CityLife

Furnaces' fired up work ethic

The Fiery Furnaces in a rare moment of relaxation

OBSERVE the way The Beatles have been martyred this month for a sterling work ethic that resulted in five studio albums inside three years, and you’d be forgiven for believing that the days of hard working bands are dead.

Not so. Study the release history of New York brother and sister duo The Fiery Furnaces and you’re certain to change your mind, because the statistics square up nicely: seven studio albums in six years, one live record, two solo LPs, plus the one thing The Beatles couldn’t do – worldwide tours to support them all.

Far from adopting a look of smug acknowledgement, though, Eleanor Friedberger – the ‘sister’ part of the duo and the band’s frontwoman and guitarist – says they could do more.

“I look around and see other musicians who are much busier than we are,” she laughs.

“This is our job; most people have to work from nine to five every day, I don’t even know if my hours add up to that. I think if we had our own studio we’d work much more.”

And much more is what they’re planning. Eleanor and brother Matt tour their new album, I’m Going Away, in the UK next month, stopping in at the Night & Day on October 6.

But first they’ve a personal summons to keep, dragged across the Pond by Guy Garvey for a support slot with Elbow at the M.E.N. Arena on Friday.

“I guess we knew Guy had been a fan of the band for quite a while,” Eleanor remembers

“They’d asked us to do a support show in the UK in the past that we couldn’t do, mostly for money reasons, and one in the US. We couldn’t do that, but it just kept popping up.

“We’re thrilled to finally get to do it,” Eleanor smiles. “We changed our flights so we could come over early – it was too great and fun an opportunity to pass up to play in front of so many people.

"And there’s the fact that Elbow just keep asking us! They’ve been so supportive – they helped cover the costs of changing our plane tickets. But it’s crazy; we’ve never played close to that many people.

“It’s going to be interesting… terrifying, maybe?

“We haven’t toured Britain for two years and last time at the Night & Day was the highlight of the UK trip. We’ve had such huge support from (former member of The Fall and BBC DJ) Mark Riley, it’s been overwhelming. We’ve always had a good time in Manchester.”

The Furnaces – a heady mix of Captain Beefheart-like arrangements, Os Mutantes experimentalism, beats that make The Fall sound tinny and a lyrical playfulness that would earn them a pat on the back from David Byrne – are well known for their healthy disrespect for song structure and for setlists. So what are Eleanor and Matt planning for the Elbow crowd?

Great rock band

“We’ve been playing very straight-forward lately. I think for some people it will still sound crazy but for us it’s very straight forward; we’re playing songs, and we’ve changed some arrangements. I hope we just sound like a great rock band.”

A sign of the band mellowing? Perhaps. But even as their approach takes a more conservative turn, they’ve found a way to turn convention on its head.

The most intriguing of these are two projects billed as The Fiery Furnaces Cover The Fiery Furnaces and The Silent Album.

“When Matt writes a song, I’ll try to work it out on guitar and end up not being able to work it out at all and making a new song that way,” explains Eleanor.

“So, for a long time I’ve been wanting to do a sort of traditional folk record – ‘Eleanor Friedberger sings the songs of The Fiery Furnaces’, as if I hadn’t sung them already.

“Any song has a million different lives and we’re not so precious about our songs that there’s only one way to play it. Matt and I have the same approach – we love rearranging songs. It’s great to breathe new life into them.”

Eleanor continues: “The Silent Album is a songbook of mostly sheet music and some non-traditional music notation and lyrics. The idea is that we’d like other people to record the music and by the middle of next year have a series of shows we curate where fan bands play the songs from the book.”

A third project, Democ-Rock, encouraged fans to get involved in decisions about the band’s next studio album. “We were trying to think of ways to include people and writing on our website doesn’t come to us naturally,” Eleanor muses.

“We’re just old enough to have bought records because we read about them in a magazine and this new technology still seems a bit foreign to us.

“We were trying to find ways to communicate to people that use our website that all this is actually about music and not about what I ate for breakfast this morning.

“We started out by asking people to vote on what our next record should sound like and during the primaries we asked people to vote for songs on the setlist and hand up a piece of paper to the stage – we turned the stage into a giant ballot box. 

“That translated into people giving us whatever was in their purses or wallets; people were handing up notes from their psychiatrists, and we’ve written a bunch of songs about that stuff. There were some personal things, I was surprised.”

It’s all part of the band’s plan to motivate the cultural left. “In this country, it seems that the cultural right has a real advantage over the left because they can organise themselves much better – the people who are pro-NRA or pro-life, they really rally themselves.

“After Barack Obama was elected, it seems all the young people and my peers just stopped volunteering and there seemed to be no more conversation, at all.

“We called our last shows Health Care Reform rallies to remind people there’s still a lot to do. We weren’t preaching from the stage but we thought it was just one little thing we could do to draw attention to the inequality.

“It’s just about adding a little cultural relevance to these tiny things we do, playing music in a small bar. There’s more to talk about than, ‘Where d’ya get your shoes?’."

The Fiery Furnaces support Elbow at the M.E.N. Arena on Friday, September 18 and play a solo show at the Night & Day on October 6. Tickets: £8.50. Call 0161 832 1111.