26/02/11
At the time of writing this interview, I read reports that say Foals have just played their first show in Los Angeles, selling out the Troubadour venue even though it’s their virgin trip to the US. They are a band who currently find themselves on the tip of the sharpest-tongues of scene kids and art-rockers alike, the Oxford thinking-man’s techno band whose notoriety has centered as much around their views on Boris Johnson, Barack Obama and mis-reported petulance in regard to their production decisions, but who, I believe, will ride the wave of the hype and resolve the notoriety in favour of being known for their exciting prog-pop output. I catch up with lead singer, Yannis Philippakis from his bed in a hotel in San Francisco, ahead of Foals’ Latitude appearances in July…
So I’ve just heard from your Tour Manager that everyone else form the band has gone off to Alcatraz on a jolly for the day, and you’ve had to stay behind…sorry about that!That’s OK – I’m in bed, so it’s not all bad at all.
I’m gonna do that terribly British thing of asking you what time it is there and how’s the weather…It’s about 2:30 in the afternoon and the weather’s lovely actually. There’s a pool in this hotel too, so I might check that out later. And it’s a heated pool, so I’m gonna go and hit it in a bit I think.
The conception of Foals has been reported in many different sources, but I wondered if you could tell us how it happened yourself.Well, some of us were friends from school beforehand in Oxford, and some of us were in bands together as well and we kinda got fed up of it; we wanted to do something that was more our idea of pop music, something that was more fun and more accessible. We got together and played a lot of house parties, and have pretty much been touring ever since.
Andrew Mears, lead singer of Youthmovies, was one of the founding members of Foals – I wondered what effect his departure had on the band?His dad comes from just outside Norwich, actually! There wasn’t a massive effect, other than that we got Edwyn instead. Me and Andrew always had a lot of side projects away from the band, and at that time, Foals was essentially that – it wasn’t anything that had any particular drive, it was just something we spent our time doing when we were bored. When he left, it just became something that consumed more of our time; he left to concentrate on Youthmovies, so that meant that we could rehearse more and become more of a real band, rather than just a project. Also, because Edwyn joined, it meant that it had more of a dance element because Edwyn has no real time scale of Rock, if you know what I mean – he’d never really been in a band before and he’d only really listened to techno, so he came in as this untrained ear, which was really good.
As you mentioned, you’d been in bands before, so was Foals meant to be a conscious departure away from your previous band, The Edmund Fitzgerald? Yeah, it was, yeah. Things that had started off as being an interesting concept just became more of a burden and we didn’t really want to play complicated music anymore. We didn’t feel like it communicated any