Loud and Quiet presents Midnight Chats.
Good evening listeners, Welcome to tropical February in London. It's weird and it worries me, and welcome to the first episode of a brand new series of midnight Chats series seven no less. Three years since we recorded the first of these conversations with a microphone we brought off eBay, we are still going, still going strong. Those tuning in for the first time, I'm not sure where you've been maybe doing something more important, which is completely under standable,
but this is what we do. Our podcasts are relaxed chats with musicians who we think have something interesting to say that loosely have a late night kind of vibe and that's it. It's not overcomplicated. Sometimes it's me Greg doing them and sometimes it's Stuart. And when we're not doing this, we're making a magazine and website and videos and it's called Loud and Quiet. It also has a
website which is Loud and Quiet dot com. But with this new run of Midnight Chats, there will be a fresh episode every Thursday, dropping at midnight for the next ten weeks or so, and I can promise you that this spring twenty nineteen series features guests that are at least at least as good as those that we've had on before. There's sixty three of those previous episodes now, so do fill your boots if you have a particularly quiet weekend coming up. Anyway, feel like this is a
really good one to begin on. Most of the time when we're recording these podcasts, we're meeting the artist for the first time, you know, we have a brief talk about the weather, make them a cup of tea, and then turn the MIC's on. But my guest on episode sixty four is someone I've known for quite a while now, about twelve years, i think, and he is Yannis Philipakis, singer with Foals. I was lucky enough to be covered in Cheap Beer at and write about a number of
the band's early shows. These days, over the course of releasing four brilliant albums, they've very much outgrown playing illegal squad parties. Instead, they now headline festivals. Twenty nineteen is a new era for them since twenty fifteen's What Went Down, original bass player Walter left the band, and they've self produced a pair of new albums that they will release this year. The first of which which everything not saved
will be lost. Part one is out on March the eighth. Now, this chat is quite fresh, recorded just last week, but awards week in fact, in a slightly echoey photo studio in South London. In it, we talk about drunk Russian tourists with fireworks, Yannis's recent visit to a Greek monastery, social media Stormsy's upcoming headline show at Glastonbury, and why his mum Yannis's mum changed the locks on the family home's bathroom door. What's left to say? Well, it's good
to be back. If you like what you hear, please do rate and comment and subscribe wherever you listen to this all that stuff, But here we go the first in a new run of Midnight Chats. This is yanis from False Jannis. Welcome to Midnight Chats.
Good to be here, Thanks.
For coming on. How has your day been so far?
It's been good. It's been quite long, been chatting. Did some photos?
You know, all of the luxury problems that a man and a band faces.
And this week is a busy week in the music industry. There was the brit Awards this week. Did you go to that?
No, I didn't.
I've been in the rehearsal studio and basically, yeah, we've been hammering it out for like six seven hours a day and then come evening, go for like a pint and then it's back to who just wiped afterwards?
So we didn't go to anything. Also, it's the Brits.
Yeah, well you went a couple of year nominated and went a few years aga. What was the actual experience?
Like, it was good.
I just remember being you know, it's like it's just pretty full on. But it was fun. I liked the spectacle of it. The food was slightly into par What did they say of that night? I remember, but it was something on crute right.
Okay it was it a bit like wedding food, like when you go.
To Yeah, like wedding food, but made without the love.
Okay, yeah, so but anyway, it was fun and then the party, the after party is always quite fun. They always get quite hedonistic of the borch and you always like meet Liam Gallagher at three in the morning and he's screaming at you wearing a white leather beret.
Which is good, sounds quite fun. Twenty nineteen shaping up to be a big year. For foals. Obviously. Where did the year start for you? Where did you actually see in twenty nineteen?
I was in India?
Okay, yeah, how was that? On holiday here?
It was great. I went with my partner and it was great.
We got fireworks shot almost directly at our head by a load of highly inebriated Russians who earlier in the evening had been wearing Santa Father Christmas hats and drinking taputin while watching his annual address to the Russian Populace.
It was fun.
It was on a beach. I'd never been that close to a firework like. I mean, they were literally they were exploding at hare height.
So this was no like organized fire displayed. This is just people setting off for random It.
Just mainly acts on a beach full of vodka setting stuff on fire.
It was great. I felt like it was a symbolic start to the year.
Did you spend Christmas in India as well?
No?
I had Christmas in London and then went to Oxford on Boxing Day and then yeah, I went to India and was there for a bit and it was great. I've never been before, but I loved it. I'd like to go back and where did.
You go goer?
Basically it was Mainian goer, So yeah, the first bit of the holiday was yeah, in Russian trance party land with relentless one sixty ppm kick drums and fireworks coming at my.
Head and dubious, dubious shrimps and prawns.
I was just saw of baby hammerhead shark on a fish blatter and I was absolutely horrified.
So I was walking out of like a hotel resort type thing.
They had like the catch of the day on ice, you know, and there was your usual snapper and mullet, you know, there was there was classic there are your classics, your classics, bear did bream, and then there was just nestled in amongst you know. The more prevalent catch of the day was an actual baby hammerhead shark, and I've I've never been more disappointed in a fish fish selection ever.
I just thought it was just outrageous.
On all of your travels over the years, what's the weirdest thing that you've tried in terms of food?
Yeah, usually I voyeuristically watched Edwin because he's kind of.
The most intrepid first person in Yeah.
Yeah, he has kind of no sense of self preservation when it comes to food. I've watched them eat horse ice cream in Japan. It was frozen slices of horse meat and we ate it after a show, So imagining that that's that's then going to float on a belly full of vodka Red Bull at the time, which is what the drink of choice was before the shows.
Horse ice cream.
He also ate on the same evening, he ate squid testes or squid eggs or something.
But yeah, he was a glutton for punishment that night.
It was the same like Jack passed out in the restaurant from jet lag, and we we fed him bits of squid and we drew a little, gave him a little French beard, a little little cyrano number, a little GotY And he's never forgiven us for that, all right.
He still brings it up there, Yeah we have.
Yeah, it occasionally resurfaces on the internet. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty safe eater.
In terms of travels, then, since what went down, he had a bit of time off and then you came back to recording and making a new record. Personal travel like going away for fun and not for work as you do all the time. Where else have you been in between what the last couple of years, I mean your adventures to India with some mad Russians. But where else is.
I went to Cape Town a couple of times. I got some family there, so I went there and that was cool. I mean, I always find it kind of an ambivalent experience going. I love it, I love the landscape, but the social injustices out there, Like I didn't never find like it's not.
I just always feel it a bit. I love it as a place and I always.
Have a great time, but you can't help but feel that things are not right there. And then the main place I spent time in was Greece. I went to Mount Athos, which is like a monastic community. It's like a peninsula and Greece, and it's been a monastic area for over a thousand years. It's twenty eight monasteries there. You have to like get a special ticket to go there. You can only go by boat. They have a customs border.
It's like so it's got its own island.
It's no, it's it's it's on land, but you can they don't let you go through the land border. Only men are allowed, and it's only been men for like a thousand years.
And it's pretty intense. There's like, it's a pretty intense place.
What is the lifestyle, like the people that.
It's just monks. It's only monks that live there permanently. They have some and there's maybe a few people that live there to help the monasteries or but it's only monks, proper monks.
It's very it's very austere.
So I've gotten this boat from a place called Ranopolis, which is and it's kind of it's north of Athens. It's like you go from Thessaloniki and you go along and you get this boat from the first thing you notice is that on the boat it's only men, and it's is it's very strange.
And monks and the day tripping monks on their way back or they've.
Been, you know, they might have been on a I don't know, they might have been to criticize the pope or something because they're Greek Orthodox mostly there's some Russian Orthodox as well.
But and then the boat does some stock.
A lot of the monasteries are on the sea and they have their own like jetties or their own like harbor, not Harbor's, but they're their own docking stations and we got off the one that I was staying at, and there were these it was just something out of the Middle Ages. There were these monks in like these smocks who were going through their fishing nets and they had sea urchins. They'd been catching sea urchins and there's some fish and then you're there and it's like it's just
full on. They had their own their own clock, they have their own time system. It doesn't align with what we consider to be the twenty four hour clock. They're thirteen days behind in the calendar. The food is spartan. The place we were at, what they were like no phones, no drinking, no smoking, you can't talk, and meal times you're up at three in the morning.
To go to like services. That the thing I enjoyed. I love the music. I love the spiritual singing.
It's going to say, did you go there with a view to going on like a kind of mind retreat? Was that the idea?
Yeah? Yeah?
And also I was just I was thinking, I just felt curious about it as a place because it's just a kind of in the same way, you know, I want to go to Mongolia. I want to go I want to do trips that I feel like interesting basically mind expanding.
Yeah, I just yeah, that's the kind of travel I enjoy.
And Mount Athos is just somewhere where I was attracted to the ancientness of it and and the austerity of it, and the landscape's beautiful. You know. It's like most of these monasteries were built like fortresses. They looked like castles because of the piracy.
In the Mediterranean. Yeah. I went there partly to.
I like, after touring, I like to do to put myself in a situation that's going to freak me out, Like it is going to be the most direct contrast to tour and to all of the excesses of the road is to go to a spartan ancient monastic community and feel myself, you know, crawl.
Purging the tour experience, cleanse the body.
Yeah.
And then yeah, did you find it useful? Did yeah come back feeling refreshed?
Yeah, I mean I came back feeling like different, you know, And I enjoyed this.
Kind of like.
Changes your sense of self when you're there. You know, you think about who you are when you're in London. It's like you're attached all that there's all these attachments we have as people when we're in a kind of developed society in terms of fashion and our phones and like how we slot in, we think about ourselves in these ways. And when you go to something like that, like all of the coordinates and moves and you're just just this person, you're just like a You're just a human.
And I enjoyed that.
And yeah, and the music, like the singing, the Byzantine singing, I find it.
I think it's cool.
Did you snap out of those habitual things like that we all have checking your phone every minute?
Yeah? I had to, Yeah, because it just wasn't any signal. I try.
I tried to get online, just rapidly, rabidly trying to make it work like a crack addicts.
Yeah, did you just did you remind you that you've just got a dependency on those kind of things like most of you huge.
I had that in India as well. Actually there wasn't really much WiFi where I was. And yeah, just quite quickly you realized that I read, you know, I started to read books instead, and I was again and I used to be a voracious reader. And one of my main disappointments in myself is that I feel that I don't have the discipline or the attention spam that I
used to whilst in proximity to the Internet. So I find the Internet overridingly seductive, and I don't feel I have the will power to withstand it, and that.
Really bothers me.
Actually, one of the things I enjoy about being forced to be with that WiFi is I remember how much I enjoyed living without it, you know, And and the time passes differently, reading books and just enjoying that feeling of just being a person that's out of reach is enjoyable.
Did you see the Nils Farm stuff this week?
Yeah? I did, Actually I saw that yesterday.
What did you think of it? So this bit if people are listening to this and they don't know what that is. Nils Farm, obviously big celebrated musician known for his kind of largely sort of ambient music work, said this week, I'm going to start I'm going to come off social media, starting with Facebook. So I don't like the idea.
That which is the nafest one, isn't it Facebook? Yeah, they get rid of the Facebook first. It's the nafest. It's the easiest one to cull. Probably, which is the least Nath probably Instagram. I feel like Instagram is the one that's a bit more edgy, bit more hip.
Yeah, you're probably right. And so he said he's going to come off of these one by one because he doesn't like the fact that that ultimately they've become the way that he speaks to his audience, and he disagrees with their politics and the morality around those services, and so he's coming off and he wants to communicate with the fans in a different way, in a more direct way.
Yeah, what's going to be interesting is how he tries to or how how are you how he replaces it. I think about getting rid of social media a lot, and I what I've done is get rid of it from my actual devices quite often.
As ink you go through and you'll just delete I'll just delete that.
Yeah, I'll just delete that.
And I'm close to deleting Facebook permanently. And then I have I think this is what you feel ransomed like. I have people that I communicate with through Facebook, and without it, I probably wouldn't communicate with them at all. And that's the that's the little catch that keeps me ransomed in And I guess Neil From is reacting to that, and I applaud him for it. I wonder, I wonder
how it's going to work out for him. But I think that social media, they they sold us like a utopian technology and actually it's just a kind of conniving business as any of that. They're just harvesters of how emotions. And having said that, I'm a total sucker for it.
But I think that's the issue, though, isn't it. Everybody feels pinched between these two things.
Yeah, but that isn't that in itself.
They've made us feel like that, you know, And I think that, So I think good on From for kicking back on it and trying to deliberate himself. We'll we'll see what he replaces it with or how he will. You know, they just have such a monopoly on it that it does just feel wrong.
But at the same times you feel kind of but both just on a.
Pragmatic level, that you'd be losing touch with people and that would be bad for your your project or whatever it might be the use it for. But also but it is addictive, so you feel the lack of it, you know, you feel the loss of the little serotonin kicks you get from it, from Marty from Warsaw you know, liking a post yeah yeah, or Barry from Bogner retweeting with a comment.
Yeah, going to be an interesting experiment. I kind of think I watch it with interest in like a year's time, to see whether it has any effect or whether he feels better. I mean, ultimately that's that's probably what he's going to measure it by. It's just if he doesn't feel like he's beholden to it and he's still also Zuckerberg.
It's like, particularly with Facebook, I mean all of you, all of them, but like Facebook is so.
It's so clearly like morally they just don't care neither.
They don't care, they don't pay tax as Zuckerberg didn't turn up to the MPs wanted him in for that selecting mete. He just doesn't give a shit. And I just think that it's a hard company to like Facebook. They just seemed they just seem like they just seem like the devil's work, don't they a little bit in
a way They do though, don't they? And also all the Cambridge analytics stuff, the fact that they don't they don't seem to have a responsible attitude to how how information and with political ramification as are spread.
They just don't. They don't care.
There's no social responsibility there, they don't. They don't care.
Do you think they care if loads of people decided they were going to.
Yeah, if it hurt their bottom line, it would, But I mean it would require probably what like hundreds of millions if not, I mean, I don't know how many billion people.
Are there billions of people.
More than there's certainly more than a billion people.
Yeah, so it would require hundreds of millions of people to quitit or to be up in arms in some way.
Yeah, they'd take notice of that many people did it.
Yeah, we should talk about some music. Sure, So, got a new record coming out next week. It's the first of two albums you're released in twenty nineteen. It's ten tracks. Ultimately you've recorded twenty tracks. There's ten tracks on each album. It's another one coming in the autumn. When you were working on all of this music, what made you eventually land on the idea of putting out two albums of ten tracks as opposed to doing a double album, doing
a massive, long playlist style album. Why why settle on what you've decided to.
Do it just felt right really like, I don't I'm not a massive fan of double albums. There's only probably only one or two that I can think of that I like. Even when I like them, I always feel that the good tracks are overshadowed just by the sheer volume of stuff. It's like a Dickens novel. It's always a bit too long. It's like a bit of a ton You.
Pick it up and then you have to just put it down and finish it another time.
Yeah, and you just think like, oh, cheers. You know, couldn't you have like given it to me? And I don't know, Like it just feels like you're burdening the person.
So we didn't want to do that.
And yeah, putting on one just I don't know, I just didn't feel I just want a sense of proportion to it. So and also we felt that there were kind of two We felt that there were two bodies of work within the bigger body, like that could see that there was two opening tracks, two closing tracks, two centerpieces, and that there was a distinctive palette, and there were songs that didn't go well together.
There were songs that one of the.
Concerns we had when we were at the final stages of recording, was like, how will Black Bull go against Cafe?
Like how will they be on the same record.
There's such different, such different entities that how are they going to ever make something that's coherent? And we want to make a coherent, structured record that's got a great journey from beginning to end. And so the way of doing that was to separate out the tracks that didn't work together, and that formed two better cohesive, standard part records,
but that also fundamentally exist in the same world. I don't feel that you've got to the end of the album until you get to the end of this the end of the second album.
For me, the full the real closer is the end of the second album.
I feel that I'm done with the world, which is the end of the Part one is like the cliffhang. It's end of series one, and there's like dot dot dot to be continued.
That's how I think about it.
It's called Everything Not Say Will Be Lost Part one and Part two. So thematically, is it fair to say that it's an album or it's a pair or a pair of albums, One body of work that explores the idea of Nintendo, Nintendo permanency or lack of permanency, the things that we might lose if we don't knowish or cherish or continue to develop. Is that is that fair? And if and if it is, what kind of things are you talking about in that respect?
Yeah? I like the phrase. I didn't.
I came across the phrase at a certain point and didn't didn't think about it as being an album title, and then it was one of those mind worms or something that kind of get in and you. It would just recur at times. I'd think about it and I was like that it just stuck with me, and I like that. I liked the fact that on the surface it's really banal and it comes from this kind of cold, un sexy digital place of just reminding you.
It's like it's like a digital chore chare master.
But then it's obviously got these these massive romantic resonances underneath it, like you're talking about, And Yeah, I just thought that it's summed up a lot of the concerns on the record, and that as a slogan.
I like big, big words in album titles.
I like big titles, you know, Like I think that that's clear probably from the titles that we've chosen to we like big words. It's not a whole lot of nuance necessarily in the album titles, you know.
I mean, they're quite.
Falling back on just calling it an album foles yet, which is fine, which some bands do by the time they reach album five.
I don't like it. I've never liked that. I think five.
Yeah, I think that your only the only time to do a self titled release is your first one. I take umbrage at bands that do it later on in their career because it's just smacks of laziness. Let's not get down that road. But but yeah, so yeah, I just yeah, I think it just sums up the themes and the lyrics.
You know.
He talks a bit about how you had a vision in your head when you were writing some of these songs about the hollowed out centers of our towns and cities, the sort of decimated high street vy can replaced by automation,
and you know, lack of people and communities. So I wanted to ask a bit about your memories of you know, do you do you have a sort of nostalgic reminiscence when you think of like going to the center of town when you were like younger and I don't know, going into our Price or HMV and like those that feeling like a sort of center of your universe.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I mean, I you know, I always enjoyed going to town as one of those kids.
Was like, I'm going to town month Saturday morning.
Yeah, Saturday morning, get back tonight.
Get on the bus, you know, sort of loiter with all the other oiks down outside that they collect be or whatever, and you know, put get get a Labrett piercing, you know, drink some w k D that you get some some man you hassle, yeah, outside bottoms up or whatever.
I was absolutely like.
That, and I made some great friends and some enemies through that type of physical architecture that used to exist, which was like record stores in Oxford definitely was like record stores. I used to love going to the bookshops, and there was great, great bookshops, none of which really exists. There's any a couple. I mean, there's still some great bookshops,
but not like it used to be. Yeah, and I made friends through that, and I felt like I was attached to or as part of a bigger kind of cultural or subcultural group that was attached to these physical landmarks that exist.
And to me.
On tour, you know, if we're in a city and I know, I can go out and I can walk around, I don't care what the weather's like. If I can go and walk around, I can get a cup of coffee, and there's some record stores and there's some bookshops. I enjoyed that process of discovering a city feeling like there's those types of sanctuaries in the city. To me, a city without that type of shop is it's all just prep otherwise, Isn't.
It stays a bit of your heart sink when you just walk past another phone shop or yeah, pound store or an Amazon locker union.
Yeah.
Maybe, you know, maybe for somebody else, a phone shop phones for you, they get off on that, you know, and that's where they want to hang out and they want to talk to other people about the latest android. But for me, I find that thoroughly, thoroughly depressing proposition.
So yeah, I just was attracted to this idea.
Of putting these these scapes into the songs. And definitely like the neighborhood I live in London's there's lots of Foxes.
I know this fox is all.
Over London, but I feel like there's a particularly precocious brigade of foxes where I live. They've almost formed the union. It feels like they're just out there in marauding teams, but.
You can always hear them.
Yeah, I mean in mating season.
It's like yeah, and I just yeah, I wanted to I wanted to represent them in the record. I want to to represent the old, decaying Victorian railway bridges and the litter and the foxes and the weeds that are springing up, and the weird foam they put in in shop windows when it's closing down, but you know, some Moreley's chicken bones out clogging up the drain and that
type of like particularly British detritus. I just wanted to tap into that and then and transform it into something that's beautiful that forms the landscape for the songs in a way.
Let's talk a bit about you getting out on the road again, because I know you're excited to do that because it's been in Foles terms quite a while since you've been out since the last record. Walter's obviously left bass player Walter are on good terms and you're not going to replace with a new permanent member. But you have got Germany from everything everything coming out with you to as a touring bass player. Now that you've started rehearsals, how's he slutting in?
Yeah? Yeah good.
I was teasing them about is she is yesterday? So I think that's a good signifier that he's fitting wearing crocs. No, he likes these Clarks. He prefers them as dance or shoes. I like these Clark's desert boots and to me they look like tee towels that have got a cereal box steak to the bottom.
But he likes them, he says. He tells me that the Vibes Cartel wrote a song about them.
But you know yet, I'm yet to hear it.
Is he on day one when he came in with you, did you give him like an initiation? Did you like after the day?
I didn't give him the look on the first day the look the look be taken to the side.
Before he started.
He made some mistakes.
He made some mistakes on the first day and I spared him the luk. But come come tuesday, he got the luck and and the.
Way that he dealt with.
The look was going to be symbolic of how he how he's going to continue for the rest of the year.
Do you think he how is he going to adapt to the Foals way of touring.
I think he's in a relish not having to wear one of those tight tunics he's got to wearing all the time and everything everything, probably boiler suits something.
Yeah, I've been teasing, but that would be like telling.
That he's got to still wears everything, everything outfit, the mechanics outfit he's got.
No. I think he's you know, I think he's really exciting.
They've been you know, jokes aside, they've been great to he's been, he's been great.
To want to do it.
I can't imagine wanting to go out on another tour after having already been on tour phrasers and certainly touring with us as a is tiring and fun. But you know, but are we going to take it out of him all right? I'll be surprised if there's much left of him for everything, everything to use afterwards. We're going to ring him out like a sponge.
If you're just like handing back and just broken, Jeremy to it yes, just just a mop. Why was it not right to replace Walter with a new permanent member of the band.
I just couldn't. We couldn't. We couldn't even envisage who that would be.
You know, the band to us is the five of us, and now with Walter gone, it's the four of us, and.
That's just what it is.
It's just like it's you know, it's a family. It's like you can't just sort of graft somebody onto it. Also, now you know, there was more room to maneuver in them recording.
It was kind of liberating in us having that extra root leg room.
Walter was a tour guy and he took a couple lot of space, and now it's it's better extra oxygen now.
Yeah, yeah, then there's more bunks in the bus.
You know, each of us get a little bit more money, and there's more space in this stud there's better oxygen.
On the tour in front. With the release of two albums this year, have you considered doing any shows where you're going to play both albums in their entirety, say, with an infal in the middle.
Yeah, maybe we haven't really got to that stage yet, but I hope that towards the end of the touring cycle, once both albums are out, that we will do some sort of perhaps something special as it were, where we do the two albums. Yeah, and then maybe with some old songs, you know, in the encore or Yeah. I think that would be cool, But we don't really have
a plan for that. All we really know at the moment is I think we're going to largely focus on album one for the first half of this year, and then you know, we probably won't play any tracks off album too, and let until it's out. Oh okay, Yeah, I think we're going to wait because partly in rehearsals, we just there's so many old bangers. We still want to play that without the show becoming too and you know, we don't want it to get onto like cure esque lengths of three.
Outs darting at seven o'clock in the evening, and I.
Mean, I just don't know how he's got the energy for that. I just can't. I can't.
You know, we want to play, We want to play great shows, and also just think, out of respect for the music, it's better just to hear on record first most rather than on somebody's MP two upload.
I'm not going to pump you for information about what festivals you are aren't doing. I'm interested to know big movie music events happening later this year. Obviously Storms, he's head down in Glastonbury for your first time.
That's wicked.
Yeah, I was going to ask, what do you think of that?
I think it's wicked. I like Storms a lot, and I think that it's good. It's just good for British music in general. It's good for grime and like UK hip hop, but it's also just good for British music.
It's just fresh, it's exciting.
I'm interested to see, like how the show will be and how, you know, how he's gonna It's a big crowd, like to command. I'm sure he'll do He's going to do a great job, but it's definitely like something where you go you've got it's one hundred and you know how fifty thousand people in that crowd in the Pyramid stage.
So but I think it's just yeah, I think it's good.
I think Glastonbury's bills are great and I think it's important that a festival of that size can champion relatively you know, he's not really that new, but it's not like he's not a heritage actors.
He so I think that's good.
It's like they're taking risks and they're creatively pushing boundaries in terms of their choices, and it's alongside, you know, alongside the more classic choices.
But I think, I think that's cool.
I've got a theory, or rather I've got an opinion that Glastonbury should only ever book headliners once because I think like there's a special energy about getting that chance once. And I don't think an artist has ever gone back to Glastonbury a second or a third time as a headliner and never been better than.
The first time. That's interesting.
Is there something to be said for What I'm interested to know is when you get to do things multiple times, like, for example, once you've played a venue more than once, is there a special feeling you get from doing something for the first time, Like would it be thinking, you know, you played a show at Wembley Arena for example a few years ago, would you go back to Wembley Arena? Would it be the same if you've turned up there
for a second time? Or is there something kind of inescapably exciting about doing something for the first time?
I think if the show is great.
We've had shows there's not even necessarily a big show, but we like there's one. There's a couple of like smaller shows we played back in the day where we just had great shows there for whatever reason, they just there was a vibe. And then we went back to those venues for a second time and totally it always it never exceeded the expectation, And it's very rare that you ever like.
Because you build up in your mind.
So I think there's something there's something magical about doing something the first time. Unless you didn't feel that it was you didn't have that really, you know, I don't mind playing the same place twice. It's just if you're trying to chase this magical, magical event that you can, you can find that it's it's crestfalling or something.
But yeah, I think that lightning any strikes once.
Right, That's what they say They say that, yeah them, Yeah, those people, yeah them.
Not because we've known each other a long time. I'm just interested to get a few thoughts on just obviously you're here talking about a new record that you're about to put out, but the very early days of fALS We've talked about this before, but.
You're always going to take it back to Guildford or wherever it was, don't the Star and.
Garter half of Marquee.
Yeah, it's just it's like, yeah, exactly, love it. What was that band that we played with?
And they they they like came with their sort of Sony publishing deal and there they're matching moccasins and it was like they had a huge There was a lot of branding and it was all preemptive, wasn't it, because no one can remember them now.
I don't know who the band was that night, but yeah, I remember they did bring they.
There was there was like a backdrop and stuff.
There was you know, a Thursday night in Harvard and it was about twenty five people there.
Yeah yeah, yeah, good times.
Yeah exactly. I mean that's the question really fond memories, like what what? What are the vivid memories view of just those first like eighteen months of foals before antidotes came out.
I mean.
It was exciting, it was pretty wild. I remember being pretty cold a lot. We were we had this red you know, we had this would saved up this postal Vans read postal ban and Jimmy managed to open the top of it like a tin candlid by going into a car park that was too low and then we just froze our asses off from this thing. And it
had a brain as well. It literally had this sort of exposed circuitry that we were using as an astray and we were listening to a lot of Kitsune Kitsune mixtape, mixed CDs or whatever and Edmund's closed on the back. I remember there was always there was always you'd go to get get a piece of music equipment. It would always be you'd always get a bit of ed and Edwin's sock, a loose sock attached to an amp or attached to a plectrum. And yeah, that was kind of
the vibe. There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of anticipation. I felt that we were onto something exciting. We were kind of nervous, we were like anxious about the future in some ways.
And we were, but yeah, it was it was a good time. It was a good time.
It was also contrasted by like going out onto the road for these kind of long weekends and playing and then go back to our parents' houses in between and there was something very There was something like conflicting about going out and being like men of the road, where boys of the road and living it up and then going back kind of tail between the legs, back to mum and then downplaying everything that had happened and asking for.
Money as well. I've been like Mum and I borrow a tenor.
I remember being broke, like we were super you know, everything costs us money and we were making our own badgers. Everything was quite diy. I remember like putting a lot of time into all of that.
It was good.
It was a good time. But I definitely am glad I'm not still having to deal with Edwind's loose socks.
What would your mum say when you went back home and you were like, I just played the house show at four am in in Elephant and the Castle. Would she be excited about that? Or would she be like, can you not make so much noise when you come in next time?
Yeah, my mum.
Actually, we used to have like metal you know, we had the locks on the bathroom door were with there were metal you know, they were like a key type system, and my mum changed it to this tacky plastic one. So it wouldn't wake her up. But I think that was saying quite a lot. My mom wasn't that particularly. She was quite stomic about the band. She was fairly.
She's quite guarded about it, unlike say Jimmy's folks, who have always been like, they come to the shows they like, they rock up with the Foals gear, you know, the Foals shoes to the full on, like decked out in merch and my mom in the audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my mom has only come to like a couple of shows, not because she doesn't like it, but just do you think she.
Just wants to give you the space.
No, I don't think so, because she doesn't like to give me space and other aspects of my life. So I think it's more just that she she finds to.
Midnight Chat is a loud and quiet podcast production by Emma Snook Music courtesy of gold Panda. Search Midnight Chats on iTunes for more episodes and to subscribe. For more information, visit loudanquiet dot com