Interrupting Jack Savidge of Friendly Fires from working on his new Deep Shit release and ahead of his set at XOYO (London) tonight, he talks to us about working on the Friendly Fires’ new psychedelic direction.
I read that you didn’t want to release another record like ‘Pala’ because it was more of a pop record and you wanted to now go down a different route (possibly recording with Andrew Weatherall) - is that still the case? We’ve done some stuff with Andrew and I think that’s going to see the light of day, hopefully sooner rather than later. The way it’s sounding at the moment is that it’s quite a bit more trippy than the stuff we’ve done in the past but there’s still that bright element we’re known for in the music we are making at the moment. It’s always difficult to convey these things in actual words; I think it’s probably best if people listen to the music when it comes out and gather their own understanding of it.
Where have you been recording? At the moment, we are just doing it at Ed’s (Macfarlane) house which is in St Albans.
So you’re still recording in his converted garage where you recorded your first and second albums. Do you still prefer recording in a DIY sense? That’s how we’ve always been comfortable really. I think, in recording you’ve got to be as comfortable as possible and if you’re not comfortable you just don’t get the results; it’s as simple as that. We’ve had good experiences in huge studios but we’ve also had experiences where it goes nowhere. It’s definitely different; there is always an inherent pressure about recording in bigger studios and really pushing the boat out budget wise. You are always on the clock as much as there are advantages. So at the moment, this is still our preferred base of operation.
Talking more about your new trippy, psychedelic direction, what do you find are the differences or difficulties when it comes to recording this genre of music? It’s a bit of a voyage of discovery for us. I don’t want to say “that’s what it all sounds like” but the piece we were all working on together, “2 Days Ago,” sounds more or less like that. It’s a different thing, arranging music that has longer durations because you kind of have to get yourself into a mind-set where you listen to the whole thing, listen to the whole arrangement and think "is there enough going on in this part?" or "is there too much going on in another part?" It’s much like making any other piece of music but the goal posts are slightly different and have slightly moved.
How do you think your live performance will change in this case? I don’t know necessary that it will change a great deal. It’s hard to say because we are still making the record. You get onto these things a bit later. We’ve always tried to push our live performance a bit further every time we release something new and I think that will definitely be the case this time. It’s always been a growing, evolving thing. Because of the nature of our music it’s always too much for three people to carry out alone on stage so we will still have extra people on stage but we’ll have to see, it’s not reached the live stage of it yet.
You record DIY - would you consider yourselves a DIY band? I wouldn’t say we are a DIY band - that has connotations of stuff like putting on your own gigs. I’m not an expert on it but I know there is the DIY scene where people are putting out their records themselves and putting on gigs in their friends’ gardens. I don’t really think we are part of that, but we record a large part of our stuff ourselves. And that’s only sprung out because that is what we are comfortable with and that’s the sound of our music in a production-y way. I wouldn’t say there is anything particularly difficult about recording that way because that’s how we learnt to put music together. However, I guess the sessions get overly busy and you could have 20 tracks on the screen, which could all potentially be used, but you’ve got to make a hard decision about what to do. I guess that’s a problem that anyone who has self-produced their music would recognize.
You have a small solo career on the side, what sort of stuff is that? I do some dance tracks and I’ve been doing some remixes recently which have been quite enjoyable. I’d say it’s kind of Acid House; it’s sort of fun, melodic and using a lot of classic Acid House sounds and things like that.
Are you planning on doing any live sets? No, I don’t think I’d do that. I mean I DJ and that would be the live incarnation of that kind of thing. I’m actually going to be DJ’ing this Friday at XOYO (Shoreditch, London). When Andy Peyton took it over, maybe just over a year ago or something, he turned it into a proper club. Before, it was a good venue but they weren’t really sure about how to use the space. Now they’ve moved the bar and they’ve done really well by taking the promotions in-house. They seem to do really well every weekend.