Friendly Fires

St. Albans' three-piece Friendly Fires popped up in an NME feature a month or two ago alongside Enter Shikari, under the title 'How St.Albans went day-glo'. Tenuous, as other than geographically, they're about as far removed from the trance-core screamo sirens as the pair of them are from the 'day-glo' of New Rave, which no one even talks about any more, so really what on earth was that article up to?

The punk-funk troop sound more like a New York garage band with a few richly picked electronics, like The Rapture if they were still a bunch of wide-eyed kids with bulging boners to be satisfied.

In the dressing room beforehand they spurn the various media types that come and go for their attention, a girl with a video camera making a frustratingly T4-esque video diary of the evening, a man explaining how he films and records DVDs and what he can do for them. A knob journalist asking them about their background when all they want to do is hang out with their girlfriends (that's me by the way). But from all this, it's clear that they must have something going for them.

Up on stage in front of drunk crowd of London hipsters out to party on a Friday night, Friendly Fires overcome the strains of playing this relatively large venue for a band this new and rip through a clean half hour of beat-heavy, discoball sprinkled dance glory. With tempered cool, frontman Ed greets the crowd by throwing out a bale of confetti, before they play out ace floor-filler 'On Board' and everyone hip-wiggles and wails. A bevvy of girls down the front clearly love what they're seeing, and make several attempts to get up on stage. The bouncer thwarts most of their attempts, but they do finally make it up during the last song, much to the amusement of the band.

Lead singer Ed gets down to the front of the crowd to sing and play woodblock. A daring punter grabs his instrument and runs off with it - not even the bouncer manages to catch this suspect Pete D lookalike. Ed doesn't mind too much, and the show goes on. 'Your Love' sounds like it samples Candi Staton & The Source, and is great fun to dance to. Everyone seems to be having a great time. They're short of a few proper anthems yet, but for a band this early in their career, by joseph they could be doing a hell of a lot worse. By the looks of things the people in the crowd seem more than content - hey, they came for a good night out, Friendly Fires gave it to them.

FUTURE GIGS

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