Foals: Communication Breakdown

It’s strange to think that it’s been a mere matter of months since the release of Foals debut album Antidotes. The Oxford based quintet have enjoyed a stratospheric level of hype for some time now; such things as albums don’t seem to be necessary to confirm a band's existence in the hearts and minds of the indie world these days.

Foals aren’t fazed by all of the attention, or if they are, they’re doing a good job of hiding it. Did the continual intrusions of the music media affect the creative process? “No not at all, most of the songs were written before we even got signed,” explains keys man Edwin Congreave, “and this hype, if you can call it that, was at the end of the last year after we recorded the album. Well, I guess it was an ongoing thing that just built and built but by the time we’d gone into the studio it was only present really to us, it wasn’t difficult at all. I’m pretty sure that in the future if hype weighs on us it won’t be hard. We look in on ourselves; we don’t look out that much. We don’t see what’s going on in the music world or what people are saying about us.”

I call his bluff and ask whether the band actually does read its press. “Well, obviously we do,” Congreave contradictorily asserts. “I don’t know any musicians that don’t read reviews. We try to take it into context, how people describe us, because they usually are quite a way off from how we’d describe ourselves and keeping that distance enables you to have more room to make what you want to make rather than what people are saying you’re making.”

Video: Olympic Airways

The outside world’s skewed take on the band doesn’t stop at the music in Congreave’s eyes. When asked about a recent post on the band’s website in which he declared that Foals officially endorsed Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the American presidential nomination, he becomes irritated: “None of our songs are remotely political," he snips. "Our blog is more of a joke, I get really frustrated with how seriously we get taken and unfortunately that post prompted a lot of people to generate official news items about it. I care, in that I think the election is interesting, but we’re not political.”

It seems Foals' main focus is on what’s immediately within their threshold. At its heart, this is a live act, which Congreave readily admits. “When we play live it’s the only exercise that we get and by the end of the show you’re totally locked in and can’t think of anything else. Our guitarist has a habit of vomiting purely because of physical and mental exhaustion -it’s not like he eats badly. In New York he vomited at the end of the show all over my suitcase that I’d carefully put behind my keyboard. This was on stage. He had to take a break for one song and vomited up steak and a lot of liquid. It was a shower of vomit, it was amazing.”

Brollies at the ready - you've been warned.