Friends Electric

Friends Electric

Friends Electric is an electro-pop band from Neath, Wales, active since 2008. The group is a quartet made up of Dan Thomas on vocals, guitar and synth, Matthew Fry on bass, synth and vocals, Dean Gorno on drums and electronics, and Ritchard Lavis-Williams on synth, guitar and vocals. The band forms out of Neath, a former mining town, and its members first play in a band together as teenagers.

The group changes direction after seeing a Soulwax show in 2006, switching from guitars to synths and moving in together in a terraced house. To fund equipment, the members take a range of jobs, including pizza delivery and engineering for Abba Mania. Their sound sits within electro and pop, with tags also linking them to indie pop, indie, indietronica and electronic music.

Friends Electric release their debut single, Wall of Arms, through Self Raising Records in 2010, followed by Golden Blood later that year. Another single, Something You Should Know, follows in 2011.

Production project

The name Friends Electric is also used by an English production duo. This separate project begins in 2002 as a freestyle, no-rules production venture and is built around Sam Rice-Edwards and Bill Robin Fuller, who meet as teenagers at a party in Notting Hill Gate. They work together on and off from the early 1990s, develop music without fixed limits on genre, groove or tempo, and build tracks by circulating initial ideas to musical friends around the world for improvisation before reworking the recordings into finished pieces. The duo perform live at parties and festivals across Europe, Africa and South America, and also remix Pitch Black.

Sam Rice-Edwards is based in London and Bill Robin Fuller is based in Berlin.