But it’s not in hatred.”The two then discuss Singa- porean songbirds, airline host-esses and Australian wildlife. It’s mildly befuddling to an outsider, but it’s indicative of their creative impetus, and the music that results. “That is the dynamic of the band, our relationship,” Matthew says. the fact that we had $14,000 was the excuse to make a more extravagant record.”The album sees the band creating an uncommon language of their own, much of it grounded in their fractious sibling dynamic. When you’re a kid, you play because you want to sound like something… We don’t have any pretensions to do it, but the best you can do is give an impression of originality.”
If that’s true, The Fiery Furnaces give a better impression than most. Raised in Chicago but now Brooklyn-based, Matthew and his quieter, younger sister Eleanor, the singer, have made two albums, neither of which sound much like anything else, or like each other.

Recorded in three days for $3,000, their 2003 debut album Gallowsbird’s Bark was essentially a 16-song demo of travelogue tales set to a vividly itinerant musical backdrop of folk-blues, discordance, wonky music-hall stompers, childsong whimsy, and more.And for their next trip? The hyperactively sprawling Blueberry Boat, which sets tales of Depression-era farmers, high-seas adventure, salty dogs, sales reps and riding the rails to music that embraces Sixties rock, 10-minute pop operas, psych-pop, fuzzy folk, mangled blues and more – sometimes all in one song, all in a spirit of bewildering, thrilling restlessness.”We thought it would be nice to at least make it sound like we could do something else,” he says, nonchalantly “For the first record, we borrowed money This time … When Matthew Friedberger, half of the brother-sister team that makes up The Fiery Furnaces, is asked if you can still be original in rock music, he takes the bait “No,” he shrugs “Guitar rock is a genre: you have to sound like something. The momentum of the last two years has resulted in the retrospective, Up to Now: The Best of Carleen Anderson. It’s much needed too, as it pulls together Anderson’s career from her Young Disciples’ days to her time as a solo singer via fronting the Brand New Heavies, and collaborating with the rapper Guru and more recent guest spots. Most importantly, though, Up to Now finally gives Anderson’s gloriously life-affirming and spirited voice the platform it deserves.Nowadays, Anderson’s happy dipping in and out of the music business, guesting for Paul Weller and James Brown and appearing in one-off shows. However, the accidental soul star is especially pleased that she’s fulfilling her original dream of teaching music. “I’m so happy it’s happened now rather than 20 years ago, because all I could offer then was books whereas now I have actual experience.’Up to Now: The Best of Carleen Anderson’ is out now on Virgin.

It got picked up a couple of years later but that whole rawness didn’t exist any more.”Anderson’s first solo LP, True Spirit (1994), left her feeling compromised: “The record company wanted to mirror the Young Disciples’ album – that’s not my favourite way of doing things. The whole art and commerce thing had really started to define itself and I had a hard struggle with that because my angle was purely from an artist’s point of view.” Anderson felt her second LP, Blessed Burden (1998), co-written and produced by long-time associate and friend Paul Weller, was closer to her heart and unfettered by any commercial constraints.In recent years, Anderson has had a renaissance, her third solo album, Alberta’s Grand Daughter (2002) – a labour of love dedicated to her grandmother stimulated last year’s Grace and Favours DVD/CD. I can remember being in the States, when I heard the Caron Wheeler lyric ‘Yellow is the colour of sunrays’ [from "'Keep On Movin"] and I stopped and thought, ‘This is wicked.’ You had D’Influence, Young Disciples, Omar, Incognito, Galliano, Jamiroquai – it was a very new sound,” says Anderson “There was nothing like that in the States. Anderson became one of the most recognisable voices of the soul, jazz-funk movement of the late 1980s/early 1990s. The emergence of Soul II Soul, Omar, Young Disciples, Incognito, D’Influence and Galliano was as groundbreaking an era as black British music has ever known.Despite the impact of “Apparently Nothin’”, the Young Disciples never quite scaled the heights they should have. It wasn’t something I aspired to.”Anderson is happy to have been part of a scene that heavily influenced black and soul music in America “The whole new soul urban movement started here.

The fact that the album Road to Freedom got picked up was a fluke, none of it was planned.”I never thought I was going to get any music done, I was 33 or 34 when the Young Disciples happened. What happened? “It was a fluke – Marco is an excellent bass player, songwriter and musician but he never felt comfortable or wanted the role of being an artist. The trio were responsible for the era-defining “Apparently Nothin’”(1991), a record that is as instantly recognisable as “Keep on Movin’” and “Back to Life” by their peers Soul II Soul. A year later, with her 11-year-old son in tow, Anderson returned to London, forming the Young Disciples with Williams and Nelson. She fell in love, got married, had a baby and then divorced; Anderson headed to university in California to fulfil her aim of becoming, a music teacher. However, circumstances – Reagan withdrawing funding for the arts a semester before Anderson’s degree course finished coinciding with the JB’s first tour to London – proved to be the catalyst which would result in Anderson relocating to the UK in the late 1980s.The JB Allstars were brought over by Femi Williams and Marco Nelson, the duo who would ask Anderson to come back and work with them, convinced that she could contribute to a scene that was breaking into the mainstream. “I couldn’t leave him out.”Sutton’s strategy of having his players prepare individually as they would for any other tournament added an intrigue to the practice days which some Ryder Cups have lacked.It may just be crazy enough that it pays off, but reason and logic suggest it will either have no effect or could go terribly wrong.