“Less phones, more hip shaking.”
Friendly Fired frontman Ed Macfarlane delivers the instruction midway through his band’s sold-out set at Elsewhere in Brooklyn – although, by this point, the hip-shaking part hardly needs encouragement. The phones, however, are proving slightly more stubborn. So, what’s a man to do but to take matters into his own hands?
That’s why, during Skeleton Boy, when Macfarlane heads out into the crowd and is immediately met by a wall of screens, he simply pushes several of them away from his face before carrying on with the important business of dancing.
If that’s not a way to live your life, we’re not entirely sure what is.
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Twenty-four hours earlier, Friendly Fires had been playing Madison Square Garden with Two Door Cinema Club.
Tonight, they’re squeezed into a sweaty Brooklyn basement, with Macfarlane throwing himself around within touching distance of the crowd and seemingly running the constant risk of cracking his head open on a (slightly worryingly) low-hanging pillar.
But if the intimate surroundings are bothering him, or the rest of the band, they don’t show it. After all, Friendly Fires have always made music for movement. Not the restrained nodding you might employ at the back of a gig with a pint in your hand: we’re talking proper, drunk-uncle-at-a-wedding, dignity-abandoning dancing.
And, nearly two decades into their career, there are still few bands better equipped for it. Macfarlane remains one of indie’s great frontmen, hips apparently operating independently from the rest of his body as he flings himself from one side of the stage to the other. Around him, percussion rattles, basslines thump and guitars dance their way through a set that rarely lets the band, or the audience, come up for air.
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The old songs, unsurprisingly, still absolutely bang.
Kiss Of Life is met like the classic it is, its opening rhythm enough to trigger another outbreak of increasingly questionable movement across the room.
And then there’s the small matter of Paris. There are some songs that become inseparable from a particular point in your life; ones capable of suddenly transporting you back to sticky dancefloors, badly-lit house parties and a time when staying out until 3am didn’t require several days of recovery. Paris is one of those songs; but tonight, it doesn’t feel remotely like a nostalgia piece. Live, the band give it a little extra muscle, and it seems to bounce from one wall of this tiny room to another. It’s bombastic, and maximalist, and utterly magnificent.
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And they’re not simply dining out on the old favourites.
New song Leap Of Faith arrives during the encore and, rather pleasingly, feels immediately at home amongst them. There’s no awkward new-song lull and no sudden migration towards the bar. Instead, there’s movement, and grooving, helped along the way by the fact that this new single has the same euphoric and energetic pulse running through it as the best of Friendly Fires’ back catalogue.
Or, to put it more succinctly: it’s a banger.
By the end, Elsewhere feels several degrees warmer than it did two hours earlier. Everyone is sweaty, everyone is smiling, and Macfarlane somehow still appears to have energy left. It was sweaty, intimate and never anything less than sublime, and a reminder of what Friendly Fires do better than almost anybody. It doesn’t matter whether they’re playing Madison Square Garden or risking concussion in a basement in Brooklyn – Friendly Fires are always indie’s ultimate party starters.
“Less phones, more hip shaking”, eh? Maybe the man’s onto something.
