RELEASES

Fightstar New Album - be human
Release date: 20th April 2009

“be human”: track-by-track
1 Calling On All Stations
In just over three minutes, the album's anthemic opening track points the way for the future of Fightstar melding Riley's soaring string arrangements with passionate vocals from Simpson and Westaway and a naggingly infectious riff. “It's about going the extra mile to get to the truth,” says Simpson, “It's about questioning what we're told. If we didn't, we'd just be like sheep.” When he declares “I vow to save this country from all the lies”, you believe him.

2 The English Way
Previous singles ‘Floods’ (with its nod to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) and ‘Death Car’ with its perfectly pitched combination of the political and the personal, showed that Fightstar would not flinch from dealing with difficult issues. The English Way deftly handles patriotism and national identity while delivering a leg twitchingly compelling sing along moment. Simpson says: “Everyone's ashamed of being English. I wanted to capture a positive appreciation of our country.”

3 War Machine
With charging strings and pounding drums, War Machine is one of the album's most dramatic moments, Fightstar at their most filmic with choral backing vocals providing a truly spine tingling experience. It's anti-war message avoids trite sloganeering in favour of something far more subtle. “It's about wanting nothing to do with the wars we're fighting,” says Simpson, “It makes me sick that we're fighting for no reason.”

4 Never Change
Beginning life as a heavy, droning rocker, Never Change metamorphosed into arguably the happiest song Fightstar have ever written – an euphoric rush of a song that finds the band tapping into their love of melody and looking back to teenage freedom. “I've always been a fan of huge hooks. It's important to us to have big stand out melodies. I tire of genres so quickly.” says Simpson. Haigh agrees, “Some people will listen to an album and expect things to sound the same but we decided to just create things you'd enjoy listening to.”

5 Colours Bleed To Red
Intricate guitars and an irresistible hook collapse into a deliriously heavy breakdown with Simpson's throat shredding scream to the fore. “The end of the song is about being sick of being told how to think. It's about turning your back on everything negative,” says Simpson. “We're still very young but that song is about us looking back to when we were seventeen or eighteen and everything seemed so much more optimistic.”

6 The Whisperer
Opening with harmonica, The Whisperer finds the band experimenting with alternative percussion (rice shaken in cups, storage boxes kicked for a beat) and revelling in a Beach Boys style love of harmonies. “It began with a slow groove like ‘Sexy Boy’ by Air but then we realised it would sound great funked up,” says Simpson. The song's guitar, a compelling chug, is another highpoint described by Haigh as “like high school jocks vs nerds personified in a guitar line.”

7 Mercury Summer
 Home to the album's most immediate hooks, the synth enhanced love song, is the track most directly influenced by the band's love of film. “It's a homage to the Shawshank Redemption,” says Simpson, “Andy [the lead character] dreams of escaping to Zihuananejo and that song is about you and your partner leaving your life behind and going on an adventure in search of your ultimate nirvana. The line is opens with, ‘I hope the sea is as blue as it is in my dreams’, is a direct quote from film.” In fact, the original version of song included a sample of Morgan Freeman saying the line but, says Haigh, “Hollywood screwed that up for us. We just couldn't get it cleared.”

8 Give Me The Sky
A “pure love song” with a deliciously '80's feel, from the sheen of synths glinting in the background to its Cure influenced jangling riff, “Give Me The Sky” was born out of a spontaneous jam. Haigh says, “We wanted to do something huge that wasn't guitar based. How could we do something epic without using massive power chords? So we went on a journey into the world of synths.” Simpson says it is arguably the band's first all-out love song while Westaway confesses that it contains his favourite lyric on the record: “I’d give the world to you, and I’d mean it/ But only if you give me the sky/ So iI can watch over you.” The big softies.

9 Chemical Blood
The album's most musically accomplished moment – Westaway's breathtaking guitar combining with the orchestra's slicing strings to create an epic, intensely filmic experience. “To me, it's Fightstar's greatest triumph,” says Simpson. Westaway agrees, “It was the most complex song we've ever done.” Lyrically the song is a dark science fiction tale, a narrator yearning to replace his body with a machine or as Simpson jokingly describes it, “wanting to be Tony Stark in Iron Man.”

10 Tonight We Burn
After the lush strings and intense guitar of “Chemical Blood”, the band strip the sound right back and introduce a skittering electronic drum pattern and hypnotic vocals influenced by bands like The Postal Service and Bloc Party before diving into a jittery hymn to preparing for a night out. “It's about going on a date and having the most amazing night you possibly can,” says Westaway.

11 Damocles
Pounding drums and intense strings lead into the angriest song on the record – the band's dark unpicking of knife crime. “I wanted to write a song that addressed the issue for a long time. It cannot continue,” says Simpson. “How can we live in a society where people can do that to each other?” The intensely dramatic song even finds Simpson considering the merits of reinstating hanging: “I don't want it back but when I wrote the lyrics I thought to myself, the only way out of this is to make them afraid of doing it.” The song has personal resonance for Abidi who has experienced knife crime several times in his life. “I've had three knives pulled on me since I was 13. I've had three of my friends stabbed – one almost died, the other two were quite badly injured,” He says, “It's in the news now but it's been happening for years in London. It's time people realised that it's a shameful act.”

12 Follow Me Into Darkness
The record comes to a reflective end with the almost hymnal “Follow Me Into Darkness” with its gentle acoustic guitar and mournful piano building to a storm of strings and titanic drums before fading into silence again. Originally intended as a duet with electronic chanteuse Imogen Heap  (who 's song Hide And Seek Fightstar cover as a b-side on The English Way single) the song is, according to Westaway, “the album's post-rock moment – influenced by bands like Mono and Mogwai. It was the song that we always imagined as the epic ending to the album.”