Foals Forum

im not saying they are the same, just two examples of nme predicting the new band saving british music

Anyone see the articlein the observer's music monthly mag ?

It's 11pm on a December Saturday night, and there's an ominous rumbling in the bowels of Manchester's Piccadilly train station. Underneath the tracks, in a cavernous bunker, nearly 2,000 people are dancing in the murk. Gurning faces loom out of the dark like gargoyles. The chemical tang of poppers sours the air.

Onstage, Oxford five-piece Foals are barely distinguishable from the audience, scruffily dressed in threadbare jeans and cheap plimsolls. Their 10-song set, fizzing with nervous energy, possesses a lean funk sensibility. It is, essentially, an unfolding fusion of the pared-down explorations of modern jazz, the avant-garde textures of post-rock, and dance music's pulsing beats, all of which, quite possibly, means absolutely nothing to the kids crammed against the barrier, high on enthusiasm. There is no denying that this is whip-smart art.

'It just feels like you're protecting a lie. Retro indie-rock records take you to a place that is entirely fantasy,' says Foals' 21-year-old Yannis Philippakis, sipping on a pre-gig Negroni in Manchester, a taste acquired while working in an Oxford cocktail bar. 'It's like coffee-stained picture postcards from the Sixties. It's a shame that people feel so alienated from the present culture that they need to find security in something that is long dead.'

Apart from guitarist Jimmy Smith, who has a geography degree from Hull, Foals are university dropouts. Yannis and keyboardist Edwin Congreave quit Oxford after spending their first year in the St John's college practice rooms with Jimmy and fellow bandmates Jack Bevan and Walter Gervers. 'There were violins and shit next door,' he chuckles. The band share toothbrushes, beds, pants and shirts. In Yannis's words, they are 'as tight as five males can be, without descending into something that's more than platonic'.

In 2007, two years after they got together, Foals received acclaim for two singles, 'Mathletics' and 'Hummer', both of which were released on indie label Transgressive. Characteristically, they've chosen to leave the songs, their best known, off their album Antidotes, which is due in March.

As befits their background, Foals are champs of intelligent hedonism, their rider staples the Guardian and packs of Marlboro Reds. And while, live, they take their inspiration from high-velocity disco devilry, their album is a more artistic affair. Recorded in a sunless concrete bunker in Williamsburg, New York, with TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, the 11-song set is heavily influenced by afrobeat, even featuring voodoo brass from Brooklyn's Antibalas. As such it rubber-stamps the suggestion that they are utterly unafraid of making clever music. Clever music that is quite brilliant.

The son of a Greek instrument maker and an anthropologist, frontman Yannis is a self-confessed control freak. He blabs on at length, his thoughts spiralling off like sparks from a Catherine wheel. Every so often he covers the microphone when he slags people off and says things like, 'You're not going to put this in. Seriously, if I see one thing about it I'm going to freak.' He's neurotic and self-conscious, but also fiercely bright. In his early teens, Yannis fronted the smart-arsed, but musically impenetrable, band the Edmund Fitzgeralds. During school holidays, they'd take their complex math rock around the toilet circuit in peripheral northern towns. He began Foals with best friend Andrew Mears (now of post-rock group Youth Movies) as a response to the seriousness of the Fitzgeralds and as an irritant to Oxford's 'very insular, self-applauding, neo-prog scene'. Their plan? 'To form this pop band that makes people dance and then we'll play at house parties and steal all these people's girlfriends.' An idea that has come to fruition, he reveals. 'Yeah, that's happened many times over. We call it stealing ex-friends' girlfriends.' Still, Yannis takes the notion of being a rock star very seriously.

...

The last word goes to Foals motormouth Yannis Philippakis. 'The moment that the tag 'this band is going to save rock'n'roll' started, that was when you knew rock'n'roll was dead, man. Optimistically, our band in some small, quiet way stand for something that goes against the super-sexed, super-consumerist, over-packaged music industry and comes from an authentic place.'

Why did British music need saving ?
Its been by far the best for the last 40 years !
unless you prefer emo rock or acoustic chrisitan rock or rap metal, then the americans beat anyone !

And if Britihs music DID need saving i wouldnt put it in the hands of eithe rof those bands, but i have met them both and they are all nice people really.

...in other news, I well fancy dricambo.

Did anyone notice the spazzy half of Jack's face in vogue?