Dark Side of the Falco

Two years after dropping their debut album into the musical ring, <b>Future of the Left</b> returned for round two last year with the brilliant <i>Travels With Myself and Another</i>. Andrew Falkous came out fighting (eventually) to take on writer’s block, success haters and pin-dick journalists, The Skinny steps up to referee before they hit King Tut's this month.

Feature by Darren Carle | 01 Jan 2010

Andrew ‘Falco’ Falkous is not your usual frontman. The Future of the Left mouthpiece possesses a razor-sharp wit which, more often than not, manifests itself in casual jibes towards extreme violence. Among fans, he is well known for his biting put-downs to hecklers, while his regular blog rants are equally legendary. All of which belies a socially purposive and politically astute mind, which is clearly evident once you get accustomed to his inimitable, snarling syntax. In short, Falco could hold his ground in debate with any heavyweight politician, though he’d probably be imagining ramming a screwdriver into their eye socket while he did it.

So, finding the man himself at his mother’s home, looking after her cat and sounding rather subdued, takes a minute for The Skinny to adjust to. “I could feed you a glamorous line about how I’m encased in the bowels of some rehearsal room, ripped to the tits on a cocktail of drink and drugs and writing our third album,” he helpfully offers. That’s OK, I assure him. I’d rather just talk about the cat. “Yeah, it’s all about the cats,” he admits. “And the dogs as well. But cats just win it in a photo finish.”

It’s a throwaway statement that, with a little journalistic flourish, could prove a fitting analogy for the bands two studio albums. As tremendous as their 2007 debut Curses was, there’s a sneaking feeling that, with some context, last year's follow-up Travels With Myself and Another pipped it to the post. It’s a situation that even the band themselves doubted would ever happen. “We definitely reached a stage where we felt Curses was going to be almost impossible for us, as three musicians, to top,” reveals Falkous. “But with any record, if you’re bringing a certain amount of self-respect and pride in your work to the table, you need to shed the skin of the previous album. It’s not so much revolution as evolution, to give the album an entirely different character.”

It may be a groan-inducing cliché, but it certainly sounds as if Travels... was a classic ‘difficult second album’. “At one stage it looked as if we couldn’t write a fucking song to save our lives,” admits Falco. “We were right on the edge of sticking our instruments up each others’ arses. Then you write a couple of tunes and go through the looking glass, the pressure fades away and the entire album drops into your heart like manna from heaven.”

Whilst Curses was hardly over-imbued with long intros or extraneous bridges and guitar solos, Travels found the Cardiff trio cutting their wares back to the bare bone whilst ramping up their already considerable volume levels. “I think Curses is a bit nastier sounding in that it’s a little bit sparser and ‘twistier’, but I think this album’s a lot bigger sounding,” he reasons, before qualifying himself: “By bigger I don’t mean in terms of its commercial reach or any fruity shit like that – literally in the size of the songs. It sounds like a lot of the songs were conceived in crumbling Roman amphitheatres.”

However, as seems par for the course these days, fans were privy to Travels... through a leaked mastered copy some two months before its actual release. Falco is unequivocal in his distaste, not just around issues of illegality and theft but in his mourning for a lost sense of occasion. “It’s like finding out your birthday party is being celebrated and you weren’t invited,” he laments. “There’s a whole ceremony to the release of a record – to anticipate a record firstly, to buy it on the day it comes out, read the lyrics and the liner notes on the way home on the bus, then to put it on and listen to it and to call your friends and share it with them. Now it’s all about it being put on a torrent site by some guy called Jakey1981 who lives in Wisconsin who got it from some pain-in-the-arse, pin-dick journalist from Southampton who doesn’t even like the band but wants either the kudos or the money from selling it on eBay for twenty-five quid.” Ah, that’s more like the Falco we were expecting.

Despite his humorous spin, it’s obviously a sore point for a band whose very financial viability is, according to Falco, up for almost monthly revision. And having endured his previous band Mclusky’s complete lack of success, he’s not prepared to let Future of the Left suffer a similar fate. “You’re not meant to try and be deliberately successful,” he mocks. “It’s not very cool to want it to go well, you know. Well fuck that! I’ve put everything into this record and I want as many people to hear it as possible, and I want as many people to buy it as possible, so I can stop living in poverty like I’ve been doing for ten years. Absolutely fuck being far too cool to actually want it to succeed.”

As ever, it’s a refreshingly honest diatribe that makes the love for one of our genuinely favourite bands all the more palpable. Thankfully though, Falco is equally as impassioned about where the band is now and shows no signs of cow-towing to secure such success. ”We’ll leave some people behind,” he reasons of the band’s progression on Travels. “Hopefully we’ll pick up some new people as well, but it’s where the band want to be and crucially it’s the band’s favourite record. That’s how things really work on any kind of inspirational level – when the people on stage are playing their favourite music.”

We couldn’t agree more, and when the band in question are Future of the Left, they just happen to be playing our favourite music too.

Future of the Left play The Tunnels, Aberdeen on 17 Jan and King Tut's, Glasgow on 18 Jan.

Travels With Myself and Another is out now on 4AD.

 

http://www.futureoftheleft.com