Friendly Fires Second Album Details

Title: ‘Pala’
Studio: The Pool and The Basement, London. Band’s own studio, St Albans
Producer: Friendly Fires, Paul Epworth
Confirmed tracks: ‘Chimes’, ‘Blue Cassette’, ‘Hurting’
Due: Spring 2011
Label: XL Recordings

Hi Ed, how has recording ‘Pala’ been?

We started recording about 18 months ago in a little basement in Shoreditch called Assault & Battery. Things weren’t quite happening as smoothly as we wanted. I think there were just too many distractions, being in London, and we couldn’t focus. We write our best stuff when we’re secluded and away from everything. After a month we came back to St Albans and started recording in my garage. I also spent a month on my own in a cottage in northern France, just writing.

Where was the cottage?

It was not far from Rouen. It was right in the middle of the sticks. I was at least two miles away from any other house. It was good. I didn’t have any internet, any TV. I just had my mobile phone. I just wanted to be away and concentrate solely on the music. I came back and had two completely finished songs. One of them is in the running for being the single.

Did any of that experience overtly find its way onto the album?

Yeah. A lot of the themes deal with love, rejection, loneliness, all of those things. I suppose that when you’re on your own for the best part of a month, these feelings become exaggerated and distorted as you turn them over in your mind. You’re not distracted by anything else, you’re not talking to anyone else.

With all this in mind, you’ve not written a Bon Iver album have you?

No, no. To me, a lot of house and disco records, the majority of them deal with the themes of love. The lyrical style in house and disco – the directness and the honesty of the lyrics. With indie music you’re expected to be clever and witty with your lyrics; I’ve never found that appealing. I’ve liked that raw honesty and I think that’s what we’ve achieved with this record.

You took your time writing the first Friendly Fires album, and again you seem to have taken a while to write and record this one too.

Taking a long time was definitely a concern for me. A part of me was thinking, oh crap, we either run the risk of spending ages writing a record and people forgetting who we are, or we run the risk of rushing out a record just because we happen to be on people’s minds at the time. We wanted to deliver an album that was a really strong progression from where we were before. I really feel like this record’s done that.

How has the sound progressed?

I think that the production is much more ambitious. We wanted the starting point of every track to come from something interesting, rather than just ideas that were jammed out in the studio. We have a track on the record called ‘Blue Cassette’ which came from old dictaphone recordings that I had made when I was younger. I was listening to these old tapes, and I thought it would be great to take a little snippet of what I’d done and try and put it into a song.

Bonus Factoids:

During his time in France, Ed got addicted to foie gras.
He’s now worried that he’ll get gout.

“‘Blue Cassette’ is quite nostalgic. It’s about finding a cassette of you and a past lover messing around.”

Not sex sounds though (or so Ed says).

Ed really does like the Bee Gees.

Ed describes Ke$ha as “the beginning of the end”. LOLZ.