Review: Funeral For A Friend – Rescue Rooms – 27 March 2015

FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND are a band who have been around long enough to have out-lived the countless skin-tight jeaned, floppy-haired, identikit – or quite simply, shit – bands they inspired over a decade ago by now. It’s this that puts them in a better position than most to know when it’s time to start looking beyond life on the road.

Make no mistake, I speak with experience when I say that this is a band who gives you everything, whether they’re headlining a sold out arena to more than 4,000 people, or playing to a few hundred in a Rescue Rooms that, just two years ago, gave you no personal space whatsoever. Without that intensity they wouldn’t still be around today.

With a back catalogue spanning seven albums-worth of material, Funeral For A Friend, for the rest of it’s existence, will likely struggle to pick the perfect setlist – such was their popularity in the UK a decade ago. And so it’s the newer material taken from most recent LP ‘Chapter & Verse’ which catches the crowd flat-flooted the most during the evening. Opening with ‘Pencil Pusher’, a track which years ago could have been the perfect set-opener – now you sense those still turning up are mainly there for the opportunity to re-live their long lost youth.

This in itself is a shame though because if you can’t appreciate their newer material, it perhaps becomes lost how more dynamic, how much more intense the older material is given the addition of Gav and Rich from fellow south Walians Hondo Maclean. ‘Bend Your Arms To Look Like Wings’ and ‘Storytelling’ are each afforded a new lease of life, whilst ‘Juneau’ could be played by people picking up an instrument for the first time and you’d still draw the biggest singalong this side of 500 Miles in a karaoke bar.

Gav and Rich’s presence has added that heavier, almost competitive edge to the band. ‘The Distance’ and ‘Front Row Seats To The Edge Of The World’ each come off like the sound of a band pushing itself to it’s hardest to stay true to itself in evolving rather than living off it’s considerable past glories like it so easily could.

The scene kids may have grown up, moved away, possibly even had a child or two – but in the meantime Funeral For A Friend have carved out the reputation of a band the UK should continue to be proud of no matter it’s shift in professional, personal or political agendas. Yet you still feel that closing time draws near for a band largely unrecognisable from the height of it’s power and it’s a shame that so few were around on this night to witness it.

Ending the set with ‘Roses For The Dead’, it feels like the night has passed you by too soon already – much like the band’s career it might just appear.

Review by Stuart Brothers