Interview with: Funeral For A Friend
by Jack Rawstone for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

The heavy metal world has always had its different factions. Now, though, the beast called emo has truly awoken and it is causing quite a rift. I sat down and had a chat with FFAF’s bassist Gareth Davis about their new album, the thought of becoming a celebrity and the state of the rock scene.


Jack Rawstone: Do you feel you’ve settled into music as your full time career and do you feel this is what it’s going to be like from now on?

Gareth Davis: I don’t think you can ever really settle into it to be honest, it’s such a fucked up industry. You know it’s all well and good for Kerrang! To turn around a year and a half ago and say Funeral For a Friend are the hottest band on the planet. That was just the most ridiculous statement I’ve ever heard and we’re well aware of that. Nobodies the hottest band on the planet, its fucking insanity when you think about it, there’s so many bands you can’t pinpoint that amount of praise onto one band, it’s impossible. A bands shelf life is three albums, we’ve just finished our second so unless things start going absolutely ape shit and we sell millions of records world wide you know it will be over pretty soon. I realise I’m not going to be in this for life, I’m well aware of that fact, and now I’ve got to start thinking of things that are going to occupy my time once this is over.

JR: When you were getting together as a band did you intentionally think, ‘I know I think we should put some more emotion into this music’ rather than just raucous metal?

GD: No, not really, coming from the EP’s it was weird because it was a completely different line up on the first one. During that period we lost a screamer and a drummer and I joined the band, so it was just a completely different line up with different chemistry. I suppose the only reason Four Ways To Scream Your Name actually had screaming on it was because we thought at the time we needed it to replace Mathew Evans who had left the band. When it came to record Casually Dressed and Deep in Conversation, I mean that’s still an absolute cluster fuck of a record for us because we were young, naive, still writing the songs before we went in the studio and that’s not cool, especially the way we write songs. Usually we’ll write something and sit on it for two months, keep playing it over and over and we’ll either say ‘this is working’ or it isn’t. With Casually Dressed… the record was out before we actually had a chance to sit down and think ‘right that has to change’, hence the reason for all the tracks off the EP’s being on there, it was such a head fuck for us. Where as with this record [Hours] it’s clean and it’s fresh and its how we want it to sound, this is it, this is how we sound. We always knew we were going to write the record like this. We always said after Casually Dressed was finished ‘this is fucked like’ we’re in a really shitty situation here. We were sick of going on forums and seeing people saying ‘arh funeral for a friend are alright’… when people listen to your music you want a reaction, either fuckin’ love it or hate it this is who we are and that is what Hours is. We sat down with the record and were like this is it, there’s no fucking middle ground any more, and it has divided a lot of people.

JR: I was going to ask, after the success of the first one did you feel under any pressure to deliver with Hours?

GD: Not at all man, Casually Dressed was more of a head fuck than this one. You know when you’re doing the second record and it’s supposed to be the ‘difficult second record’ because you’ve written it in no time at all, well we did that with our debut. We had 2 EP’s then the album, like that, and we were like ‘this is moving a little bit quick’. This record was a piece of cake, everything was so much easier because we were comfortable with each other and everything was there, it just made sense.

JR: Was going to Seattle a conscious choice, it being the birth place of the grunge scene and that being similar to emo?

GD: No, not really, I mean it was all to do with Terry Date that was. It’s where he lives, he knows his studios, he’s comfortable and he said ‘I know if you guys come here I can get you the sound you want’ so that was the main reason we went there. We argued blind with the label, they were like ‘oh we’ll send you to LA’ and we said we didn’t want to fucking go to LA, if we go to LA we’re going to be out in the sun all the time and it will have a totally different vibe. We really wanted to be able to focus on the record so when going to Seattle we thought, right the weather will be shit and the vibe will be great, you’re an hour away from the desert, snow and water so it was fucking great.

JR: I was reading that during the recording process Terry was doing weird stuff to get the right sound like getting Matt singing in cars and stuff, did you feel okay with that or did you not want to take that risk on the second album?

GD: No, it was fine, the majority of the experimenting stuff was with Matt’s vocals and finding Matt’s comfort zone. Usually in the past when Matt was recording vocals he’d be in front of a microphone with a pair of headphones on and he wasn’t finding in comfort spot so he wasn’t performing as well as he could. So initially Terry turned to Matt and said, ‘where are you most comfortable singing, where do you sing every day?’ and Matt said ‘when I’m at home in my car’ so Terry thought that was perfect. He wired the sound of the desk straight into the car stereo and he sat in the car singing. All the noises before the track Drive are actually Terry starting the recording early. It was live and he was comfortable, in fact the rest of the tracks were recording as if Matt was live, he had two set monitors, an SM58 which is a stage microphone not a studio microphone and that was that he was jumping off monitors and singing as if he was live.

JR: And you were happy with how that turned out?

GD: Yeah totally, because Matt was comfortable he gave a better performance. A lot of people have said Matt’s voice sounds a lot richer on this record and that’s because the whole record was really recorded live and he was totally comfortable.

JR: Are you guys as a band at all worried or perhaps excited about becoming a celebrity type band like the Lostprophets did? Does the prospect of that scare you at all?

GD: Yeah completely. Three of us are married, two have long term girl friends so that kind of throws the celebrity girlfriend thing out the window. I mean we were just talking about this the other day you know we love our fans to pieces, they’ve been fucking incredible to us, but we’ve been away for a year and it’s just weird for a band to come back. This time last year we’d have maybe three or four kids upfront when we arrived in the morning now, a year later, we haven’t toured the UK for a year, we come back and there’s like 50 kids, it’s a bit fucking frightening. I first kind of realised when we were coming into Glasgow and I was woke up at 8:30 in the morning by people banging on the side of the bus, and I thought ‘this is fucking scary’. You know it’s weird for me because I don’t see myself as anybody except a ‘boy from the valleys’ that joined a band wrote a couple of songs and its all gone crazy. A lot people say ‘oh well you fucking signed up for it’ and I’m like I didn’t really I signed up for practicing on Sunday and maybe a gig in the week (laughs) and it all kind of escalated from there. You know I’m really glad it has but some fans can cross the border, there is a line between fans and friendship. Because fans read about you all the time and they feel they know you so well they think they’re a friend of yours, so it’s quite weird. For it to get any bigger, that would fucking eat me, it would seriously get me, I’ll become a recluse I will (laughs). But I do love our fans I must say.

JR: As a band do you guys classify yourselves at all and if you did would you go towards metal or emo?

GD: I don’t really care for classifications because I like to think there’s more to us than just one particular genre. On Hours particularly, Seven, one of the later tracks is very different and so is History it’s more anthem really. I wouldn’t like to pin us down as a metal band or an emo band really I like to think of us as a rock band because I like to think we can cover all different directions rather than just those two styles. Although we do drift into them every so often.

JR: There seems to be a lot of emo bands coming from south Wales are you guys a little more tender coming from down there or something?

GD: Yeah, I dunno, there’s always been a really good scene in south Wales but its only since recently people have been paying attention to it, especially since Lostprophets. People forget that in the mid 90’s there was the big indie wave with the Manics, Stereophonics, Catatonia there was all those bands, now all of a sudden there’s all of these rock bands and people are like ‘where did this come from’ well, we’ve always been here just nobody gave a fuck until recently. But I don’t know where we fit in amongst it all, I mean Lostprophets are moving away from the heavier side of things and you know that’s cool, that’s their choice, it’s a natural thing for every band to change, and if you want longevity to a certain extent I suppose you have to. A lot of people were like to us ‘why didn’t you write an album more like Casually Dressed?’ and our answer was ‘I’ve heard Casually Dressed and I didn’t like it so we wrote something better’. It really is swings and roundabouts.

JR: Do you feel as rock and metal has become more and more popular over recent years do you think it’s lost a bit of its soul in some respects?

GD: I think in some respects due to people jumping on band wagons people are getting sick of it. People have suddenly seen a certain genre of music is cool and have gone ‘fuck it we need to change our style to sell more’ and I’ve seen it with a couple of bands and its like, why are you doing that you were better when you were doing what you wanted to do. You know when unsigned bands start changing their ideals of song writing because a certain genre’s popular to get signed then that’s not cool. They think ‘oh this music’s massive at the moment labels are looking for it’ and it’s wrong because it’s already massive labels are looking for the next big thing. So to a certain extent, yes it is getting washed out but on the other hand the people who were doing it originally are the ones who will carry on doing it, they’ll come through it.

JR: It seems there’s an air of seriousness about your music these days, obviously you still find time for having fun on tour etc?

GD: Oh of course yeah, touring is still a good laugh, especially when you bring local lads like Bullet For My Valentine, it’s wicked having a Welsh band around. I mean as cool as it is having an American band around with you, you have to slow your speech down for them, with the Bullet For My Valentine boys you can talk as fast as you like and mumble to them and they know exactly what you’re on about. But yeah, touring is always fun you know I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t enjoying it.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Interview+with%3A+Funeral+For+A+Friend/