This is Foals first ever cover story. Even then Yannis was an intense guy. I knew I had to go in with good questions, even though they were just one single in at the time. It was obvious from the get go that they were special.
““We played a squat in Elephant & Castle – there’s a photo of it on our myspace – and this entire wall got hit through with a fire extinguisher,” Yannis remembers with a smile. “There was a whole wall and a doorway into the basement where we were playing when we started. By the time we finished our set there was just a beam and rumble, and ketamine and squat juice. That was pretty exciting.”
Foals might like to play with the walls literally removed between them and the audience but Yannis also likes these house parties – and inviting the fans on stage for proper gigs – as they remove the metaphorical barriers around the band, the way that the hardcore punks would. At the Camden Crawl 60 kids shared the stage with the group.
With all those complex layers of melody it’s a surprise that they could tolerate a nudge against their musicianship. Is that extreme musicality something they work at? Yannis says not – they never make things more complicated for the sake of it. But it’s a dangerous game to play, being talented at your instrument – just look what happened to prog rock.
“Dangerous? No,” he says sternly, “because we have a modicum of taste. There are some amazing prog records and there are some terrible fucking punk records. Predominately we like communicating with people.””
Read MoreWithin about five minutes of Bat For Lashes first single arriving on my desk I was on the phone to get her on the cover, her first. This was the final of three times I interviewed her - a Q&A but she was on good form.
“You’ve collaborated in your songwriting for the first time on ‘Laura’. Was that a difficult decision to make?
It was quite hard. I think I’ve always been quite snobbish about it in the past but I wanted to see what it was like to work with someone that would push me a little bit in a direction, and teach me something that I didn’t know already. I feel that it was really nice to be collaborating with Justin [Parker, who has also worked with Lana Del Rey]. I had a brief. I wanted to write a piano song that was harkening back to those old 70s ballads, with a middle eight and traditional structure. But I always like to put my own angle on it, so the dark subject matter or whatever came through. And together we navigated it and came up with something that still sounded very much like me. I think it turned out really well. I’m happy with that song.”
Read MoreSea Power are Brighton legends. I put them on the cover three times and this was the final time, while they were still called British Sea Power, I interviewed them for their brilliant ‘Machineries Of Joy’.
“The whole album has a lightness that’s certainly a change of pace from the hour long ‘Valhalla Dancehall’. Yan says that he felt like some of their previous songs seemed like the band were “telling people off”. He reckons that things are confusing enough at the moment, that people need a break.
“When we started I felt like the world was kind of getting better, almost like a progression,” he laughs, like a man who has to otherwise he’ll cry. “But it seems like it’s all gone round in a big circle and it’s probably worse than it’s ever been now. So I felt like it would be nice if the record left you feeling better about yourself or about your life. It’s quite challenging for me to do that.””
Read MoreMartin Rossiter is a world class interviewee - clever, witty, charming. From years as the frontman of Gene, he absolutely knows what makes a good interview, and helps you get it.
“Sales might not come close to the million records sold by Gene but critics adore the LP. The Guardian called it, “an unlikely but often brilliant comeback,” while in The Times Stewart Lee announced that we’d “lost a 20th century indie band to gain a 21st century solo artist.” Martin must be delighted, especially to see it appear in so many best of 2012 round ups.
“I am,” he says warmly, now out of his frozen cover shoot make-up. “Back in the 90s Gene were never press darlings. I lie – we were for about two weeks. It was curious because our first record came out within a week of Oasis’ first single. It was a zeitgeist shifting moment and we found ourselves on the wrong boat. So to have the amount of critical acclaim that I’ve now had is astonishing. For a few weeks I imagined I was Adele, which I’ve subsequently proved not to be.””
Read MoreI had a great night out with Mo Wax’s James Lavelle in Romania. I know he’s got a bit of a, er, reputation, but we got on like a house on fire. This report is from DJmag.
“But the experience hasn’t been all plain sailing. Waiting for James to turn up in the less than glamorous Bucharest airport earlier in the day, he’s easy to spot, decked head to foot in Bathing Ape clothing and Futura scribbles. He’s also weighted down with a brace of the coolest record bags available. He smiles his way through a Fabric-fueled hangover, but it isn’t long before the lack of sleep helps shift his mood. There’s been a mix up, and Lavelle isn’t in the least bit happy. His favourite mixer isn’t at the club as planned, and instead he’ll have to make do with his most hated bit of equipment. For someone who claims to be ‘not much of a DJ, no Sasha’ it seems a bit much as angry phone calls are made.
Somewhere around the UNKLE album Lavelle started to get a regular kicking from the press. His ‘overblown’ longplayer ‘Psyence Fiction’ – featuring mates like Massive Attack’s 3D, Badly Drawn Boy and Thom Yorke – dared to go beyond the underground hip hop clubs where he was worshiped. The media had spent the last few years asking Lavelle what they should tell their readers was cool (“Star Wars figures? Great. Futura graffiti? OK!”), but now they’d changed their minds. The Mo Wax boss was getting too big for his boots, they said, he was arrogant and needed taking down a peg or two.”
Read MoreI interviewed Metronomy before they broke through with the flawless The English Riviera. I ought to work in A&R really. The photos were by Tom Beard. As good as these pics were, I sacked him and he went on to direct pop videos for FKA Twigs, so maybe I’m not a pop culture Nostradamus after all.
“If it all sounds a bit ramshackle, like Cliff Richard’s “Let’s do the show right here!” that’s probably cos it is. There was no money to do “anything proper” so Joseph Mount enlisted his cousin Oscar and former bandmate in The Customers, Gabriel and tried to make as much of a show as they could, with as little finance.
“We were trying to do it so it’s not your average electronic thing and so that we could enjoy it ourselves,” Joe explains. “Oscar, who plays keyboards, happens to be the best dancer in Brighton, so he was employed as a keyboard player and choreographer.” Joe admits that people either find it really enjoyable or absolutely hate it, to the point that they can’t bare to watch it. Which, he says, is fair enough. The community’s reaction on Youtube to a typical performance, for example, of Are Mum’s Mates (keywords: Metronomy, Halloween) says it all.
“Can someone stop them?” exclaims Jumpinjp “Please stop them. It’s cunts like this that give dance a bad name!””
Read MoreIt’s not always musicians, sometimes I interview real people. Caroline Lucas is super real.
“Can normal folk even get the government to listen to us?
It’s really important for people to think that their voices can be heard and that their voices matter. One of the biggest myths that governments put out is that individuals are powerless, and that’s a very effective myth. The very first step is believing that you can make a difference.
What are the main ways people can make themselves heard? Does the old ‘writing to your MP’ actually work?
Don’t underestimate writing to MPs, even if you think your MP already agrees with you it is quite handy to be able to have the evidence that you’re speaking on behalf of a large constituency. There are all kinds of other ways, particularly through social media. We’ve seen the rise of 38degrees.org.uk or Avaaz.org – different ways of bringing communities of interest together around particular issues. They’ve been incredibly powerful.”
Read MoreI got super excited about Traams - they were amazing live and the first album was all I hoped it would be. This was their first cover story.
“What makes the band so special is that they take a garagey style of punk and inject it with both pop and krautrock. At its best it’s incredibly powerful, as on their debut album’s closing track, ‘Klaus’. Kicking off with a riff like Weezer’s ‘Hash Pipe’, disorientating vocals give way to Stu’s jabbing guitars and a rhythm section that’s happy to sit on the same throbbing groove for seven minutes and make you never want it
to stop.
Onstage it’s a powerhouse of a tune, allowing Stu to punch melodies out of his guitar while the crowd stay entranced by Leigh’s rolling bassline and Adam’s Neu!-like drums. If there’s a better live track played in Brighton this year we’ve yet to hear it.
“I think we always wanted our sound to feel like it was constantly moving,” explains Stu. “It was always about pushing it forwards.”
“I remember in the early days Stu saying he wanted to make it really pulsey, like dance music,” Adam says.”
Read MoreThe Wytches are one of the funnest bands I’ve ever interviewed. Opinionated and outrageous, even though one third of them was almost too hungover to speak.
“From there, talk turns to a night in Lincoln that started with Gianni having sex with a girl in a lift and ended with one of their mates pissing in a hoover and throwing it out of the window. That hardly fits with the dour, moody band that everyone seems to want to paint them as. Hardly an interview goes by without the phrase “We hate…” popping up, and while they’re happy to lay into anything that doesn’t impress them, The Wytches are far from the angry young men that people want to portray them as.
“The music does get pretty intense,” admits the likable Gianni, “but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re a band at the end of the day and it’s supposed to be a laugh. We do have a laugh most of the time.””
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