Warm sultry disco-rock

St Albans doesn’t exactly shout ‘summery’. Historic, picturesque and quaint, perhaps. But sun-drenched, not so much. So you wouldn’t necessarily think that some of the coolest sunkissed, tropical pop tunes going around would hail from this small town in notoriously drizzly and choppy south west England. 

“I think coming from St Albans has definitely helped us get to where we are today,” says Friendly Fires guitarist Edd Gibson, over the phone from Oslo, where the group are on tour. “Why would you make music if there are so many vibrant scenes around you in the first place?”

Boredom, it seems, was at the heart of the reason why schoolmates Gibson, Ed Macfarlane and Jack Savidge first got together more than five years ago at the tender age of 14. But ironically, St Alban’s tedium is part of what has launched them to be hailed as one of the most exciting young bands in Britain. 

Of course, it also had a small something to do with their acclaimed 2008 Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut, Friendly Fires, an album full of infectious sunny disco-rock goodness. It’s a sound they’ve become known for, even more so since the release of new album, Pala, in May this year. 

“People keep referring to Pala as ‘that summer album’. So I’m just terrified that, come winter, we’re going to have nowhere to go. Although, I suppose it’s always summer somewhere in the world,” says Gibson.

If their debut was summery, Pala – a name lifted directly from Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island – takes that sound, lathers on the suntan oil, shakes up a fruity cocktail and slips into a bathy beach-side pool. It evokes lush tropical air, warm primal beats and the kind of cliché lapping of foreign seas that works for summer albums, epitomised by the track Hawaiian Air. 

With such a consistent sonic texture, it would be easy to
presume that these evocative images were the starting point for the trio’s sophomore LP. However, according to Gibson, the trio didn’t consciously make a bee-line for paradise shores when conjuring the concept for this album.

“Everything can be under the microscope when you’re writing a song in the first place. It’s hard to step back and look at the bigger picture and see how certain songs will fit in as a whole,” he says. “I think it was only when we came to write Hawaiian Air that we had these 10 tracks recorded, and basically had this album done, we realised that there was a certain sound that perhaps wasn’t on the album that we should try to aim towards.”

With the success of their debut, there was inevitably going to be pressure to back it up with a second album. Gibson tackled the expectation in a unique way: he just thought of it as their first album. “I think Pala’s almost a debut record,” he says. “The first one was odd because it was over such a long period of time. It was just a collection of the best songs that we had up until that point.”

The debut was where Friendly Fires found themselves – progressing from their self-confessed reverence of New York’s DFA label to Kiss of Life, the track which became the launching pad for the new album when ‘it become clear that we had discovered something that sounds personal to us’. Says Gibson: “Pala almost sounds more like a Friendly Fires record than the first one.”

If you say so, Edd. As long as you know that you’ll have to do a sophomore album at some stage. KITEC Tue Aug 16, Tickets: 3128 8288; www.hkitcketing.com

Mark Tjhung