Favours for Sailors
Words by Dan Jude
If you choose to pay heed to the music press, you’ll know that all-male guitar-led indie music is ‘dead’. 2009, according to the muso intelligentsia, is the year of the electro-pop female. So it’s out with Johnny Borrellites in spray-on skinny jeans, and in with quirky buxom damsels on synths. Favours For Sailors couldn’t agree more. “Things come in waves”, says Jon Crawford, singer/guitarist. “For the past four years there have been loads of four-lad, cockney, shouting bands which have been naff. It’s time for a change.”
Jon, it seems, is in the midst of an identity crisis. His band, Favours For Sailors, are a four-piece, all male, guitar band. Who shout. And are cockneys. Despite this, he doesn’t appear to be too worried. “It just means we have to be better”, he declares cocksurely. “And if that doesn’t work, well, I know a good plastic surgeon.”
Thankfully, FFS don’t look like they’ll need constructive vaginal surgery any time soon. With a mini-album just released that is already garnering near-unanimous critical commendation, it seems that they might just be able to buck the trend and strike back on behalf of shouty bloke-bands across the capital.
Getting to this stage hasn’t come easily though; not only have FFS been plagued by destitution, poverty and quasi-alcoholism (the three not being entirely unrelated); they’ve also had multiple line-up changes – one particularly controversial revision the result of ex-drummer Metin’s impromptu elopement with bassist Alex’s sister. As well as numerous personnel modifications, FFS have gone through their fair share of genre metamorphoses, and after starting out as post-hardcore screamsters, they spent some time in the nether regions of math-rock experimentalism before eventually settling upon the far more radio (and ear)-friendly classification of “indie-rock, with a healthy dose of pop”.
There are still notable traces of their hardcore roots on debut mini-album Furious Sons; “BA-BOOM” Jon wails on opener Erode My Empire; his howling eruption perhaps a nod to their earlier days, before the track breaks into an anthemic power-pop chorus. But unlike so many of their contemporaries, the quality is then sustained for the duration of the album, something Jon is acutely aware of. “A lot of new bands are pretty shit with only one good song…and obviously we’re not like that”, he declares.
Although the sublimely confident Crawford has evidently been (mis)educated at the Pritchard/Borrell school for haughty boys, there is enough substance to back up his hubristic convictions. Thunderous guitars, anthemic melodies and insanely catchy stadium-sized choruses combine to make truly great power-pop. Throw into the mix incisive, droll Turner-esque lyrics and you’ve got pretty much the full package. As Crawford foresees how his personal ecological Armageddon might unfold, he comes across as a modern-day Ray Davies, imagining how: “Empires erode from the coastline in / and I’ll be left in the square metre in the middle / probably in Nottingham.”
Such nonchalance is symptomatic of FFS’s laid-back attitude to making music, as evidenced by the placing of Becks (the beer) ahead of Beck (the alt-rock musician) in a list of influences. “We drink Becks all the time, so it kind of makes sense. It’s just so nice out of a can; so cold and refreshing.” Like beer, like musical attitude; fuck Bono-style self-fellatory delusions of global salvation – FFS just want to “get drunk and play music”, recognising that “it’s a bit silly to always want to save the world.”
Their unwillingness to take themselves too seriously is mirrored in their live performances, for which Jon promises they will be “either drunk or incredibly hungover”. But whilst there isn’t, generally speaking, much cross-over in the Venn diagram for ‘beery all-bloke power-pop acts’ and ‘talented musicians you’d actually like to listen to for more than five minutes’, don’t let their love of the bottle put you off. They might not have too ambitious expectations for themselves, with Jon predicting that in five years they’ll “probably have reverted back to drinking cans of Becks in the park”, but on the back of their initial offering, we think it’ll be plain sailing from hereon in.
http://www.myspace.com/favours4sailors
Posted Fri, April 03, 2009