Introducing: Friendly Fires - page 2

11 July 2008

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A lot of gigging followed, during which time the band honed their energetic live show, featuring Savidge’s propulsive drumming and Macfarlane’s marionette-with-tangled strings mode of dancing. When they toured with Crystal Castles and White Lies in May, they stole the show, something they put down to “all those Tuesday nights playing in East London dives”. And when they supported Interpol in Dublin, an impressed Bono came over to introduce himself. “He asked us where we were from,” remembers Savidge. “When we said St Albans he said, I played The Horn Reborn, which is a local venue, back in the day. Who’d have thought it?”

A second ten-inch EP, Cross The Line, saw them gather more momentum thanks to the video for lead track, On Board. Directed by two mutual friends known as OWLS, it was picked up by MTV 2. “They came to us with an idea about people in fancy dress costumes running around a race track,” says Savidge. “Someone was dressed as a prawn, someone else as a horse. The costumes were made out of cardboard, which we thought was good because it was clearly within our budget.” When it came to recording the album, the band tried working with various producers, but in the end opted for the same lo-fi, DIY aesthetic as the On Board video. The recording sessions took place in the studio they’d always used: the garage of Macfarlane’s parent’s house. It means they can work whenever they want and to their own time scale, something Savidge describes as “a blessing and curse”. “We’re constantly writing music,” adds Macfarlane. ”This album only represents about five percent of what we’ve written. But it’s through doing that that you get good songs. It’s like sperms competing for an egg. And whatever happens with the album, good or bad, we will know it was us, because we’ve done it all ourselves. If we’d worked with someone we weren’t happy with, we’d always be thinking, maybe it was them.” Looking to the future, the band have a busy year ahead of them. As well as the album, they have a string of high-profile appearances at Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds in the UK, Summersonic in Japan, Melt in Germany and Plage De Rock in France. The last word goes to Macfarlane. “It’s not long ago that I thought things might not happen for us.” Now they are, he puts it down to “songs that are catchy and don’t mess about.” Simple really.