“It’s difficult to get over that initial ‘we were at Uni together’ with so many bands playing shitty little gigs and the only people turning up being your mates like ‘can I get on the cheap list?’ It takes so long to get away from that and actually build a fanbase.”
Even while relaxing in their plush tour van that’s ready to whisk them away to yet another festival date, Fickle Friends are in a combative mood. Despite the band beginning whilst at BIMM, and still being based in Brighton, they maintain that their desire to break away from their hometown has led to their London shows feeling more like a homecoming, though they perhaps wisely omit that from their onstage chatter later in the day.
It’s been two years since the band self-released Swim, sending music industry hacks and teenage blogsters into hype and rapture of equal measure. The band confess the initial success may have come too soon, with vocalist Natassja revealing “[Swim] was the first song that we’d written where we thought ‘this is actually really good, this is the direction we want to go in’. The week we released it we played a show in London and the whole music industry was there, and we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing, the rest of the set was fucking dreadful!”
One success to emerge from that fateful night in the capital was the band acquiring a booking agent, who “might have seen something amongst the crap”, and who subsequently filled their diaries, resulting in the band playing over 50 festival sets over two years. It’s been a highly formative time for the band, who have developed and rounded their sound to become a highly accomplished live proposition, and been picked up by major label Polydor in the process.
Though “it’s been fragmented” recording their debut album in LA, with the band travelling transatlantic almost monthly, the experience has largely been a positive one for the band, who are aiming to see it’s release in time for next year’s festival season. Judging by latest effort Cry Baby, whose disco-infused beat and ever-so-slightly-deranged video is beginning to gain major recognition, Fickle Friends could well be providing the sound to many summers yet to come.
