Fightstar Interview
Interview with Omar Abidi from Fightstar
Words by Brendan Monteiro / Photo by Paul Harries
Fightstar have come along way, initially having to deal with a relentless amount of animosity, having people completely over look their band due to their singers past. Then eventually if that wasn’t enough, being pushed by their ex-record company (Universal) to be a more “commercial prospect”. Still they pressed on, and with their latest release ‘Be Human’ they have taken the boundaries and totally obliterated them, displaying their sheer determination to come out with an honest release. An album to be proud of and show the world exactly what they are made of!
You formed Fightstar while Charlie was still in Busted, how hard was the decision to make the band knowing the background he came from and the animosity it might bring?
I think we kind of went into it quite blind, personally I was never into the charts. When I met him I knew of him and I had seen his face on T.V but it wasn’t a big deal to me, I think everyone else in the band was in the same boat. It was so organic and so natural the way we all just clicked and vibed off each other. There was never any thought of “Oh God, we’re in a band with some dude in a pop group.” I think it was more like “I wanna jam with this guy.” Fortunately he lived really closed to me and Al. Al was actually kipping on his sofa, thats how we started jamming cause he wanted to move to London and stop doing his degree in Birmingham. So Charlie said, “look its fine come and sleep on my sofa in the spare room. The room is yours for as long as you need it basically.” I think from there it was just a spark, we were around there every evening just jamming and we started writing. We only met each other for two to three weeks and had already written our first song.
Thats pretty quick.
Yeah it was like that though, it was a really intense musical vibe. Before that I had not been in a band for two years purely because I hated being in bands after being in so many of them and them not working. Being in a band is very emotionally draining, you’re in a relationship with four or five guys and its not natural its just work, work, work.
As I said it was so natural that most of those questions weren’t asked until we were physically in the public’s eye and then we were realising “Oh yeah, fuck.” Nobody thought about that and now we were. I think the big one for me was when he left Busted. On the day he had the press conference we were also playing a gig at Warrick University. After the press conference he came to my house to pick me up, we were driving up to Warrick and we switched on Radio 1 and there was this whole news piece. We were just looking at each other like “What the hell is going on?” Basically they had loads of crying girls going “I can’t believe what you’ve done, you’ve ruined my life. I hate you.” We were properly stunned and when we got to Warrick we just sat there silent for half an hour.
Do you think that Charlie being in a ‘Pop’ band so to speak hindered the band in any way?
You know what, Charlie was more rock than any of us from the get go. The first day I met him we were having a dinner party at Alex’s sisters house which is how we met Charlie. We got really drunk one night, we drank like seven bottles of wine between the four of us. It was great, we went on to make water bombs and threw them at buses. We came downstairs and started jamming, the first song we jammed was ‘Killing in the Name’ and we jammed it like seven times after that. That was his choice of song and from that moment we clicked, he could see I could play drums and I could see he could sing and he was into good music. We started talking about Deftones, Tool and Pantera and there was never a point where I was like “this guy is really pop and I’m really rock”. That’s the great thing, we all encompass different things, Al’s very much into Jeff Buckley and Radiohead, Dan’s into the heavier side of stuff but also into people like M83 now and really cool sort of Post Rock bands. All of our influences kind of swirl around the whole spectrum but they all have these common meeting points.
What good attributes do you think you bring to the band?
Some groove, I come from a Jazz, Funk, Hip/Hop background before I started playing Rock music and then from about 15 – 16 I started getting to into Punk and Hardcore. That’s all I did, like Dilinger Escape Plan, Converge, Botch, all those bands were massive influences for me and that’s all I wanted to do. As I grew older I started bringing in some more of that groove I grew up with, I have always come from the groove, when we started rocking out I always wanted to keep it in. I have always tried to bring a bit of that groove to my style.
A lot of animosity must of been felt towards the band because of the whole ‘Busted’ past, how did you deal with it?
Personally I didn’t really absorb much of it because by the time we were already getting involved and these vibes were coming toward us, we were already great friends by that time so my main thing was to make sure I had Charlies back. There were always little situations that used to happen but we all were there backing him up and not letting him deal with it on his own. It wasn’t just his problem, it was all of our problems. There’s four of us in the band so if you have got something to say to him you have to say it to me as well.
Did you ever feel anything like that from other bands?
No, I tell you what, it was all the other bands that were the coolest people. Even the most Hardcore brutal band, we had nothing but love from them. It’s really only ever been people who come and watch, your non fans who have ever had any kind of animosity. All the bans we have met have been so open minded, we’re really good friends with the ‘Sikth’ guys and they all really good guys and have always been really supportive of what we do because they understand what it’s like. What you have to go through to get on the stage and give it your all. When they saw that we weren’t a manufactured Rock band or anything like that, were just four people who want to give it our all and write songs. They respected that from the get go. That’s the difference between people who are in bands and people who are not, you kind of understand what it takes to do what we do.
Do you feel that the fans you do have are a huge victory on your part, as your music has had to do a lot of the talking on your behalf?
Oh yeah! And there is a lot of fans that have had to put up with shit from other people just because they are fans of our band. There is a lot of people who have had to go out and fight there own battles just because they like what we do as a band. We are really respectful of anyone who comes to our shows or anyone who buys our records, its the only reason we are still here. So those are the people that really matter, without them the four of us may as well get day jobs.
Be Human, is the new album released on your own label. Tell me more about that decision and how that came about.
We were is a situation last year where Gut Records, our old label, went bankrupt. We basically said to ourselves because we didn’t have a very good time with that record label - they made a lot of promises that ended up getting broken. There were some good people there that we worked with but unfortunately they were ruled under an iron fist. That person wouldn’t let anyone sort of do what they thought creatively right and kind of really messed with people, including ourselves. So we were quiet happy, it was a stroke of luck. Otherwise we would have ended up in another contract term. We thought lets do what we wanted to do since the beginning and release it off our own backs. We basically planned that all summer we would play all the festivals, gather all the money and put it all back into the record. Basically just trying to live on the breadline just to that we could get to 2009 and get the record finish. And it worked fortunately and we managed to strike up a deal with a distribution company who put in the marketing money and our management who helped us out with bits and pieces. And there you go, Be Human. Its the most natural record for us because we didn’t have to answer to anyone else. We basically set up in a shed, quite literally in a shed, and in four months we made it.
People like the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead have come up with different ways of getting their music out, what do you think of these schemes?
A lot of bands have started to think about this subscription thing. Its an interesting idea. I think that now we’re in no mans land. No one knows where the fuck it can go or what the fuck is going on. They are just trying to grab hold of something tangible. The record companies are losing money. They’re firing people and selling their buildings so that is obviously not the way. Even the bigger independent record labels aren’t doing to well. I think its people looking for a new business model that allows balance to still survive. At the end of the day if it carries on the way its going only the biggest bands will survive and the smallest. All the bands in the middle will just cease to exist. Purely because they rely so much on the little money that does come in to keep them ticking over as a band and keep them paying rent. That’s why I find it so funny because Radiohead are so huge they, don’t need the money. Not that they don’t need the money, but it was a very strategic thing. I think it was 2.5 or 3 months after they released their album for “Whatever you want to buy it for” they released a special DVD boxset for £40 a set. They made 4.5 million pounds off that boxset. Do the math. Someone will work it out, someone will have a great idea that everyone else will follow. And that will be the birth of a new music industry. We will have to wait and see. Maybe it’s what we have done.
I think going at it on your own is going to be the way forward in the future. Small bands will use big label’s to get known.
Exactly.
And once they have the fan base in place they will just do it alone.
Big labels will just be seen as capital start up company’s.
Do you think the subscription idea could work?
I don’t know, we have discussed it but it’s such a wild thing. Its almost like your band becoming a fan club directly. So what you’re doing is giving someone a subscription for say £35 a year and they get say an album, a shirt and a couple of concert tickets and it brings them into your world. But it is totaly a gamble because 10 people might subscribe, then where are you? I think the subscription thing is still very young and it might be something that works for some bands and doesn’t work for others, depending on how big or small you are.
What made you decide on such a vast array of music on the new album?
I don’t think it was an idea its just the way we write. We don’t hold back. We don’t say “does that fit into the box?” Especially on this album, there was no fucking box. The problem is there are four of us and is very much all four of us on the album. Thats why you have so much because it’s a little taste of all of us. Like ‘The Whisper’ is totally my kind of groove, and it’s a very strong one that people wouldn’t have heard Fightstar do that kind of thing before. I think its classic, one of the best on the album. ‘War Machine’ and ‘Chemical Blood’ we wanted to go as far as we could take it with the strings on the theatrical side of it and make it as grand as possible. ‘Chemical Blood’ is our finest technical achievement to date and ‘War Machine’ is proberly the best song we’ve ever written.
So the whole theatrical side of the album was planned or did it just come about that way?
It was something we specifically wanted, we wanted to go from beautiful, we’ve always been about dark and light and trying to put them in the same space at the same time. What we wanted was that dramatic slap around the face with the riff, and then you come back. Its almost like someone punching you, and then giving you the biggest hug. We were always into that kind of thing, of trying to push how heavy it could be and then how withdrawn we can make it.
