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Funeral For A Friend.
 Variety: it's something that all great bands have, but one thing a lot of bands seem to not think about when making records - or even making a band in the first place. Not Funeral For A Friend though: as drummer Ryan Richards explains.
"I think differences, and difference of opinion is what makes our line up work so well," he states in that Welsh accent that all fans of the band have come to know and love. "There's a lot of bands around today who are in the scene who all inspire to be like a certain band, or maybe have the exact same favourite bands. We on the other hand are different characters, we have different musical tastes. Myself and Darran [Smith, guitar] and Kris [Coombs-Roberts, guitar] like the metal side of things; all that European metal and big hair thrash stuff. Matt [Davies, vocals] on the other hand is into the newer sort of punk stuff as well as old country and western kinds of things, Gareth [Davies, bass] tries to get us into more indie records and electronic records. So that's why we sound the way we do, it's all a mixture of everything. There's no one person steering the ship: we all get a say and get what we want out of it. It's a compromise, and sometimes it takes a lot to reach that compromise but somehow we make it all work."
And work it does. The band's debut album went gold, and second release 'Hours' gained them a seemingly infinite amount of fans and success that - amongst other things - brought them down to Australia for last year's Taste Of Chaos tour alongside bands such as The Used and Story Of The Year. "That was a great time," Richards enthuses. "We met so many great people, had so much fun. Australian fans are great: they give so much energy, and for the entire show. We just love it. It's strange to compare different fans around the world, now that we've been so many places.
"We've all been in bands before and done the whole months of touring, not really having anybody listening to you, putting out our own demos and stuff like that without really getting anywhere. Some bands do that as part of their own history, some bands who are making it now have recorded loads and loads of demos and done loads and loads of touring. We, on the other hand, have done our apprenticeship in other bands, so to speak. It's really rewarding for us to finally hit the right formula and chemistry in our band to give us the kind of success we've wanted. I mean, we're about to come down to Australia for a second time, and that's probably as far away from home as we can get!" Richards laughs.
Time on the road has taken its toll on the band though, with vocalist Matt Davies suffering from laryngitis earlier this year, meaning Funeral For A Friend had to cancel their headlining tour of the United Kingdom. "He wasn't in any real health danger but he wasn't able to sing at all, which was a bit of a problem," admits Richards. "But we've pushed back the writing and recording of our new album to make up on those shows we had to miss. All the dates we were going to do will be honoured, and we'll be doing a couple more on top of that now too, as a sort of apology to fans."
The situation was the first big speed bump in their otherwise faultless tour schedule, so it was a bit of an eye opener for the band. "There's not much you could do in that situation. Your other option is to just go out and do it anyway and risk doing even more damage to Matt's voice, so it's difficult to decide. You've really got to think about the long term. As soon as we knew we wouldn't be able to do the shows we made every effort we could to be able to make it up to the fans, to come back and do it again... If you were to have a guitarist, bass player or drummer sick it's not quite so bad. But I think if fans were to come and see us and we had someone else up front they'd feel cheated. We'd done something like that once a little while ago while we were on tour with Taking Back Sunday and Atreyu: Matt got sick so we had those guys come on for three songs each: we sort of had a karaoke, guest vocalist thing for a couple of shows. But that was just a one off thing, a last resort at the time. I'm sure our fans would've much rather seen us at our best, and all together."
Ryan Smith
 | dB Magazine proudly presents Funeral For A Friend at Thebarton Theatre on Wed 5 April with Fightstar, My Awesome Compilation and Behind Crimson Eyes. |
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