Ahead of a sold out show at The Platform, Natti Shiner of the Brighton-based indie pop band Fickle Friends chats to The Linc about their debut album, small music venues and the band’s love of palm trees.
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“It’s kinda random to be playing in Lincoln on the day of our album release, but we’re pretty excited, it’s sold out, it’s gonna be really, really good,” says Natti, the lead singer of the Fickle Friends who take to the stage in the city this evening.
Their debut album, You Are Someone Else, follows on from their EP Glue which came out in August last year. With the singer saying the 16-track album is mostly about ‘the feeling that you don’t fit in your own life’, there’s no doubt that it’s a personal record.
“Everything’s super personal,” Natti says. “It’s never writing in any other way. Brooklyn itself is about the feeling of anxiety. It’s not the most prominent thing throughout the whole record, but it’s definitely touched upon a couple of times, especially in Hard to Be Myself as well.
“So I think writing about it and putting it in music kind of makes it more of a universally heard issue that people feel a little bit more open to talking about.”
Such a personal tone is also radiated in their live shows. With a host of smaller venues on their list of gigs, a Fickle Friends concert certainly has an intimate vibe about it. It’s no surprise then that the band are patrons of the Music Venue Trust – a charity which supports independent UK venues.
“I can’t describe the importance of still having them around because for acts starting out and breaking out just kind of doing their first few tours, you need venues like that,” Natti explains. “You need people coming to those shows, you can’t jump in the deep in the end – you can’t go and play Kentish Town Forum straight after that. You have to play the Camden Assembly, you know, or Lincoln’s Platform before you play The Engine Shed.”
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But it’s not just the intimacy when it comes to a Fickle Friends gig – there’s also palm trees.
“We just love ’em!” Natti says when she explains why the plants make an appearance on set. “I don’t know, you just see the Fickle Friends aesthetic, it’s pretty throwback, it’s pretty Miami Vice and spending all that time in LA that I spoke about. We just f**king love palm trees,” she laughs.
With parts of the album being made in Los Angeles, Airbnb’s and band member Jack’s bedroom, Natti says the album’s been ‘all over the place’ and that they’ve done a lot of it themselves.
“We went out to LA to record the whole thing, and then we ended up writing a whole another album whilst we were out there, and came back to the UK and we’re like ‘sh**, we have all this music and find some way of recording it’, but we’ve spent the whole recording budget so everyone’s been pulling their weight,” she explains.
Now, as Fickle Friends prepare to party at The Platform, it won’t be long before people ask what’s next from the five-piece band from Brighton – and Natti says they’ve already started writing.
“I think what we’re going to do is add to the album, maybe?” she says. “We started writing for the second one, but it’s just the way that Spotify and streaming services are, we might add a couple of songs to the record in a few months’ time.”
You Are Someone Else is available now on cassette, vinyl, CD and digital download.