Flight Brigade

Think of Flight Brigade as a family as much as a seven-strong band and you start to understand the chemistry between them. Think of their songs as epic stories to which each member is essential and you begin to grasp what makes their music so powerful. Watch them perform and you can’t fail to be struck by the special bond they share.

Flight Brigade’s strength in numbers suits the scope of their songs, the ambition of their arrangements and the myriad of musical styles in their melting pot. The grand orchestral sweeps, the crunching anthemic guitars, the striking mix of male and female have brought Flight Brigade comparisons to Arcade Fire and Of Monsters and Men, other pop troupes who refused to compromise their size for the sake of their sound.

At the core of Flight Brigade is an actual family. Ollie and Miriam are married. Miriam and violinist and vocalist Dorry are sisters. The trio grew up in each other’s pockets, their parents best friends, their families part of a hippy commune in Hampshire. The other four members – bassist Tom Clay, guitarist Thomas Pink, keyboardist Jonny Barker and drummer Neil Blandford – were childhood friends who lived nearby.

In 2015, called the Best Unsigned Band at Brighton’s The Great Escape, that summer saw them perform at 16 festivals, including Bestival and Glastonbury. In November, they released their ‘Stealing Fire’ EP, to rave reviews and radio play from 6 Music, Radio X and the BBC. Lead track ‘When We Were Young’ had its video premiere on Channel 4. In 2016 Flight Brigade were named one of Time Out’s Rising Stars and commenced recording their debut album, ‘Our Friends Our Enemies’ which is released 14th October 2016.

The album’s title track, which first appeared on ‘Stealing Fire’, has an intriguing tale. ‘Our Friends Our Enemies’ was inspired by a story about Czech factory workers forced to make bombs for the Nazis. Some risked their lives by neglecting to include detonators, so that when the bombs dropped, they didn’t explode. “It was on a production line, in front of soldiers,” explains Miriam, “so it’s a story of bravery. One even put a note inside a bomb saying ‘this is all we can do for now’.

That Flight Brigade aren’t the sort to settle for simple love songs is no surprise. Their passion for performing, their desire to make music that moves those who hear it and their ambition to share the community they’ve created with the world wouldn’t allow it.  

“We make the music we want because we feel we don’t have a choice,” says Ollie. “For all of us, there’s nothing in the world we’d rather do and no one else we’d want to do it with.”