Funeral for a Friend - London Kentish Town Forum, May 21st 2016Here is a tale of what was simultaneously the best and most heartbreaking concert I've attended in my life. Forgive the emo-ness of it all. It was traumatic. This is also long as shit and quite dramatic, but hopefully someone will read it. I think I just needed to write it all out. It was surprisingly tough to deal with and I hope this captures even just a little of what this band means to me.
A bit of background: Funeral for a Friend, who I can see I mentioned in this very thread a few years ago, are a band that always have and always will hold a special place in my heart. I think everyone has that one act that resonates with them more than any other they've ever experienced, and they were mine. I first heard them way way back in 2002, when I was 14 years old. In the years preceding, most of what I had been listening to had been pop-punk, which I had discovered as "my own genre" after being brought up listening to Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest etc. But you know how it is as a 14-year old, when you get all angsty and sad and emo and shit. Pop-punk's too happy for that phase. Out of seemingly nowhere, however, came this little Welsh band, Funeral for a Friend, straight out of the valleys with their aggressive, emotional post-hardcore gem, This Year's Most Open Heartbreak.
It was a breath of fresh air to hear a British band doing something that was so different and so progressive. The fact it resonated with me so much at that age was massive, and I immediately felt a connection with this band of five guys from just a few hours away from me. Over the next four years, they would bring out two massive albums, Casually Dressed and Deep in Conversation (2003) and Hours (2005), and play various UK shows that made them not only one of my favourite bands, but also the most influential. They were the band that inspired me to branch out and try listening to heavier stuff in my teenage years, and even though I don't listen to that style of music as much as I used to, I like to think that the changes in style that Funeral have gone through in their 15 years has also been an influence in my own desire to always be seeking out different types of music across all genres without restricting myself. That all came down, in my eyes, to that wonderful few years where they were the most important band in the world to me.
Over the years, I admit that I kinda lost this feeling a bit with the band. As I listened to heavier genres of music around the age of 18/19, they were starting to drift away from their own hardcore influences and towards a softer type of rock. To say we drifted apart is probably a fair assessment of that time, but I feel like I sort of took them for granted as well. This band had released what to this day are still my two favourite albums of all time, and then they just sort of faded from my consciousness, or at least anything new they were doing did. I rediscovered them some years later when I just so happened to make friends with someone at work who was a massive fan of theirs, and even though I never really got into the middle albums they did, I started going back to their shows and really appreciating them again. In later years, they would go on to release some wonderful albums again, and by the time I got to my mid 20s, they had once again become a prominent part, probably the biggest part, of my musical life again. I moved far from home in 2011, and since then the majority of friends I've made have shared my love for this band, and it's become a major part of how and why I made new friends, even many years after I first heard them, which I think shows just how important they've been to me. It seems like a daft thing to say, but over the years on here, I've had a million and seven FCs. Never once did I claim Funeral though, because I would never be able to do justice to their quite wonderful Welsh faces with my RPs.
Anyway, it all changed again towards the tail end of last year. There I was, October 2015, enjoying life, 27 years old and 13 years on from when this band first became a big part of my life, when the bombshell news hit; Funeral for a Friend were to embark on a farewell tour of the world in April and May 2016, and then it's over, done forever. It was quite hard to read, because you always just assume that your favourite bands will last forever. Apparently not. The cushion to the blow was the fact that they would play two shows in each city, one playing their second album Hours, and the second playing their debut masterpiece Casually Dressed and Deep in Conversation, both in their respective entirety. I immediately bought tickets for both nights in Manchester and the second date in London, which was set to be Funeral for a Friend's last ever show. It was too important to miss. The last few months of Funeral came and went with relative pace, as months tend to do, and I eventually attended the two shows in Manchester, which were both bloody excellent. But still, nothing was quite going to be as emotional and important to me, and most Funeral fans, as that night in London on May 21st.
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So there we were in London, stood inside a sold out Kentish Town Forum, 14 years after I had first heard the band as a 14 year old. This was the end, and even before the show started, it was a lot more emotional than I expected. All night, people were discussing how they were going to miss the band, what they meant to them and how hard it was to see such an important British band come to an end. Looking around the venue, it was clear to me just how important this band of beautiful Welsh bastards was to music in my country a decade and a half ago. Everyone in the crowd was around my age, showing just how hard they resonated with people at an important part of their lives when the band first emerged in 2001/2002. That was pretty cool to see, and as I made my way as close to the stage as I could, it was cool to just rub shoulders with fellow fans, the post-hardcore hardcore if you will, who were going through the same emotions as I was. In the minutes before the band took the stage, I think the reality of it all hit home. This band was so very important to so many people in the UK, and even further afield, and within the next couple of hours it was all going to be over. It was as if everyone in there was witnessing the putting to sleep of our teenage selves, the cliched end of an era in the truest form I've ever personally experienced anyway. It was the most hushed crowd I've ever been in in the minutes before the band took to the stage, and it was that air of the end that I think gripped everyone. It's hard to express in words how impactful this band were on both me and the people around me in their 15 years of existence, but if I could bottle up that atmosphere from the minutes before the show started, and in the minutes after the last chord rung out, I would.
Once Funeral took to the stage, it was one of those performances that I will personally never forget, and I don't think anyone in attendance ever could. Starting from Rookie of the Year, they played all of their debut album to a crowd that was so au fait with every single note and lyric that at times you could barely hear the band over the crowd. It was just a magic experience. Everywhere you looked, people are singing, jumping, dancing and hugging each other. Bend Your Arms to Look Like Wings, Escape Artists Never Die, Red is the New Black, She Drove Me to Daytime Television, Moments Forever Faded, Storytelling, Novella. I have so many favourite songs from that album that it's hard to pick a highlight of their rendition. Everything about it was just spot on, perfect. They played their hearts out and brought that emotion and passion to the album that had made me fall in love with them as a band all those years before, interspersed with messages from frontman Matt Davies about love, politics, standing up against domestic violence and being there for each other. Such a wonderful little man. By the time they finished the album, I was a sweaty mess, and it felt like a triumphant night of music, sharing in memories with people who had been through it all together. As a band and as fans, we had grown up together, all of us, and this was the culmination of it all. Strangely, it was only then that the realisation the end was near started to set in. I think it was that realisation of how we had all grown together as a band and fans that allowed for the contemplation of it all at that part of the night. The album they had just played was from 2003, 13 years ago, and in that time so much had changed for so many people in that venue, but through it all we had this band, this genre of music and these songs. And in too short a time, that was going to be over.
Emotion is a funny old thing. I never for one second thought I would cry over music or over a band, but sometimes it just comes out of nowhere and sideswipes the hell out of you. For the first song of their encore, delving even deeper into their back catalogue, Funeral bring two of the original band members on stage to play This Year's Most Open Heartbreak. You might recall I said many thousands of words ago higher up this post that this was the first song I ever heard from this band, 14 years prior. I wasn't the only one, of course. I screamed out every word of this song with everything I had, fuelled with every memory of the discovery of this wonderful little band and all the joy they brought me over the years, and I had tears in my eyes by that point, as did many people throughout the venue. It was a surreal experience. I had never seen a crowd go from so high and on it to so emotional in such a short period of time, but it was cool to see. I suppose guys in their late 20s, as the majority of the crowd was, are supposed to be more macho than this and hide our emotions, but literally no one cared.
The rest of the encore saw Funeral play more of their fantastic EP tracks, pre-dating their debut album, and even though I've seen them play 10:45 Amsterdam Conversations, Kiss and Make Up et al many many times in the last decade-plus, it was special to see them all grouped together like this in a setlist, which I'd only ever seen once before back in 2013 when they last explored deep into their history. Rarities like 10 Scene Points to The Winner and You Want Romance? were also lovely to hear, and things like that sort of lifted the mood of the place once again after that initial emotional moment of the encore. That all changed again slightly later though when the band came to the end of classic Funeral track The Art of American Football. We all knew that it was coming to an end all too soon, and the band were starting to show that they couldn't hold it much longer at that point as well. Matt Davies, the dude with the microphone, took this moment to give a speech about how he met the rest of the band all those years ago, and how much it meant to him to have been able to share his music and his message with his fans for the last few years, and as he spoke about the end, he just lost it. The guy was in tears on stage. Well...that was it. I was gone. Stood there in a venue in London at the age of 28, I was bawling my eyes out, and so many people around me were the same. Like I said earlier, I would never have dreamed that any band could make me react like this, but Funeral did, and as the band cried, the crowd cried, we all cried together, and it was kinda nice to share that moment with so many people in the same place. It was also nice to know that this still meant as much to the band as it did to the people they were doing all this for.
The night came to an end soon after, with the band playing the two songs that they said represent everything Funeral for a Friend was about, Roses for the Dead, a track about losing people and dealing with loss, and History, a song about standing up for what you believe in and fighting for your dreams. The latter was, and always will be, the only way Funeral could ever go out, with a beautiful song that has, more than any other, become their anthem and their signature. It encapsulates everything about our little sliver of the UK music scene, and everything about their own heritage and their culture in Wales. On this night, it also represented everything that we as a collective of Funeral for a Friend members and fans had shared over the last 14 to 15 years. It was a beautiful few minutes to share with the band, and one that I can't really do justice to with words, so...
If anyone is remotely interested in understanding what this band meant to people my age in my scene, and how special said night was, this video someone has brilliantly put together of the last song from that last show is a great watch. If you've got the patience, watch beyond the song itself, about two minutes after the band has finished. I've never seen a crowd spontaneously burst into song after a show like that before, and it gives me goosebumps watching it back even now. The crowd singing that last chorus back to the band after it was all over was a special moment that I will honestly cherish for my whole life, and it was wonderful to be a part of that.
When it was all said and done, that night in London in May was probably the best and most heartbreaking night of music I've ever experienced. It was emotional, it was wonderful, and it was hard to say goodbye for the final time to a band that has been there through everything. In the space of 14 years, we all go through a hell of a lot in life and I'm no different. This band was with me through most of my formative years, and all of my adult life to date, and now that it's all over, I can look back and say it was a privilege to share the last 14 years with them. I'm sad that I'll never get to experience new music, or a new live show from Funeral for a Friend again, but I know I'll always have the music and the memories. And to have been there on the last night of their career was truly an honour, and a night I will carry with me for the rest of my life. So goodnight Funeral for a Friend, you bunch of wonderful bastards, your history is mine.
