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When you’re at the stage of your career that Foals are, says Yannis Philippakis, you realise what you are missing. You can be, like Foals, a genuinely big band — all their six albums have reached the UK top 10; they can fill arenas; they headline festivals — but you operate with the dangers reduced. There is a management structure around you, a record label behind you, booking agents and promoters running your tours. There is no risk. The possibilities are known, rather than boundless.
“I feel I slightly sentimentalise nostalgia, how fast the time has gone, and how far away from the past I feel,” says Philippakis, Foals’ 33-year-old singer, guitarist, lyricist and de facto public leader, drinking coffee and smoking in the garden of a south London pub on a brisk Monday in early autumn. He is recalling Foals’ beginnings, in Oxford in the middle of the last decade, when they formed part of a scene of groups in the city indulging in the recondite, twitchy subgenre known as “math rock”.
“I didn’t appreciate how exciting and fertile it felt to be young and part of the scene, and to feel that what you were doing was, or had the potential to become, part of the cultural zeitgeist. It’s not just that, though. It’s the sense of endless options, the endless unknown, and also risk and things being precarious.” When Foals began, he says, “We saved and bought a Royal Mail van. I booked our shows, we made our own badges, we’d book a tour in a half term, and then we’d throw a house party afterwards. We made our name by being nimble, doing guerrilla house parties that could get out of control.
“There’s something about the organisation and the plotting of it now that I don’t find in any way exciting. But that’s how it has to be. Now that we have actually succeeded I feel proud and I think we’ve made some great music, but there is a kind of safety there that we’re trying to wrestle with.”
Foals have tried to wrestle with safety this year by defying conventional wisdom and releasing two albums within six months of each other. Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost — Part 1 came out in March, reached No 2 and was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Part 2 follows later this month. The first record was loosely concerned with strife and conflict and the sheer bloody awfulness of things; the second deals — equally loosely — with the personal reaction to and aftermath of that. They are, Philippakis agrees, more or less the apocalyptic and the post-apocalyptic records. Though they sound more like a beefed-up Talking Heads than, say, Metallica.
The lyrics to this second album are twitchy and paranoid — on “Wash Off” he contemplates, wonderfully, the possibility of people assuming he has died in a plane crash in the Pacific. Was that just to tell a story, or is that the way he is? “The pH of my brain is that twitchy and that paranoid.”
There’s an edge to him that has cropped up throughout Foals’ career, and which, around the time of the album Total Life Forever in 2010, manifested itself in a series of self-flagellating, soul-baring interviews, which upset his family and which he now regrets. Things got better for him the following year, when he fell in love, but you don’t need to push too hard to get a sense of his unease. He notes, for example, how it is now impossible to make new friends, and it would be a lot harder for him to fall in love with someone.
“A lot of the people you meet are through the band, and then there’s a kind of hierarchy.” A power dynamic, in the sense that you are the guy in a big rock band, and they aren’t? “Yes, a power dynamic that doesn’t allow for the sense of playful equilibrium that is important to meeting someone and falling in love. I haven’t made many new friends for a long time. All of my closest friends are people that pre-existed the band, definitely. I’ve made new acquaintances. But it’s definitely a different thing.”
He says he used to use interviews as a form of counselling: “There’s a therapeutic quality in talking to strangers who are listening and asking probing questions. But that then being turned into the printed word that is discarded a few days later is cheapening something. Particularly when it’s private issues that are important and sensitive.” Now, though, he has got better at recognising his own problems and how to deal with them, rather than spilling them out for the benefit of whoever happens to pick up a newspaper.
“I definitely feel that I’m having to start self-determining when things are going too far,” he says. “I didn’t know there’s anyone really around me that is looking out for my health. I’m obsessive. I have character traits that aren’t necessarily the healthiest. I have to now try and put up parameters about things, and nobody else will do that for me. And that’s a problem in the music industry in general. So I’m having to be more mindful of that. Because I don’t want to burn out. I want to make music for 15 or 20 years, and I don’t want to be a husk. But there’s a part of me that’s attracted to oblivion as well.”
When Philippakis was first trying to put together groups, he used to woo potential bandmates in the same way people wooed the opposite sex in the days of C90 cassettes: by making mixtapes. First there were tapes of metal bands, then industrial groups such as Skinny Puppy and Einstürzende Neubauten (“No one wanted to be in that band”), and then noisy art-rock and post-rock bands like Sonic Youth and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And you can hear something of the mixtape in Foals’ albums, especially the two Everything Not Lost albums, which encompass fairly gnarly rock, skittering electronics, funkily tropical music and more. Even in the age of track streaming, the notion of the album, the long form work that encompasses an arc and tells its listener a story is Philippakis’s love.
“I still think about music on the album scale,” he says. “I don’t think about individual songs, I think about trying to make a body of work that sits alongside other records. There is something of inherent value in the album. Being able to live with music for longer than three minutes. And for things to unfurl themselves, and to have relationships and interactions between the songs. There’s something rich in that, that you don’t get by having just these disembodied pieces of music that are slotted into some larger grid.”
Just like making a mixtape, really. Except now he doesn’t need to recruit band members with them.
‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost — Part 2’ is released on Transgressive/Warner Bros on October 18
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