BLAZING SQUABBLES

The Times
by John Mulvey
July 9, 2004

You thought Oasis could bicker? At least neither sleeps with the engineer. John Mulvey meets aptly named brother-and-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces

Matt and Eleanor Friedberger do not, it seems, like each other very much. When they were growing up in Chicago, the children of an English historian father and Greek-American mother, Eleanor (who’s now 27) would never bring friends over to the house because Matt (now 31) would be so horrible to her. “I was a little s***,” he admits. “I was at my smartest when I was 11, and I never really got any smarter.” He has no memories of Eleanor from his teens because, as she points out, she spent years avoiding him.

As adults, the Friedbergers initially enjoyed a polite, if fairly distant, relationship. Matt moved to New York and played in bands, Eleanor went travelling. Then, in 2000, the two of them surprisingly decided to form a band together. In the past year or so, that band — the Fiery Furnaces — have become one of the most eccentric and compelling acts around. You might have seen them recently supporting Franz Ferdinand: typically, their act involves playing some 30 songs, non-stop, in about the same number of minutes.

The songs evoke haunted fairgrounds, the incidental organ music at American sporting events, folk, garage rock, electropop, Captain Beefheart, nautical history and the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. It’s quite hard to categorise, not least because the Fiery Furnaces have a penchant for radically changing their tune every few seconds. That Matt and Eleanor can do this, while clearly annoying the hell out of each other, is something of a miracle. Today’s interview, 12 hours or so after their last show with Franz Ferdinand, resembles a fractious band meeting to which I’ve accidentally been invited.

For instance, they had a huge fight just before their first album (the marvellous Gallowsbird’s Bark) was released last year, because Matt wanted to change their names. “Matt is just embarrassed and doesn’t want to put his name in public,” she explains. “It’s all self-deprecating behaviour. I think: ‘Stop being a brat.’ We’re here playing music to all these people, we should be happy about everything instead of complaining.”

Are you more of a populist? I ask her tentatively.

“Well, compared to Matt.”

“Oh, what do you mean, populist?” he turns on her. “I’m very populist.”

“Matt’s the most critical person that I’ve ever met. He’s very distrusting. Immediately you say something, he takes it in the worst possible way. It’s comical, almost.”

Matt laughs, or rather snorts. “It’s not comical to me.”

“Your first instinct is to be negative about everything.”

“I don’t think it’s cynical,” he counters. “It’s just looking for the worst so you can find the truth . . . That doesn’t make any sense what I said, but it sounds fine.”

Matt Friedberger’s calling in life, it soon becomes apparent, is the pursuit of wilful perversity. While his sister is sardonic and quietly charming, if exasperated by her brother, Matt is animated, scheming, droll and entertainingly untrustworthy. The success of Gallowsbird’s Bark might have set up the Fiery Furnaces as the next big band out of New York, where they both currently live. As a follow-up, however, Matt has constructed a 76-minute concept album called Blueberry Boat, in which his beguiling tunes are cut up in pieces then rebuilt as a sprawling prog-pop concerto. It may well be a masterpiece, but it takes a good 20 listens to make any sense.

“Matt’s one of those people who doesn’t listen to a CD all the way through,” says Eleanor, explaining the impatient way that he has of starting and rapidly discarding great tunes. “He fast-forwards.”

“I never listen to the whole record, that’s for sure,” he says of Blueberry Boat. “It’s tiring.”

If the album makes for complicated listening, the recording of it last year sounds like a nightmare. Matt and Eleanor’s relationship had degenerated so badly that they could barely stand to be in a room together. Matt also enjoyed volatile dealings with the engineer, Nicholas Vernhes, who he thought was “messing up my record. I was a real pain to him.” Oh, and Vernhes was having an affair with Eleanor, which broke up halfway through the recording. “It was a complicated situation,” she says wryly.

There was, she continues, lots of screaming and crying. “Eleanor’s very bossy and anal,” says Matt, “and I’m very bossy and disorganised, so it’s a very bad combination.” After these horrible sessions, it’s a wonder that the band still exists. Stranger still is that they actually went back and recorded their fabulous new single — Single Again — with the hapless Vernhes. “I haven’t been talking to him,” says Eleanor guiltily.

More recently, the indie bush telegraph has been buzzing with stories about Eleanor stepping out with Franz Ferdinand’s urbane frontman, Alex Kapranos. At the mention of this, she smiles nervously and turns to her brother for help.

“Don’t look at me, Eleanor,” he says gleefully.

So are you a couple?

“Um, yeah, I feel stupid lying about it.”

How’s it been on tour with your boyfriend?

“It’s good because I never see her,” Matt grins.

“We get along fine,” she says.

“It’s funny, though, because for Eleanor it’s like she’s not on tour because of that. Because you have your life in order.”

“What do you mean?” she counters, amazed.

“I’m away from my routine and the people I hang out with.”

“But I don’t have a routine.”

“Yeah, so this is more normal for you now.”

“That’s true,” she concedes.

When they do return to New York, the Fiery Furnaces’ next project is — allegedly — an album of duets between Eleanor and their 81-year-old grandmother. “I think people will like it,” says Matt, though confusing his audience rather than pleasing them is more obviously his forte. “The songs are dialogues. Eleanor sings the young person’s hopes, and my grandmother sings the older person’s disappointments.”

It is hard to separate truth from invention in this irrepressible, wonderful, theatrically bickering band. Matt, especially, revels in telling stories that are just as magical and implausible as the yarns of blueberry-stealing pirates that make up his songs. “One day we’d like to play a lake in Finland, towards the Russian border,” he says, “when we do our Greek Orthodox Mass . . . No, we’re never going to write an Orthodox Mass.” And he pauses again, and there’s a slightly frightening glint in his eye that suggests anything is possible. “I hope.”