Funeral For A Friend

Not since Sophie Ellis Bextor's previous band The Audience brought song titles to the fore of Britpop have we seen a band with their hands equally grasping for the thesaurus as well as their guitars. The fact that Funeral For A Friend rock their emo Post-hardcore soundtrack with the best of them on the likes of "She Drove Me To Daytime Television" and "This Years Most Open Heartbreak". Designer Magazine caught up in the studio with bassist Gareth from Britain's most important new rock band.

Q: With the "Four Ways To Scream Your Name" Ep reaching out to a brand new audience I guess first of all it's best to ascertain where the band are coming from. Every time I read anything about Funeral For A Friend the various sub genre's of rock get mentioned from Emo to Post-hardcore. How would you describe the bands sound?
A: I don't really like to pigeonhole us so usually we just say were a rock band with metal and emotional overtones involved. Straight rock with an Iron Maiden riff behind it with Jimmy Eat World's harmonies is the one that usually seems to come out, but I think that is probably the closest you'll ever get to our sound.

But there's got to an amount of emo in every songs because it's someone's feelings - I think a Hundred Reasons said were not an emo band, every band is emo!!!
 

Q: They say you can never escape where you came from. How did growing up in Wales influence you?
A: In Wales there's basically 3 things you can do - play football, play rugby or play in a band...and we were all crap at sports so we played in a band. In terms of what we could go to watch it wasn't that bad at all because there were a lot of rock bands playing at Newport TJ's. Nirvana played there and Kurt Cobain proposed to Courtney Love in TJ's and in South Wales there is a lot of music culture that no-one seems to realize is there.

The only comparison we ever seem to get because were Welsh is the Lost Prophets and we don't mind that at all because they've done well for themselves. A lot of people would put there nose up to something like that, but we honestly don't mind the Welsh tag.

Q: Taking it back to the beginning again - where does the name come from?
A: It's an old Planes Mistaken For Stars song. For Matt it summed up the whole vibe of the band and he brought it to the table.
 

Q: The name of the band and the song titles such as "She Drove Me To Daytime Television" do stick out in people's minds. Where do they come from?
A: I don't know what it is, Matt really likes long song titles. We had one once that went "You Never Know When You're Going To Need A Good Getaway Plan" and it was just too long to say so we had to cut it down a little. He does read a lot and writes his lyrics and song titles down on his computer and he has enough songs to keep us going for the next 6 years.
 

Q: You're in the studio at the moment. What can we expect from the album?
A: There's going to be a lot of variance on the album, but for the people who have bought the 2 EP's there are still going to be things similar to that. There's going to be a piano track and maybe an acoustic track alongside the straight rock tracks. Colin Richardson (producer of "Four Ways To Scream Your name) is doing the album because we got on so well with him and he knew what sounds and feel we wanted on the tracks.

The whole writing process for a song can take up to two weeks because we each rip it apart in succession until were happy with it - the label turned round to us once and said we need a B-side and we just don't write B-sides. I don't think we could write a song and think that's not good for the album so we'll use that for a B-side - we'd be cheating ourselves if we did that.

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"Four Ways To Scream Your Name" is out on April 21st
The band play the Kerrang Weekend and Tour throughout April
For more info
www.funeralforafriend.com
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