They’ve Got The Cure | Who needs TV On The Radio? Foals remixed Antidotes all by themselves.
Bloc Party w/ Foals
Sep. 9 (8pm). Edmonton Event Centre, WEM.
Sold out.
Nobody wants to be in a “buzz band.” And Jimmy Smith, 24-year-old guitarist for British post-punks Foals, is no exception.
“I fucking hate that word,” he says. “It really pisses me off. I hate it. See, in England we’re not really a buzz band anymore, but in America we still are. What we’ve been told — from people who’ve succeeded and failed — is that a lot of people will come to your shows because you’re hyped, you’re in NME. The hardest thing is to go back again, without the hype, and succeed, which is what we’re trying to do.”
That split between success there and relative obscurity here puts a strange damper on our interview, since most of the things I want to ask Smith about have long since become public knowledge in Britain. He seems understandably tired of talking about the pressures that come with being a hot young musician, and why the band was unhappy with the original mix of their debut album Antidotes (done by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek — coincidentally also in town this week) and decided to remix it themselves. And I’m sure he’d rather stop talking about how cool singer/guitarist Yannis Philippakis is. (Placed 45th on NME’s 2007 Cool List! Appeared on hit U.K. music quiz show Never Mind The Buzzcocks!)
But the fact remains that most North Americans have never heard a Foals song, let alone the story of a certain altercation in July with a certain Sex Pistols singer, who allegedly made racist comments to a certain high-profile Foals tourmate — an incident that got Philippakis arrested as a result. So I ask Smith about it.
“Yeah, we were all there,” he says. “It was at this festival in Barcelona, and it was really early in the morning, like 4 a.m., and we were about to go to the airport. None of us saw it at all — we just saw [Bloc Party frontman] Kele [Okereke] getting beat up by this big guy, basically this big bruiser. So we jumped in to stop it, and then there was a huge ruckus. [John] Lydon was there, and he was pretty wasted, acting like a total asshole. I didn’t hear [him say] anything racist, but I trust Kele. I’m sure it started off like that. It was pretty horrible.”
Tabloid stories aside, here’s what you need to know about Foals: they play the kind of spiky, tightly constructed rock that might remind you of fellow Englishmen The Futureheads, or the aforementioned Bloc Party. The guitar lines duel, the drums are crisp and relentless, and Philippakis’s heavily accented vocals come in cryptic, yelping bursts. Antidotes takes that sound and stretches it a little, adding a brass band and shades of droning ambient music. These additions make the record sound nicely eclectic and expansive, but, according to Smith, they’re difficult to translate properly live.
“It’s something we’re struggling with, but we will conquer it,” he says. “We want to be able to play two kinds of live shows. At the moment our live show is really frenetic, and raw, and heavy, and almost punky in places — which is great, but we want to sit down and actually make some beautiful music live as well.
“Also we’ve been playing the same set for nearly a year, and we’re starting to play places we’ve played four or five times before. People are going to start being like, ‘Fucking hang on a minute, I swear I saw this last time.’”
Unless you live in North America, of course. Edmontonians still have the chance to see Foals for the first time when they open for Bloc Party this Tuesday, riding high on buzz and critical acclaim, and before the inevitable wave of backlash hits. And, really, isn’t that the best time to make up your own mind?
