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.””
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“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.”
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“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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