Fickle Friends aim for the big time as they head to The Joiners on biggest tour to date

Through two years of hard touring the five-piece have been gathering steam, becoming one of the most blogged-about bands of 2014 along the way, and last month they signed a deal with Polydor Records.

They are currently on their biggest headline tour so far, 28 dates in just over a month.

WOW247 grabbed a few minutes with frontwoman Natti Shiner just before the tour began during a busy day where the band were meeting up with a creative director for their next video.

Slightly out of breath, Natti says: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much a solid month, and then we head to South By Southwest (the massive music festival/conference in Austin, Texas).

‘Originally it was 32 dates with no days off, and they were asking: “Can you do this?” And we were like, “Yeah it’s fine”, but they did take out a couple so we don’t completely die.’

The band are no strangers to the south coast – Natti is from Brockenhurst in the New Forest and now lives in Brighton, and they played at both the Dials Festival and Victorious Festival in Southsea last year.

‘Dials was good,’ recalls Natti. ‘I think we were a little bit knackered, the end of last year is a bit of a blur because we were touring so much, but we like Portsmouth. We did Victorious Festival last summer as well and that was awesome.

‘We had some great burritos there too.’

While there has been a lot of hype online about the band, Natti doesn’t oversell it.

‘We’re doing all right. When we released (early single) Swim we were one of the top five blogged bands of the year and that was mental.

‘How on Earth did that happen? And it just goes to show how quickly things can spread like wildfire on the internet.

‘We thought if we can do that off our own backs, by putting a song online ourselves, what could we do with the backing of a major label helping us out? It was like: the work begins now.’

And since signing to Polydor, things have started to take off.

‘That’s why everything’s a bit crazy now. We signed our publishing deal before Christmas, agreed our deal with Polydor before Christmas and signed it afterwards, and it’s just been manic ever since.’

The next obvious step is their debut album, but there’s no release date set for it yet. ‘It’s going to be a combination of old and new,’ explains Natti. ‘We’ve written the album, and it’s a lot of new stuff but because we’ve only ever done stuff self-released or through indie labels. There’s also the question of what can we do again? What can we rerecord? What can we do better?

‘I think the next single is going to be a surprise for a lot of people.’

The Joiners, Southampton

Friday, February 19

joiners.vticket.co.uk