Interview: familyfriend.

A Nottingham-based DIY musician working in the realm of dreamy, eccentric bedroom pop and indie rock, familyfriend. is one to watch in our local scene. Hazy, psychedelic samples and synthesizers bring various eras of popular music into one beautiful amalgamation on his great debut album, the appropriately titled popculture., which is at once uniquely surreal and, crucially, extremely catchy. Liz Clarke caught up with familyfriend to discuss this album, music venues in Nottingham, Gorillaz, and why you should stay away from Nextdoor, amongst other things!

First of all, how would you describe your music to somebody who has never heard it before?

I’d say that it’s pop music, as made by somebody who has never heard of pop music before. Somebody who has heard of the elements of pop music but doesn’t know exactly what it sounds like.

I like that a lot! Your debut album, titled popculture., has just released. Where did the title come from?

I guess it came from the idea that “Pop culture” is such a universally understood idea: people kind of know what to expect if they see an album with it as a title, but also don’t. I quite like the whole postmodernist idea that everything is somehow a remix of something else at this point in culture, and I think that comes through on a lot of the album’s sound, in that it’s pop music that pulls from a little of everything and meshes a lot of different influences into one. The all-lowercase stylisation is to match my stage name, though, which I kept in lowercase and added a full stop to out of necessity: there’s another artist called Family Friend and I wanted to make sure people could still discern between the two of us, even after I knew I wanted that name.

I think the album cover fits that too, seeing as it has a little bit of a pop art or Andy Warhol vibe to it.

Definitely, and there are so many other good albums with four-square grid covers as well: Demon Days by Gorillaz, and Let it Be by The Beatles, are the first two that come to mind. It’s such an iconic format and for good reason, that it makes sense to go along with everything else, as I kind of wanted it all to be some level of pastiche

Two of the most conventional pop songs on the album, Hollywood and Kids of The New Generation, definitely feel linked to me, thematically and sonically, and they remind me a little of that idea.

They’re definitely linked for me too! Hollywood in particular came from my experiences of celebrity culture: my sister has always been quite invested in the likes of the Kardashians, and whilst I claim that I’m not, I still can’t really look away. It’s all so empty and vapid but there’s a definite allure to it, and even though the luxuries are so obviously unattainable to the average person, you can’t help but be slightly intrigued by how it all works. The lyrics largely came from my opinions on random celebrities, who I never consciously set out to learn anything about, who I ultimately cannot look away from even if I really wanted to because they're just everywhere.

Similarly, Kids of The New Generation is the political side of that, in that most of the lyrics are, intentionally, just buzzwords. So many politicians are currently just building their platforms on slogans, without any cohesive policy or plans to improve the world, and people are falling for it, so I decided to collage that into a song.

You know what that reminds me of? It’s bad enough that I’m reading these in the first place but… comments sections on the Facebook pages of local news websites. You’ll see a random city centre incident being reported on and half of the comments are just the week’s racist slogans somehow being repurposed.

Oh come on, you can’t go near those! I was thinking about Nextdoor as I was writing this, have you ever been on there?

I haven’t heard of that, what is it?

It’s just where all the NIMBYs congregate, a scary, scary place. They’ll post on it asking why there’s somebody new in the area who they don’t recognise and who looks a little different, and it’ll turn out it’s just the postman or something. Just goes to show how paranoid some people are, due to the rhetoric that politicians are empowered to spread. But the moral of the story is, you can’t mess with the NIMBYs!

Definitely one to keep in mind! When did you decide you wanted to make music?

I think I consciously started wanting to make music after watching My Chemical Romance at Reading in 2011. They looked and sounded so cool, and I guess I wanted to replicate that feeling that they were pulling something out of the ether: they were technically just some people on a stage with instruments, but because of what their music means to so many people and how they presented it, it wasn’t just music necessarily, but a major moment in peoples’ lives being spawned then and there. So at around that time I had a massive emo phase, and also really liked video game music. I had a Yamaha keyboard that I used to play around with and that was the beginning of me developing a style for the kind of music I might want to make.

This is admittedly a horrible question, but what would you say was the singular most important album in your life?

(with a confidence that I don’t normally get when I ask anybody this question) Not even just because we mentioned it earlier, I’d say it would honestly have to be Demon Days. It was one of the first albums I ever bought, and I remember listening to it over and over again when I was waiting in the car to pick my sister up from Brownies. I found a few tracks, particularly November Has Come and O Green World, to be a little creepy at the time, but I think that intrigued me to keep going back to it, the fact that it was somehow different.

It’s a great one. I also first heard it when I was quite young, and just loved the idea that they were a cartoon band in general.

Yes, the cartoon thing appealed to me too! I think particularly because I didn’t know who Damon Albarn or anybody else involved in it was at that time, there was another level of intrigue and anonymity, and it kind of opened up a whole other box of things that could exist alongside music and contribute to your experience of it. It felt like it really was a group of cartoon characters making the music.

Thinking about the songwriting and production process again, what have you learnt from being an entirely DIY solo artist?

I’d love to say that being totally independent was completely a decision made out of artistic principle, but in reality it’s more about practicality than anything. I’d been writing songs for so long that I just wanted them out there at this point, no matter what. But one thing about being a solo artist specifically is that you don’t have the same amount of eyes on you by default. In a band, you have four groups of friends, four families, all of whom have an opinion and some interest in what you’re doing. Meanwhile, I only have my friends and family, meaning both that there is more control and that you’re somewhat more reliant on finding opinions and suggestions from other avenues. I’ve similarly learnt that the internet is completely unreliable as a musician: there are hundreds of people online telling you what software you need, what instruments to buy, and the like. But you quickly learn to listen to your heart and not care about that. Sure, you could pirate a synth pack that will make you sound like Imogen Heap, but if that’s not sincere to you then it’ll show and you’ll feel it.

On a similar note, I noticed a lot of little samples throughout your album. One in particular that jumped out at me was a very low, distorted voice at the beginning and end of the track Black Book, which feels very eerie in the context of the song. Where did that come from?

That’s actually my mum’s voice! She rang whilst I was working on that song, and I just realised I could build it into the track somehow. There’s quite a lot of similar noise from my environment throughout the album to fill out the sound, just little sounds distorted and edited which add some different textures that are unique to the moment into the mix. That song itself is about disappointment, so having a voice that was edited to sound faintly disapproving definitely helped those themes to come across.

The internet is completely unreliable as a musician: there are hundreds of people online telling you what software you need, what instruments to buy, and the like. But you quickly learn to listen to your heart and not care about that. Sure, you could pirate a synth pack that will make you sound like Imogen Heap, but if that’s not sincere to you then it’ll show and you’ll feel it.

I first came across your music at Beat The Streets back in January, and your live performances also involve building up a lot of sound, using a laptop, a guitar and your voice often layered in the moment. Was this always how you planned to perform live?

Initially, my live performances were a lot more acoustic, a bit more of a singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley-esque vibe was what I was going for. But going back to the idea of authenticity, that just wasn’t what I wanted to do in practice. So I basically gave myself a kick up the arse and started doing what I really wanted to do, which was build the songs up in real time. 

Do you have a favourite Nottingham venue?

JT Soar, obviously! An amazing place with a real community. And also The Chameleon of course, RIP, that was amazing and I have so many good memories of it. John and Lauren who ran it used to have a Supernintendo which I managed to get given before it closed down.

Sadly I never visited The Chameleon, but JT is the absolute best: every time I go it feels like going home in a way, a truly special community-driven space. Do you have any final thoughts to leave us on?

Support your local venues! And get on board with my music now, because now that I have a full record out, I’m not stopping, I’ve got the bug and am hoping to release consistently and frequently now. 

Liz Clarke

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Photograph courtesy of Rae Dowling, album cover courtesy of familyfriend.

Edited by Liz Clarke