A Friend Of Mine use guitars, bass, pedals, laptop, keyboard, drums, sampler and two lead vocals. They have been doing this since they were in shortpants, but recording/performing under this name started in October, 2005. First EP came out 2007. It is cheap and critically acclaimed.
Facts for the casual reader... Our first gig was at a friend's 21st, Oct 05. There was a Boxwars theme. Low on material, we did "Planet Caravan". Celebrity cokehead Neil Wedd stood up at our third gig and bagged the crap out of us. We were loud, apparently. We did a stint with screamodelic jam band Harmonilehre. We recorded ten hours of jamming, and played alongside Damo Suzuki (once in Can), who is every bit the legend he is said to be. We picked out of a hat to determine the order we went on stage. Great fun. Most gigs involve technical difficulties and bleeding, though both in small measure. Our shortest gig was 2 minutes, in a carpark at Monash Uni, where a goon screeched up in a car and said the Dean would fire everybody if we played another note. We decided to stop. We often wear clothes that were not intended to be worn by people of our stature/age/gender. Our first decent support was the Tote's NYE 06 Lock In, with several reputable musical entertainers. We like crude props, and emblazening crude slogans on ourselves and our clothing. This helps distract you from the music. We have never, ever lost the "drink your rider first" game. We have never made it known to the other bands that such a game exists. Davd often throws up before a gig, because apparently he can't burp. Chris and I learned to do that when we were babies. Mid-2007, we released our joyously-received EP, with a joyously received residency at the Tote which, if you're Little Red, will send you rocketing to stardom, but if you're not, it probably won't. Around this time Chris started getting some on the side, as Shooting At Unarmed Men's drummer. The year ended on a high as we were accused of theft by another band. Our friend Lloyd is going to play guitar with us now, helping diversify our sound. We're just about to record our full-length album. It's brilliant, I assure you.
BOOKINGS: contact our "management" on 0414 609 862 or band (at) afriendofmine.com.au (or through this very site)
Debut EP "If Your Head Explodes You'll Never Make It" $10 digipak version available online and at all shows.
Buy Online
"A full and fierce debut EP from the ambitious songwriting team that is A Friend of Mine. Heavily informed by a late-period Radiohead, the boys also cite Mogwai, Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails and Neutral Milk Hotel as influences and bear the marks of all these bands. Rich, dark and deeply creative, they move from glitch-based dreamscapes to murky ballads to industrial gothica in an album length collection of oblique but powerful tunes. Very, very interesting."
-Beat Magazine, Single Of The Week
"A Friend Of Mine played the sort of music you might bulldoze a neighbourhood to: rolling waves of brooding guitar grounded by frenetic, precise drumwork... their variation in intensity and unpretentious character made them a band worth catching. Take Tool and splice their musical genome with that of jazz legends The Necks and you've got a rough idea."
-Inpress Magazine, Live at the Greyhound Review
"The music industry is plagued with perils and pitfalls that compromise artists' ability to evolve from amateur garage band to commercially attractive proposition. Judging by the title of its debut EP, local band A Friend of Mine has already grasped a salient (if statistically unlikely) lesson about life in the music industry. If Your Head Explodes You'll Never Make It is a mix of atmospheric rock moments, samples and emotive pleadings which resists temptation to dive into a well furnished musical pidgeon hole. Hopefully A Friend of Mine will not only continue to progress musically, but continue to raise public consciousness of danger of exploding heads."
-Beat Magazine 1078