Interview with Foals - March 13

If you read the unabridged version of this interview online, Foals’ bassist Walter Gervers talks about their new album, ‘Holy Fire’ going on “a little bit of a journey.” It’s a fair statement; it’s as if the tracks of this, their third album pass the baton between each other, themselves an aerial view of the Foals journey so far. To take their two lead singles as an example, ‘Inhaler’ soundchecks the formative Foals years, with casual yelps and at times, anti-narrative lyrics, but then ‘My Number’ clunk clicks itself into a pop-friendly groove, with linear progression and all the funk of a Chromeo record. It makes their overall patchwork quilt of three albums a joy to explore, and is why four years after our first, we interview Foals again, ahead of their Norwich jaunt.

How are you doing today Walter?I’m good; a bit busy, bit busy, but what’s new?!

Doing loads of these interviews, I imagine.Yeah, just a few!

I am sorry about that, I know it must be hideous.No, it’s fine, honestly.

We do appreciate your time again – we interviewed Jack about four years ago.Oh wow, OK - that far back?

Yeah, it’s been a good while since then, and album three’s now on the way, I can’t believe it!I know, I know, it’s amazing. It’s been a real work in progress for a long time, and now it’s only a few days from release. It’s weird; it creeps up on you in the end.

You’ve done really well to keep it under wraps. There’ve been no leaks, I don’t think…Well no, I think there actually was one, but we managed to control it with the help of the label and stuff. I mean, it’s typical, it’s so likely to happen nowadays; people just can’t be trusted. It’s a shame as well, because people think that they have some right to do that and it’s like, ‘c’mon, at least let the band release their own record after so much work.’ It’s a bit of a shame, but I think we got away with it… almost. Hopefully people who understand will buy it.

When you said you “controlled it”, you sounded ever so slightly sinister. What did you do to these people?![LAUGHS] Yeah, we disappeared them! [LAUGHS] No, no, I think there was just a certain link which was up somewhere from the label so that people could get it in time, which spread like wildfire, but if you can close them down, then… But yeah, I can honestly say that something happened, but it was alright; it was controlled…

[LAUGHS] Still sinister… Well I feel sad, and out of the loop because I still haven’t heard the whole thing yet. It’s been that tightly guarded that only one of our team could hear it! What excites me though is that I read a quote from Yannis that said this album “…has the greatest internal diversity within it.” Were those your intentions going in to it?Well, I think yeah, the intention to make a varied and interesting record is always the main aim. We didn’t want to make an album that was 11 tracks of the same thing, so yeah, it does have a lot of variety in there. I think there’s some really honest, straight-forward pop songs in there, which is something we haven’t really explored too much before as a band, you know, just leaving things simple, and not over-complicating certain tracks, and then there’s other tracks which carry a lot more weight, like ‘Milk’ and ‘Late Night’, ‘Providence’ and things – those are the bigger, weightier songs. And then there’s small moments of quite intimate, quite beautiful moments, like ‘Moon’ at the end of the record. We’re really pleased with the variety of it; I think that’s really important, as an album. All our favourite records are ones which have a lot of colour to them, and surprise you, you know, you go on a little bit of a journey from start to finish. I think it’s more rewarding to make a varied album as a whole piece, rather than a couple of individual tracks.

Just to talk about a couple of those tracks from the album though, Alex, our writer that got the pleasure of reviewing your album, suggested in his review that ‘Providence’ would “break you in half” if you weren’t expecting it at a gig… Can you elaborate on what Alex might have meant by that?Well, it’s got kind of quite a fierce ending to it, which is a sort of fun, meathead riff, which is the sort of thing that, as a band, we always play around with almost light-heartedly, you know, playing heavy, stoner riffs or quite rocky kind of things. It kind of shows our confidence coming through really; we’re not trying to take ourselves too seriously and ‘Providence’ is just one of those songs that we thought, ‘well, why not?’ If the end can break into this quite heavy riff that suits the song, then that’s how it should be – we didn’t try to soften it around the edges, or anything. That was kind of a product of being in the studio with Flood and Moulder, who have these backgrounds in making big rock and industrial records, you know. They were just like, ‘you know, go for it. If the song goes towards it, then let’s explore that fully’; like I said, not blur the edges, but yeah, ‘Providence’ is one of my favourite tracks atctually. It came out of this a capella, almost gospel like vocal thing which Yannis had, then it’s got this nice, choppy riff behind it. It’s actually a bit like early Foals, but it’s just got this sort of up-to-date twist on it, I suppose.

You just mentioned using Flood and Alan Moulder as producers – when I spoke to Jack all those years ago, you were producing ‘Antidotes’ yourself, and now you have those guys! They have such a breadth of experience – what knowledge did they impart on you, or give you the confidence to do?Well it’s funny, because they both adopted quite different roles, which I assume is what they’ve done before as co-producers as well. Flood is very, very hands-on in the room, up to his elbows in the actual structures of the songs and he’ll definitely be like, he won’t worry about the sonic details because in the other room is Alan Moulder sitting behind his desk worrying about that kind of thing. So as a duo it’s really great, and you have the confidence that anything you’re doing in the room that’s being overseen by Flood is being recorded in the next room by Alan in the right way! They have this quite weird, telepathic thing between them that they’d agree on a lot of things without it really needing to be said. It was really great; we just made sure we had this honest communication with them so they could say, you know, ‘this is crap’ or ‘trust us on this track’, because it’s very easy when you’re personally involved in all the songs to really change your tack or your opinion on them, which is something that as a band we’re quite guilty of, like we’re quite neurotic. We’d go home after recording some nights and take things away and say ‘oh no, we’re doing this wrong’ or ‘this is too fast’ or anything like that, so to have people like that behind you, who you really trust who can just be like ‘no, that’s OK’ or vice versa, be like ‘I know you guys are really in to this, but it’s not working’. It was definitely a perfect combination to work with them; it was a real joy.

You were saying earlier that you had a tendency to overthink things, but I read another Yannis quote that said for this one, “we wouldn’t analyse it or intellectualise it, we just wanted to strip all the waffle away”. Do you feel like you’ve been guilty of this before, because from a public and fan’s perspective, the previous albums have been lapped up without question?I think the majority of people would agree with you, but there’s always going to be people who haven’t been in to it and we pick faults in our own last records, and I think that’s natural as well. But yeah, I’d say that what he means is that not taking yourself to seriously thing and realising that actually not everyone needs to play on every song, or not every instrument needs to be used. It’s very easy, in a band, to just slip into your natural roles and actually, you need to break away from that a little more and certainly, a couple of tracks on the record, particularly at the end, ‘Stepson’ and ‘Moon’ are the products of not requiring the whole band to be playing and they benefit hugely from that. And then there are other songs that need the five of us all there as the ingredients. So yeah, we’re just learning how to do that a lot more now I think, you know, this is only our third album and each experience is so uniquely different that you take different things away from it. Hopefully we can continue to work like that and keep making different, varied, interesting records, ‘cause that’s what you want – if you’re a fan, that’s what you want your band to do; you don’t want them to repeat the same ground.