Flight Brigade
Hurricane Season
From the forthcoming album 'Our Friends Our Enemies'.
Flight Brigade will release debut album ‘Our Friends Our Enemies’ on 14th October 2016. First single ‘Hurricane Season’ is available now.
Watch the video here:
Glam Glare; "Flight Brigade offer a big sweeping stunner of a song with “Hurricane Season”… the track grabs you from its very first beat, draws you into a whirlwind of instruments and voices and beautifully blends pop elements with edgier, rougher rock pieces into one gorgeous song."
Clash Music Mag; "The London via Hampshire collective have a direct, driving sound, one that bears comparison to Arcade Fire but also has the crunch of Twin Atlantic. New single 'Hurricane Season' boasts an orchestral swell, while the songwriting has a real punch to it."
Record of the Day; "…they knock it right out of the park again with this total barnstormer of a tune…This punchy, crunchy drivetime anthem is as solid as a rock. Simply incredible."
Think of Flight Brigade as a family as much as a seven-strong band and you start to understand the chemistry between them. Think of their songs as epic stories to which each member is essential and you begin to grasp what makes their music so powerful. Watch them perform and you can’t fail to be struck by the special bond they share.
Flight Brigade’s strength in numbers suits the scope of their songs, the ambition of their arrangements and the myriad of musical styles in their melting pot. The grand orchestral sweeps, the crunching anthemic guitars, the striking mix of male and female have brought Flight Brigade comparisons to Arcade Fire and Of Monsters and Men, other pop troupes who refused to compromise their size for the sake of their sound.
At the core of Flight Brigade is an actual family. Ollie and Miriam are married. Miriam and violinist and vocalist Dorry are sisters. The trio grew up in each other’s pockets, their parents best friends, their families part of a hippy commune in Hampshire. The other four members – bassist Tom Clay, guitarist Thomas Pink, keyboardist Jonny Barker and drummer Neil Blandford – were childhood friends who lived nearby.
Music runs in their blood. Miriam and Dorry’s parents were the folk duo Mask, who performed at the first Glastonbury Festival and spent the ‘70s on tour, supporting the likes of Hawkwind, Roxy Music, Paul Simon and Supertramp. Ollie’s dad often drove them to gigs in his camper van.
By 2013, Flight Brigade were gigging all over Britain, swapping shows with bands they befriended everywhere from Scotland to Bristol. The following year, they won competitions to play on the main stages at both Blissfields and Hop Farm festivals and, for the first time, all seven had room to move around. In 2015, having been named the Best Unsigned Band at Brighton’s The Great Escape. The summer saw them perform at 16 festivals, including Bestival and Glastonbury, where they played three sets. In November, they released their first EP proper, ‘Stealing Fire’, to rave reviews and radio play everywhere from 6 Music, Radio X and the BBC. Lead track ‘When We Were Young’ had its video premiere on Channel 4. IN 2016 Flight Brigade were named one of Time Out’s Rising Stars and commenced recording their debut album, ‘Our Friends Our Enemies’ at a studio in Eastbourne.
The magical ‘Dust & Glory’, fronted by Dorry, took its cue from a poem read out at the funeral of a friend. ‘Tearaway’ was about finding a soul mate as an outsider and the statuesque, astonishingly-arranged ‘Thick As Thieves’ was inspired by the real-life story of a baseball player told to Ollie by his brother Seth, who is responsible for Flight Brigade’s acclaimed videos. “It’s about a baseball player whose younger brother was great at analytics and knew by looking at the stats that if his brother pursued his baseball dream, he’d be incredibly successful,” says Ollie. “And he was. But the brother had depression and committed suicide.”
The album’s title track, which first appeared on ‘Stealing Fire’, has an equally intriguing tale. ‘Our Friends Our Enemies’ was inspired by a story about Czech factory workers forced to make bombs for the Nazis. Some risked their lives by neglecting to include detonators, so that when the bombs dropped, they didn’t explode.
“It was on a production line, in front of soldiers,” explains Miriam, “so it’s a story of bravery. One even put a note inside a bomb saying ‘this is all we can do for now’.
That Flight Brigade aren’t the sort to settle for simple love songs is no surprise. Their passion for performing, their desire to make music that moves those hear it and their ambition to share the community they’ve created with the world wouldn’t allow it.
“We make the music we want because we feel we don’t have a choice,” says Ollie. “For all of us, there’s nothing in the world we’d rather do and no one else we’d want to do it with.”
Live dates below:
28th Sept Coventry University
29th Sept Anglia Ruskin Cambridge University
5th Oct Clwb Ifor Bach Cardiff
6th Oct The Venue, Derby
7th Oct Cluny 2, Newcastle
8th Oct Twisterella Fest, Middlesbrough
9th Oct Electric Circus, Edinburgh
10th Oct King Tuts, Glasgow
12th Oct Castle, Manchester
13th Oct Bodega, Nottingham
15th Oct Trouble At Mill, Farsley
19th Oct Talking Heads, Southampton
20th Oct The Vic, Swindon
21st Oct The Cellar, Oxford
22nd Oct Crofters, Bristol
23rd Oct The Convent, Stroud
27th Oct Sebright, London
28th Oct The Hope, Brighton
29th Oct The Star Inn, Guildford
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