Live Review

Funeral For A Friend – TheBorderline, London

• 17th Feb 2011

To say the Borderline is electric tonight would be… Well, it would be a complete lie, frankly. A lukewarm crowd seems to promise a difficult environment for support bands and headliner alike, but the venue begins to fill up before first band Spycatcher take to the stage.

Filling in for the mysteriously-absent The Blackout, Spy Catcher play like a band that could do much better if their singer wasn’t colossally hungover. They’re a tight, professional unit with some excellent tunes, but they just seem to be lacking something tonight. Nevertheless, they do a solid enough job at warming the crowd up, and promise much better things to come.

The absence of The Blackout means Canterbury are elevated to main-support status, and boy do they relish it. Energetic, loud and unbelievably tight, they’re a band that really need to be seen to be believed. The two-singer approach is not something that’s easy to pull off, but Canterbury are so in tune with each other that you could honestly be listening to an auto-tuned pop record; it’s truly astounding. Treating the crowd to a solid mixture of new and old songs, it’s a testament to their ability that the entire crowd is moving along with them by the end, although they could do with finishing on a more energetic note, as their last song peters out with a whimper in a bizarre end to an otherwise-flawless set.

If Canterbury are flawless, there aren’t any words for how good Funeral For A Friend are tonight. Playing in a much smaller venue than they’re used do, the title of “HMV’s Next Big Thing” is a crown that they do not wear easily; FFAF are *already* a big thing, and their crowd of devoted followers is eating out of their hand tonight. Right from the get-go, the Borderline becomes a sea of activity, fists flying and bodies bouncing as the Welsh metallers destroy everything in their path. It’s easy to forget just how many classics FFAF have in their repertoire, but songs like Juneau are surprisingly timeless in this setting, the venue ringing with the sound of a sold-out crowd screaming every single word as if their lives depended on it. It’s a rare treat to see a band of Funeral For A Friend’s size in such a small venue, and their hour-long set is absolutely storming, a flurry of energy and aggression that devastates the increasingly sweaty venue. By the time frontman Matt Davies has crowd-surfed over the end of their final song, every single person in the Borderline is leaving with a smile on their face and electricity in their eyes. London has officially been rocked.