Foals find legs on Holy Fire
FOALS’ Jimmy Smith is worried. “Everybody seems to like our new songs,” he says. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I keep expecting to wake up one morning to a backlash. You find yourself thinking, ‘this is way too good to be true’.” He speaks from experience. Seven years ago, Foals were the hot thing in British independent music. The NME adored their zeitgeist punk funk (this was when the magazine’s endorsement counted), MTV and the BBC radio were cheerleaders. The hype was clamorous.
But Foals never wanted to be one of ‘those’ bands, the sort you hear non-stop in Topshop for six months, then forget. So they played hard to get. Interviews were refused, television offers rejected. Sometimes, says Smith, it’s smarter to move away from the spotlight.
“You’ve got to be wary,” says the guitarist. “There are so many ways to expose your music, nowadays. It’s important not to overdo it. People say you should agree to this newspaper thing, that spot on TV. Occasionally, the cleverest step you can take is to say ‘no’, even if it feels crazy. What you don’t want is for people to grow sick of you before you’ve put a record out. We were just talking about it the other day — what happened to all those bands who started the same time as us? Most seem to have slipped by the wayside.”
Concentrating on their music, Foals released two acclaimed records, 2008’s Antidotes and 2010’s Total Life Forever. The first was a blistering mash-up of indie rock and dance music. The second was even better: a sad, strange concept album about 20-something angst and post-modern paranoia.
“The presumption was that we would go and make Antidotes a second time,” says Smith. “That if something is successful, you’ll turn around, do it all over again. We never wanted to take that course. For us, it would be a huge waste of energy.”
Total Life Forever was regarded as risky, an avant-garde curve ball that could have ruined Foals’ reputation. It proved to be the making of the band. Critics who had dismissed them as a triumph of haircuts over tunes were smitten; fans were delighted to see the Oxford five-piece mature. It wasn’t long before an old problem surfaced. The band fretted they were growing too popular.
“We had the option to continue touring Total Life Forever,” says Smith. “Let’s be honest, live performance is how musicians make a living, nowadays. As I said, though, we are very wary of over-exposure. You have to watch how you go. The best bit of advice we got was to just disappear.”
They vanished for 18 months. No live shows, no tweets from the studio, no sneak previews of their new songs. People thought they had broken up. Everyone forgot about them.
“We were anxious. It’s such a brutal, relentless industry. To disappear ... it can seem like suicide. We really had to hold our nerve. In the long run, I think it was for the best. The best advice we got was someone telling us, ‘just stop’. We could have toured for another year. Then you get over-exposed,” he says.
They put their time away to good use. New album, Holy Fire, is overseen by the super-star production team of Flood and Alan Moulder, best known for their work with U2, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins.
“It was the first time I became star-struck in a studio,” says Smith. “These guys produced Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, by Smashing Pumpkins, for heaven’s sake. That’s the record that made me fall in love with music. It was an amazing experience. If you write a song and those guys like it, well, there’s a pretty good chance other people are going to, too. The relationship we had with them was fantastic, very collaborative.”
Foals have had their ups and downs. They row frequently, Smith says. Maybe that’s good. Resentments are aired so don’t fester.
“The most dramatic thing that could happen is that one person would feel alienated for a while. Then, we would bring them back into the fold. It is natural, if you are dealing with five people, you aren’t going to agree all the time. We’re sort of like the musical Waltons. Whatever happens, we try to end on good terms at the end of the day,” he says.
One reason Foals have endured, Smith says, is that they have never forgotten their roots. “Coming from Oxford, you don’t belong to a particular scene. The people you come up with are the bands around you.
“We know some amazing musicians in Oxford, and those are the individuals we measure ourselves against. They are idols to us. Maybe it helps keep us on our toes.”
Smith is tremendously enthusiastic about Foals’ new album, which he says is the group’s best to date. However, he seems jaundiced about the music industry. It has a habit of sucking bands up and spitting them out, he says.
Smith’s advice to young groups is to focus on building a fanbase first and not worry about a deal. You need to make the record label work for you rather than the other way around.
“You hear horror stories of young bands who have a record contract and a publishing deal, and all this stuff. But they’ve never been on tour before. And then the label says, ‘actually, there’s not much money, would you mind driving yourselves?’ And they’re like, ‘no way. I want it to be rock’n’roll. I want to party’. That’s not how it works. You have to be coming from somewhere.
“Our advice is to start on your own terms, before entertaining the idea of a record deal. And don’t just meet one record label. Meet a lot of them.
“That’s what we did. It gave us a sense of what they could do for us and, more importantly, what we wanted out of the whole thing. You have to keep your head and know what you are about if you want to survive in this business,” Smith says.
*Holy Fire is released February 8
