To say that Jimmy and Hugo, the two producers who make up the wildly successful Sydney duo Flight Facilities, jealously guarded their identities when they first burst onto the scene would be unfair. The fake back-stories and mysterious alter-egos were a tool to generate hype. And also, as Jimmy tells me, “to have a little fun.”
One 2010 article on music blog Mixed Tape put it best when they wrote; “It’s not easy to find out where Flight Facilities actually come from. Some people say they hail from Trinidad and Tobago, others say they in fact are from Sydney, Australia. Some people say the duo consists of Captain Earnest Bon-Huffington and Madame Francois de Lundenkopf, Esquire Winston Humphries III or Fred. Others that they are just a DJ duo who want to stay anonymous.”
It never lasts of course – anonymity that is – not in the age of the internet. Even so, it doesn’t hurt to try. The internet is an omnipresent force, a relentless information machine and the more it gives, the more people want. Just look at how successful Daft Punk are.
Of course, making effortlessly catchy music doesn’t really hurt either. Something Flight Facilities specialise in.
“We really want to make things that matter in our catalogue,” says Jimmy. “If you keep people wanting more when a song comes out then when you release another thing it becomes like a special event, so we get that extra hype around it. It probably puts more pressure on us though, because each song has to be pretty damn good.”
Flight Facilities are one of those rare beasts in the Australian musical landscape; a group whose music is just as at home on the airwaves of an independent, community radio station as it is being played on high rotation at a major commercial station. Their music is extremely ‘cool’ and yet your mother would enjoy it too. It’s disco, after all. (Up to a point, anyway.)
So why not make an album, I wonder?
“It’s definitely something we want to do. It’s just most albums that get made have filler tracks,” he says. “ We want to get rid of the filler tracks. When, or if, Flight Facilities become really big, like a household name or something, then we would make a full-length album.”
It’s hard to find fault with that argument and yet, a part of me wants to tell Jimmy that they’re already at that point, very nearly anyway.
Still, the way they go about their business at the moment certainly seems to be working for them.
Take the moody, eight minute, Claude Debussy-inspired slow burner Clare de Lune. It’s an exquisite, broody, epic track that somehow manages to capture all the beauty of the original classical piece of music and yet still manages to infuse a modern, disco inspired beat into it effortlessly.
“We both loved the original by Debussy,” says Jimmy when I ask him how he and Hugo ever managed to write such an incredible piece of music. “We really wanted to do something with the original chords. It’s such an amazing chord progression. So we kind of grabbed a few chords from the original and built the song off that. It kind of just grew itself,” he laughs. “Although, to be fair, it did take us a year or so to finish.”
–
When so many of their colleagues in EDM (Electronic Dance Music, a term I hate but am forced to use, because I can’t really think of anything better) seem to crank out a new track every few weeks, Flight Facilities are just the opposite. In over three years they’ve released just a handful of singles.
“We’re just slow as they come, but there is method in the madness,” reveals Jimmy.
You only need to look at the short, but oh-so-sweet back catalogue of Flight Facilities since smash hit Crave You to see that Jimmy’s right. It’s all been pretty much solid gold.
Flight Facilities’ latest track I Didn’t Believe, featuring young Sydney singer/songwriter Elizabeth Rose, is a perfect example. Effortlessly soulful with a languid 70’s funk bass line, washy synthesizer leads and a killer vocal hook. It would be just at home on the dance floor at Studio 54 in 1978 as it is now in Kings Cross or Fitzroy in 2013.
While Jimmy and I are speaking, his other [musical] half, Hugo, is driving him around. The interview is occasionally interrupted as the two grumble to one another about other people’s terrible driving and the lack of spots in a shopping centre carpark. It is an odd phone interview to say the least; yet, it’s also kind of fun.
Jimmy has just signed the lease on a new rental property and yet his happiness is tempered by the fact that, upon moving in, he left the front door of the new place open and his roommate’s dog escaped and was run over. Agony and ecstasy, or in his own words, “Yeah, it’s a pretty heavy scene. It was an old dog, though, and I think it had had a pretty shitty life. It just kind of hid under his [the roommate’s] bed the whole time.”
“Maybe you did it a favour?” I suggest, taken aback at the direction the interview has taken, just when it seems to be going so well. “I wouldn’t say that just yet, man,” he replies, yet he doesn’t seem too shaken up about it. He seems to actually be enjoying himself.
Flight Facilities will be playing at this year’s massive Splendour in the Grass festival in Byron Bay and while Jimmy and Hugo have played the festival before, they’re on at a much better time slot this time around. “It’s going to be pretty exciting I think. We played the last Harbourlife with 10,000 people on one stage, but Splendour is so big, so important. It’s going to be great, obviously.”
The two of them will also have had plenty of practice playing live, having completed a tour around the country at the end of May which included a trip to Jimmy’s old hometown of the Sunshine Coast. “It was interesting,” he says. “I don’t think a lot of gigs get put on there.”
There is a time and a place for hiding one’s light under a bushel, but that time has passed. For Flight Facilities, anonymity served a purpose and served it well, but now, much like the aviation company where they lifted their name, the sky is truly the limit for these two. ❚
Flight Facilities’ newest single I Didn’t Believe is out now on Bang Gang. Catch them at Splendour in the Grass flightfacilities.com
