaps have it all, have it released at the back end of summer.

So is the Australian tour perhaps a bit of a holiday or break? No, not really I mean we are doing 10 days so it’s not that much of a holiday but yeah it’s nice. I’ve got some distant cousins who live out in Perth and so I plan on spending time with them and Ed the singer’s parents actually live in Adelaide at the moment so he gets to go and see them. So yeah I mean it’s kind of a holiday thing but it won’t be a holiday once we get on stage.

When you guys were at school together and 14 years old, did you ever imagine that you’d be touring the globe and flying to New York to sing in front of 2000 people, coming to Australia in the space of a year and working on a second album that’s going to be heard by thousands of people? Not for a second, not for the faintest fraction of a second but I suppose, even for me personally, say three years ago that wasn’t even something I really considered. I mean when I left University I was looking into other jobs, I mean in journalism and doing some writing work and stuff like that. So yeah, it’s something we’ve all kind of fallen into as much as anything. We obviously worked hard at it but you know we’re obviously very fortunate and yeah I mean it’s not something that we’d really designed. It just had it its own momentum really.

Yeah has there been a moment along the way when you’ve had to pinch yourself and go, “I can’t believe this is happening?” When we were doing Glastonbury, and we were on the stage, at the time it was just kind of another gig and we’d been getting gig after gig but it was obviously huge for us and really exciting but now, even now I kind of look back at some of the footage on YouTube and I look at some of the pictures and it’s like, “Fucking hell that, was enormous!” and it was actually about 40,000 to 50,000 people watching us on stage at the time and it was also crazy because as a teenager and as a music fan growing up, I’ve always videoed the Glastonbury coverage on the BBC and watched it religiously. It just seems insane that we should be doing something that I would be watching as a fan back then.

Friendly Fires are playing as part of The 2010 Good Vibrations Festival.

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