New Lease On Life

"We got back from Russia yesterday,” The affable frontman says in his deep Welsh accent. “It was bloody freezing, but the shows were very warm. We hadn't been there since 2007 so it was kind of nice to get back there and still have a connection with the fans, and also to make some new friends.”

According to Matthew Davies, since album number six dropped at the start of this year, Funeral For A Friend have been loving the experience of getting out on the road, playing sweaty shows in intimate venues, the kind that their recent Russian jaunt was made up of. “That's where our heart lies, and that's still the driving force behind getting out there on these hardcore tours. Being able to get in people's faces and doing that – it's still really exciting for us.”

“We've really enjoyed getting back into the live arena,” he continues. “For most of the last year we were eagerly anticipating getting back into that mode. We finished the record around the middle of last year, and then we played a few shows here and there, but we were keeping activity to a real minimum, but to get back into the swing of things and to start touring properly was very exciting. We grabbed hold of all the touring opportunities that were coming our way, and so far it's been [going] really well. The UK tour that we did at the start of the year was really awesome – for me personally it felt like one of the highlights of the last five or six years of UK tours because it felt like we were able to make a genuine reconnection with our fans, because we were playing those really intimate venues where we could get up close and personal – no barriers, everybody sharing the mic – back to the old school days.”

Davies goes on to explain how album number six, Conduit, was a, well, conduit, for Funeral For A Friend to return to those old school days of the band.

“It was us trying to write songs that made us feel the same way that the songs that we wrote when we first started this band made us feel, the singer says. “The songs on Conduit made us sit up and take notice, and really make us feel something. When we were writing the album we were talking about the bands that we loved growing up and the bands that inspired us, and then it became this whole idea to reclaim this thing that people over the years had come to say that we'd maybe slipped away from or something. But we thought that place where we started at was really where our heart was, and also where our strengths were.”

Conduit is a record that is a perfect fit with Funeral For A Friend's return to the realm of the sweaty hardcore show. Ahead of the five-piece's return to Australia with a run of club dates, Davies explains how the album marries so well with what the band want to do live.

“This album has definitely got a little more intensity live,” he says. “It's faster, it's more punky and hardcore than it is on the record. And it's looser. I'm not saying that there's a lack of professionalism, but there's not a sense of theatre or whatever a lot of rock bands do; we just get up onstage, plug in and start playing. There's no 'Woah, this is us. Look at us. Adore us, we're Funeral For A Friend, worship us', y'know? We just get on the stage and try and get people to sing along and get up and grab the mic, to really show and share how passionate they feel about sharing their emotions with us.”

Those kind of shows are critical to the Funeral For A Friend experience, Davies believes. It's something inherent in the band's personality, etched into their collective psyche from all the time they spent in the rock clubs as kids. 

“I used to go to hardcore and punk shows two or three times a week,” the frontman recalls. “That's really how all the guys in the band got together in the first place, and that's put something into our DNA, and as everything's gotten bigger over the years I think we've really started to readdress what we want out of this band. More so than ever, it feels like we need to get back to the core of that, the heart of that. Because I think these days people experience music as it's filtered through computers and [there's] this false sense of perfection, but when I used to go to shows, whether the singer of the band would sing every note to perfection or not didn't matter, it was about the passion, it was about the heart, it was about the integrity. And that's what we've done a pretty good job over the last two years about putting out there. Music as it's meant to be played and presented; full of passion and heart.”

While Funeral For A Friend's live show never lost its passion and heart, as the band progressed, encountering substantial success on albums like Hours and Tales Don't Tell Themselves, they naturally began to push their sound in different directions. The move introduced the band to a whole new fanbase. Davies calls the music they were playing at the time “big arse arena rock”, but it did see Funeral For A Friend get distracted from what they primarily wanted to do as a band.

“There was a push and pull of different personalities that became apparent as the years [went on]. It wasn't really so much an issue for those first two records, because the main writers on those first two [albums] was myself and Chris, and Chris could come up with the bare structures for songs, I'd put my lyrics on them and then everyone else would put their bit into it. But when we reached semi-burnout, we started to let other members of the band into the writing process and then it became apparent that not everybody may have been on the same page.

“It was confusing for myself and Chris; we just kind of went with it to see what would happen, and now looking back on the third and fourth records we did, actually when we started this band we didn't think in a million years that we'd make records like that… Not that we regret what we did with those records, but definitely those decisions led us to where we are now and we feel the most content now than we ever have as a band. I feel we slipped away from initially what I wanted from this band when we started when we did those records, and now I'm happy to say that we're back on track. I think we're able to be ourselves, for the first time in a long time.”

Funeral For A Friend will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 8 May - The Rev, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 9 May - Surfers Paradise Beer Garden, Gold Coast QLD
Friday 10 May - The Cambridge, Newcastle NSW
Saturday 11 May - Manning Bar, Sydney NSW
Sunday 12 May - The Basement, Canberra ACT
Tuesday 14 May - The Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC 
Wednesday 15 May - Pier Live, Frankston VIC
Thursday 16 May - Fowlers Live, Adelaide SA
Friday 17 May - Amplifier Bar, Perth WA
Saturday 18 May - Prince Of Wales, Bunbury WA