Interview: Foals

Backstage at Amsterdam’s Paradiso venue, Foals’ 21-year-old singer-guitarist Yannis Philippakis is chain-smoking cigarettes, swatting away the flies that infest the cramped dressing room, struggling with an untimely cold he’s picked up, wondering when his tour manager’s going to bring him the food he ordered, and telling me about Karpathos in Greece, where he lived until he was seven and where his dad (and brother) still live.

“I used to go back all the time to see my dad,” he says, over the din of Clocks, who’ve just struck up upstairs. “My dad builds instruments and stuff. Very traditional folk… In fact the thing we’ll open our set with tonight is an old Byzantine song that my father used to sing. All the men in the village sing it round a table: it’s like a song-poem, a saga, and they used to make it last an hour. We only do the first two lines. But I was brought up with a very weird, peculiar musical tradition. They play bagpipes there. They have arranged marriages. It’s a very strange place… very rural. It’s on top of a mountain. It’s called Olymbos, it’s 300 metres up on the side of a cliff. A lot of the women still wear traditional folk costumes. Very untouched. They speak a Doric form of Greek. It’s very, very traditional; like, very traditional. Athens is very modern, very metropolitan, but not where we’re from. In-breeding and weird shit going on. But I love it.”

Byzantine song-poems? Traditional Greek folk? Maybe I’ll hold off on the questions about math rock, Battles and Bloc Party, for now.

The Paradiso is what you might call a storied venue. Glen Matlock played his last gig with the Sex Pistols here. Nirvana filmed a gig here as the storm broke in November 1991. A widely circulated Joy Division bootleg was recorded here four months before Ian Curtis died. Tonight, this converted church is the setting for the latest milestone in what’s been a year of them for Oxford five-piece Foals.

London Calling is an annual, weekend-long festival that showcases young British bands to noisy, appreciative local hipsters and indie kids. This year, Foals are headlining a Friday night bill that includes the likes of New Young Pony Club and The Maccabees. Over a thousand people will watch them, and that’s only a tenth of the capacity of the Dublin venue they’re playing with Bloc Party tomorrow night.

It’s been quite a journey to this point. When The Stool Pigeon last caught up with them, in January, Foals were newly signed to Transgressive Records, giddy with excitement after recording their first BBC session and plotting their first release, in which they hoped to fuse “clinical techno” with “raucous rock”. Since then it’s all kicked off. They’ve released two great singles (plus a live EP), played South by Southwest in Texas, taken the Reading Festival by storm, recorded an album in New York with their hero Dave Sitek, headlined a sold-out UK tour, been invited onto Later… with Jools Holland, guested on Channel 4 yoof drama Skins, reportedly signed to Sub Pop in America… you get the picture. Yannis is aware that his band seems to be on the cusp of something, but he’s keeping cautious: “Being the buzz band in 2008 is gonna suck in 2009.”

It’s not just Foals’ popularity that’s changing. After all, it’s only 16 months since they first formed, and even as they grow up in public their sound continues to evolve. Neither ‘Hummer’ nor ‘Mathletics’, the two records that created the juggernaut currently powering Foals forward, will appear on the debut album due in March 2008. “Those have been released,” shrugs Yannis. “We write quite prolifically, and also, re-recording things is a pain in the arse. And, like, those were the first bunch of songs we wrote… With ‘Hummer’, we were trying to do a very clinical, very precise German techno Steve Reich-tYP:e thing, where all the notes are perfectly placed. We don’t want to keep repeating ourselves. I understand people who like to be accustomed to a band’s sound, who like to return to a band that kind of repeats stuff – it’s comforting – but we’re not the right band for those people. The bands we like are bands where they fuck with your head a bit.”

To this end, Foals have made an afrobeat record.

It’s time to talk about Dave Sitek. Guitarist with TV on the Radio and producer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell and Liars’ They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, Sitek was selected by Foals as someone who would help them take risks and frustrate “anyone expecting us to be some sort of Bloc Party-tYP:e band or Klaxons-tYP:e band”. The result of the collaboration is an album that, as Yannis enthusiastically puts it, “a lot of people will probably be disappointed by”.

SP: How do you think it will differ from expectations?
YP: “We had a couple of phone calls with Dave before we went out, and he said, straight off, ‘If you want to make a commercial record, if you want to make some big glossy pop record, then don’t work with me. It’ll be the most expensive mistake of your life.’ And his other thing is: ‘Why mess around when you can fuck around?’ The final thing that he would repeat quite a lot would be, ‘If Jimi Hendrix or Arthur Russell had Pro Tools, what kind of record would those progressive-minded individuals try and make?’ They certainly wouldn’t be making records that sound like Joy Division. That’s why we brought in this whole afrobeat element. We’ve got brass, but it’s still poppy in a lot of ways. In my mind, it’s a lot less fierce than the live show – it’s not as relentlessly dance-y at all; it’s much more diverse. Things are a lot slower, there’re no synths and no electro edge left. Everything’s done on a Rhodes piano now, so it’s got a much more organic style.

“There were very direct references for the record: The Flowers of Romance by Public Image Ltd., a lot of Talking Heads stuff, a lot of afrobeat from the sixties, like Ethiopiques, which we all got into just before we went out. That very much influenced the record, and making it in New York influenced the record. Our band is about us stretching ourselves. We won’t make another afrobeat record after this and it’s not like this album is a statement of intent – this is the thing where we feel slightly alienated from our peers who play in the indie sphere. It’s like, the next record we make genuinely might not have any guitars on it, it might not have any drums on it, it might all be brass, it might all be electronic, it might be ambient, it might be whatever the fuck it has to be, but it’ll still be about communicating things to people. It’ll still be a pop record. It’ll still be Foals.

“We’ll see what happens. This year’s just been weird. I never thought we’d be in this position now, when we did that Stool Pigeon interview [in January].”

SP: What position did you think you’d be in?
YP: “I just didn’t think that we’d become as popular as we have. I don’t really like thinking about it because it adds a whole other level of pressure and there’s pressure enough already within our band. The way that we work is very self-critical, and I’ve got pressures in my head from everything else anyway – just real stuff, family things and life. The moment you start thinking about, ‘Are kids going to dig this song?’… why bother! I’m just trying to have fun.

“This will probably sound a bit goonish but for us it’s very refreshing that people have gotten into a band like ours that isn’t about hanging out with the cool people. We’re five pretty unpopular boys from Oxford, which doesn’t have a particularly cool scene, doesn’t have particularly cool affiliations. We were all at university. We basically formed this band to piss off a load of prog friends of ours, because that’s the background we came from. I remember writing songs like ‘Balloons’ and ‘Two Steps Steps’ and being like, ‘That’s too poppy. We can’t do that. All our friends are going to hate us if we play that.’ And then we did it, and they do all hate us!

“We formed to play house parties and to try to make some dance music because it was the thing that was most alien to us. And that should be the hint as to what we will do in this band. The reason that we formed this band was to do something that we were totally unschooled in. We don’t come from a dance background. None of us were real ravers. We got into techno about a month before we formed, and so the next record might be a Mongolian drum record because it’ll be like: ‘We’re not going to be able to pull that off; let’s try that.’”

SP: You set yourself a challenge each time.
YP: “Yeah, exactly. That’s why doing stuff with Dave Sitek and doing stuff with Four Tet is so important for us. That’s what we feel like the core of the band is – doing something that’s artistically fulfilling [a Four Tet remix will feature on the ‘Balloons’ single due December 10]. It might not be what the label want but it’s what we want at the end of the day.”

SP: Is there a constant push and pull with the label?
YP: “Not really, because they know that we’ll just kick their arse if they try to fuck with our shit. Seriously. This is something that’s actually evolved since we did our interview. There’s a whole gang now. Dave Ma [Stool Pigeon photographer, director of the ‘Balloons’ video] is, in my mind, part of the band. Tinhead, who does all our artwork, he’s part of the band.

“Dave’s doing all our videos from now on: he will do them all. We take a load of money from the label, and they’re like, ‘There’s this trendy MTV dude who’s going to make you guys look like total pop stars,’ and we’re like, ‘Sod that: let’s give it to our mate.’ And Tinhead as well. He was a binman – he got rejected from every art school, he’s a failed model, he’s got a lot of severe Aspergic qualities to his personality. And it’s like, ‘Tinhead, man: come along for the ride.’ It’s about keeping everything in the family, and the less we get involved in the architecture and the tentacles of the music industry, I think, the happier we feel. That’s how we keep grounded, because if you don’t do that the music industry and being in a band can turn you into a knob…”

To step into the world of Foals is to get tangled in a web of contradictions. They’re an avowed pop band with a taste for wild experimentation. They’re earnest and serious about their music, yet they insist they started the band as a joke. Their songs are meticulously crafted and they’re a tight, forensically precise live unit, yet when it comes to organising themselves – catching flights, preparing visa applications, being on time for Stool Pigeon interviews – they’re a 10-legged disaster area. They appear to bicker constantly, but it’s plain that they’re fiercely protective of one another. Mess with one Foal, and you mess with them all.

At the centre of it all is Yannis Philippakis: polite provocateur, hater of authority and tireless mischief-maker. The first time I met Yannis, he kept lighting cigarettes in the no-smoking dining area of a Maida Vale boozer, to the mounting irritation of the staff. Each time he was reprimanded, he’d pretend he simply hadn’t understood the previous time. Then he’d light another cigarette. The same spirit of impishness carries through everything he does and, by his own admission, leads him into trouble occasionally. He had his earring ripped out in a fight at the Reading Festival, and cheerfully admits that he deserved it.

Yannis claims to “dislike people more and more as time goes on”. When I ask if he was a super-aggressive teenager, he replies, perfectly, “Why, do you think I was?” Gentle probing reveals that, as a teen, he had a habit of getting busted for weed and suspended from school for fighting. However, he must have excelled academically, since he ended up landing a place at Oxford University to study English Literature (his favourite writers include Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams). He hated it at Oxford and has no regrets about dropping out after a year. “Full of squares,” he shrugs.

Within Foals, Yannis’s chief sparring partner is technical whizz-kid guitarist Jimmy Smith, the band’s resident loose cannon, who recently enlivened a house-party gig by chipping his tooth on his own guitar, spitting the chip onto the carpet and playing on. “Me and Jimmy particularly egg each other on to get in more trouble than the other one,” says Yannis. This dynamic is evident when Foals play live. The two guitarists play facing one another, sidelong to the audience, and their duelling melody lines and spasmodic dancing are huge parts of the sound and the spectacle.

It’s drummer Jack Bevan that has the longest-running friendship with Yannis, however. School friends, they shared a pre-Foals existence playing together in Oxford trio The Edmund Fitzgerald. Technical and unapologetically self-indulgent, The Edmund Fitzgerald were rooted in the math rock genre and their largely instrumental songs would sometimes run to 20 minutes. Though one Edmund Fitzgerald track survives – having been reworked for use as a Foals live intro – Yannis regards his alma mater band as a youthful folly, and claims not to have copies of any stuff they recorded, apart from the two split singles they released: a 12” with Bilge Pump on Noisestar and a 7” with Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies (now Youthmovies) on Vacuous Pop.

Youthmovies frontman Andrew Mears is Foals’ Pete Best. A founding member, he sings and plays guitar on the first release under the Foals name, the ‘Try This On Your Piano’ single issued by Oxford indie Try Harder in April 2006, which introduced Foals’ trademark knack of making guitars sound like eighties computer games. However, it was only after Mears left that keyboardist Edwin Congreave joined, Yannis took on vocal chores, and a pop sensibility took root.

Back to Jack. The ex-Edmund Fitzgerald drummer’s role in Foals is critical. Making heavy use of his hi-hat, he underpins each song with a driving dance beat, ensuring that there’s more movement on the floor at a Foals gig than any indie or even nu rave contemporaries could hope for at theirs.

Bassist Walter Gervers is a school friend of Jimmy’s and the band’s oldest member, though only two years older than Yannis (its youngest). Reckoned by Yannis to be the best singer in Foals, Walter forms a white-hot punk funk rhythm section with Jack, and he’s everything a bassist should be: tough, reliable, a perfect gentleman. It was through Walter’s friendship with staff at Truck Records that Foals first got serious, the latter having thrown down the gauntlet by offering the band a slot at the annual Truck Festival. Foals also recorded their first demo at Truck’s studio.

Completing the circular formation in which Foals play their shows is Edwin, whose stage presence is somewhere between Sparks’ Ron Mael and a pre-lobotomy Bez. Edwin differs from his bandmates in never having played in a band, or even played an instrument, before joining Foals. By Yannis’s account, this is the beauty of him. He listens to music with an untrained ear and offers a different perspective to that of a jaded math rock veteran.

“I was working with Edwin making Martinis for rich, unappreciative people in Oxford,” recalls Yannis. “He introduced me to techno basically – and all of us to techno – and we all started going to the same parties and then we were like, ‘Let’s make a band.’ If anything is testament to the lack of seriousness about the band, it’s the fact that we invited Edwin largely at first as a fucking joke. It was just like, ‘We need a keyboard player, you don’t have a clue what you’re doing: let’s make it work.’ I think for Edwin it’s been the weirdest, out of all of us. There’s no way that he envisaged himself being in a band. He was just my friend, we used to go out and we used to go dancing and get drunk and make really bad mistakes with ex-friends’ girlfriends.”

These, then, are the five disparate men of Foals. “The five of us are just this travelling, really dysfunctional family and it’s awesome,” says Yannis. “A couple of us have got autism, a couple of us have got asthma… You need to ask our tour manager. I know he finds it hard dealing with us. He sees it like a school trip gone wrong. That’s how this band operates.”

An experiment in communal living in Brighton didn’t work out (“We didn’t really make any friends, we didn’t really ever go out, we just ended up sitting at home watching Devo videos and getting high and stuff”). Yet for all their dysfunctionality, Foals are not afraid to assert themselves. In fact, they recently did so in circumstances they would dearly love to have avoided.

It’s time to talk Dave Sitek again.

SP: In a recent MySpace blog, you talked about mixing tracks on days off from touring. Has it been difficult getting the mix right?
YP: “Basically, what happened was, we left New York and we left Dave Sitek to mix the record and he did something to the record that we hadn’t envisaged at all and that we weren’t comfortable with, so we had to remix it. Which is a real shame, because he’s pissed off with us… Well, he’s not pissed off with us, but I feel almost like we betrayed him in some way. I don’t think we did, but that’s how he feels. He tried to make something very cinematic and very… almost cosmic-sounding. It was just too much for us so we decided we’d remix it.”

SP: Were the tracks too long and spacey?
YP: “Not long; just a lot of reverb. I’ve never been a massive fan of reverb. It just felt like, we were in New York and we did everything that he suggested because we were up for experimenting, and… the mix that came back didn’t feel like the record that we had left. It felt like it had taken a tangent. He executed his vision perfectly – it’s not like it was sloppy or anything like that. But it just felt like it wasn’t our record any more. It’s difficult: the balance between a producer and a band is really difficult. Particularly with someone like David. He’s got a big fucking personality. He’s very charismatic and very opinionated, in a good way.”

SP: So was it a hard phone call to make?
YP: “It was definitely one of the hardest phone calls I’ve ever had to make. To me, he was more than a producer. It was more like, while we were out there, he was a mentor for our band, in terms of everything: his attitudes towards the music industry, towards what’s important about being in a band, how you deal with touring for 14 months – this is all stuff that he’s been through. He’s made hundreds of records, and he’s a very intelligent human being. It almost felt paternal, his role with us, so it almost felt like dethroning your father or something. It was very unpleasant.”

Yannis tells a funny story about Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner listening to a Foals playback while on a visit to Sitek’s studio and not having a single thing to say about it. His confidence, however, has plainly not been dented. Nor have his energy levels: you can be sure that he’ll keep working on the record until it exactly matches his vision for it. But what, exactly, does he want it to communicate? Foals lyrics have always been opaque, to say the least. It’s hard enough to make out what Yannis is singing, let alone what it might mean. I’d always assumed the chorus of ‘Hummer’ to be a repeated “I command!” When I look it up online, I find that it’s actually “Oh, come on!” Unless, that is, it’s “Pokemon!”

When, after tonight’s gig, I ask Edwin, “What’s that song where Yannis keeps singing the word vessels?” He has no idea which one I might mean, and cheerfully admits that even he doesn’t know what Yannis is singing a lot of the time.

In the occasional flashes of clarity, the intrigue only deepens, thanks to Yannis’s intriguing turns of phrase. ‘Hummer’ offers this: “Your quiet heartbeats shine like millions,” while ‘Balloons’ repeats the line, “We fly balloons on this fuel called…”
Inevitably, Foals’ lyrical ambiguity turns out to be calculated.

SP: Is the album a confessional record? Are there a lot of personal demons exorcised?
YP: “I don’t know. It’s up to you to decide, I guess. There are no narratives. It’s very divorced from the current trend of lyric writing, which is writing about a boy who’s been wearing the same jeans for four days. It’s not really about that. It’s mostly about emotional things. I’m not really very into dealing with the day to day… I’m interested in cultural stuff a lot, ‘cause I feel personally very alienated, and I think a number of the band feel alienated, from 21st century western culture and consumerism. The last thing that I want us to do is become a political band, but I think even just on a personal level we feel quite alienated from things that are going on in our culture and in terms of a lot of our peers, and a lot of that feeds into the album. There are a lot of things about escapism on the album.”

SP Do you intentionally keep things ambiguous in your lyrics?
YP: “Yeah, of course. I think that’s what lyrics should do. Otherwise I think people become stale very quickly. If you listen to a song twice and you’ve totally nailed what’s going on in a song… I like the idea that it’s almost like a relay or something. You pass on the baton and the listener takes it somewhere different. I find that far more exciting than if I were to sing about the specifics of my childhood or about one of my friends who’d been in a car accident. It’s gotta be in some way more abstract, because I think it suits the music.”

SP: Does the band have to be ultimately a benign dictatorship with you having the final say? It seems like you’re the one mixing the record, for example…
YP: “If anyone ever has a problem with the mixing we just change it. I mean you could call it a benign dictatorship but it sounds quite horrible. We all just agree. Because even though we are all quite different, we all have the same aims in this band. We all share the same fundamental background in the kind of music we like. There’s not one of us that likes The Horrors, for example. None of us like music like that. We all have the same bedrock in terms of our tastes and in terms of the attitudes we have and the ethics and aesthetics we have towards music. The enjoyable part comes from the idiosyncrasies from different people. That’s why it’s more fun being in a band than spinning in space, like a solo musician: ‘Wow, this is my brain in sound form!’”

SP: With The Edmund Fitzgerald, obviously you were more within the math rock genre…
YP: “I find it funny that people still call us math-rock now. I did this interview for a Danish paper that seemed to think we were a math rock band. I was like, ‘Man, if only you knew what people who like that sort of music think of our band… To them, we’re dirty pop sell-outs!’”

SP: Is ‘Mathletics’ a sarcastic comment on that?
YP: “It might be… What the fuck is math rock, anyway? I don’t know what it is. I do like a lot of bands that are considered technical; I still like a lot of that music. My favourite band in the world, pretty much, is Sweep the Leg Johnny. They certainly don’t call themselves math rock but other people probably would. I grew up listening to Don Caballero and stuff, but it’s like… We formed Foals to piss off the people who are into that. Not piss them off, but just, that’s what we wanted to get away from.”

SP: The Oxford scene?
YP: “We just wanted to get away from it and actually have some fun. Because it had become very, very academic. I like where this band is now, because it’s pop but it’s not pop, and it’s kind of stupid but it’s kind of clever. To me, it just became a bit too purist, all that stuff. ‘Oh, you can’t have a chorus in your song because it’s all about the math. It’s all about the stop-start.’ It’s just like, ‘Back off, man.’ I like pop music. Please don’t shoot me. I’m not interested in DIY ethics any more…

“There isn’t even a math rock thing going on in Oxford anymore. Now you’ve got loads of noise bands, which to me is kind of interesting. It’s almost like prog then punk; in Oxford you like all this technical shit and now you’ve got just these crazy kids making fucking noise. That’s cool!”

SP: Has it been stressful recently, trying to mix the record between bouts of touring?
YP: “The touring is kind of relentless… I think we all get homesick quite a lot. We all deal with it by basically just destroying ourselves slowly… There’s a fair amount of recreational escapism. There’re just ways you have to deal with it. This is all quite alien to us so often we probably do act a bit obnoxious – I wouldn’t be surprised. We were obnoxious before, anyway. I wasn’t that pleasant a person to begin with. I don’t think I’ve got any worse but it certainly hasn’t made me any easier to get on with.”

SP: Does the on-the-road excess get, um, excessively excessive at times?
YP: “I don’t want us to be some cliché. I was never into Guns N’ Roses, put it that way. We’re not like real jockey tYP:es… To me, the alarming thing that’s happened in rock music is the infiltration of it by (a) fashion-tYP:e people and, (b) jocks. Like, guys that have blatantly played rugby for the last 10 years and all of a sudden they’re wearing tiny skinny jeans and these ripped t-shirts and passing themselves off as The Futureheads… They’re not who they say they are – they’re not like these weird people – they’re just average suburban kids passing themselves off as this thing.

“I understand the way that a lot of pop music works: Prince wasn’t born like Prince. A lot of it’s about myth management, effectively. But I think that, for me, what I always used to love about bands like Nirvana or whoever is was that you’d know they’re real and they are who they say they are. And we’re who we say we are and think there are a lot of other bands who are like that. But, to me, there’s no filtering in the press or by kids who get into bands: they’re duped. It’s not their fault. Bands have become incredibly clever at packaging themselves.

“I just find it very calculating in a way, and almost the opposite of everything that I ever thought music should be. Music should be a sanctuary away from calculating marketing and popularity contest-tYP:e stuff. If our shows are busy, we’re happy in some small way that 10 kids will go and read an interview about Q and Not U and Sweep the Leg Johnny, or they read about the fact that we didn’t have girlfriends at school because we were too busy smoking cigarettes and smoking pot and listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and all trying to grow beards when we were 15 and failing miserably.”

SP: Are there other bands out there that you feel an affinity with?
YP: “Yeah, loads. Absolutely loads… The very fact that we got signed and that there’re bands like Hot Club de Paris and Metronomy – bands that, in my mind, come from a sincere place – is a really hopeful sign. On a larger level, you’ve got bands like Radiohead… I think it’s a very impressive thing that they did with that record [In Rainbows]. I hope that maybe in the not-so-distant future it’ll get back to the point where bands are basically functioning off patronage and working with producers and just splitting profits off things and the more voracious industry element of it does get damped down a bit. And once that happens, we won’t get these prefabricated bands in such quantities. Or bands with the wrong motives. A lot of what’s created or reinforced the ability of bands to be fake is the trappings of the industry itself. They’re interested in snorting coke and getting laid and hanging out at fashion parties. If that goes, what are they going to do? They’ll do something else. They’re infiltrate the art world or the literary world.”

Yannis, it turns out, has a lot of time for the two bands to which Foals are routinely compared: Battles, who like the man himself have abandoned math rock for something more accessible, and Bloc Party, to whose singer Kele Okereke he is sometimes a vocal double (check out Foals b-side ‘Big Big Love’). Indeed, Yannis once personally promoted a Battles show in Oxford, and in mid-December his band will support Bloc Party at their massive Ally Pally shows. He’s grateful for the invite.
Plainly, a lot of Foals’ manic energy derives from the warm, fuzzy feelings they have for each other and for like minds. Equally plainly, a lot of it derives from hatred for swathes of the contemporary British indie scene. Yannis is never slow to vent his spleen, and tonight’s London Calling bill almost seems designed to provoke him. “There are certain bands who are playing here tonight who are just super-driven: if the music industry was school, they’d be the head boys, and yet they try and pass themselves off as rock’n’roll and nonchalant. It’s like, ‘Man, I know you go to bed at 10 o’clock and you’ve never done acid.’”

Who might he be referring to? Well, the band playing below Foals tonight is New Young Pony Club and, in a boon to sub-editors everywhere, a feud seems to be brewing between the two. Last year, obnoxious behaviour by the Pony Club at a gig in London led to Foals (and others) trashing their dressing room. Tonight, their sound engineer shows up in Foals’ dressing room to offer some brave talk about returning the favour. It’s hilarious.

Oh, and that comment of Yannis’s about “guys that have blatantly played rugby for the last 10 years”? That, it emerges, was a reference to Look See Proof.

It only damns them with faint praise to say that Foals dispatch the competition with ease tonight.

As they’re setting up, it occurs to me that Yannis might have been winding me up when he spoke of opening the set with a snatch of a Byzantine song-poem, and I’m relieved when he does. It means that the talk of a Flowers of Romance-influenced record featuring the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra might also be true.

Tonight’s set is more a document of progression than of any sudden shift in direction. Like all Foals sets, it’s intense, danceable and exhilarating. The jerky, propulsive rhythms and mantra-like French-language vocal of ‘The French Open’ send a shudder of excitement through the packed room, and there follows a dazzling sprint through the choppily malevolent upcoming single ‘Cassius’ (due January), the commercial money-shot ‘Red Sox Pugie’ (to be released as a single after the album) and the portentous pop of ‘Balloons’, which thanks to its video may usher in a new dance craze we’re calling ‘The Hummingbird’. Elsewhere, album tracks ‘Heavy Water’ and ‘Olympic Airways’ point to a deepening of Foals’ artillery.

Edwin breaks out the maracas for ‘Mathletics’, which cues up a bone-throwing closing trio of crowd pleasers, the other two being ‘Two Steps Twice’ and ‘Hummer’, retooled to reflect Foals’ changing aesthetic. By this point, the atmosphere in the room is such that I’m loudly berated by a drunk Dutch girl for not dancing enough. It seems I stand out.

I’m reminded of something Yannis said earlier, about the UK tour: “The shows have been really good and really wild as well – like, violent! This tour was almost like what I imagined the early nineties to be like. There’s just been something very special about the atmosphere – just people reverting to this primal state where they’re not worried about looking cool or anything and they’re just going fucking mental and getting onstage. Kids who would normally be all moochy moochy at the back of a gig are onstage ripping their shirts off. That’s the kind of thing that gives me a genuine connection which I think is great.”

There’s certainly nothing ‘moochy moochy’ about Amsterdam’s response. Though everyone’s kept dancing tonight, there’s a ferocity to Foals that emphasises the ‘punk’ in punk funk. Another Yannis quote flashes to mind: “I like bands like The Butthole Surfers and Swans and Skinny Puppy. Bands that have problems. Those are the bands that are fun.”

SP: And you’ve got enough problems in Foals, you reckon?
YP: “Mmm. Yeah. We’ve got plenty. It’s fine. We’ve got plenty to deal with for the next couple of years at least.”

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