Foals interview: ‘Brexit feels like an act of self-harm’

Frontman Yannis Philippakis was accused of being a Leave supporter after an interview he gave in 2016. On the eve of the release of the band’s first album in four years, he tells Hannah J Davies that his words were misconstrued

Foals (left to right): Jack Bevan, Jimmy Smith, Yannis Philippakis, Edwin Congreave (Alex Knowles)

Difficult. Brexity. Beardy. These are just some of the words whispered to me by people who’ve met Yannis Philippakis, now 14 years and 1.7 million album sales into his career as the frontman of Foals. There are plenty of interviews to draw on, too: ones where he seems like a Made in Chelsea character (“I find whisky sours without angostura bitters in them bothersome”); ones where he’s jokily pretentious (“I’d like us to make an experimental polyphonic Greek noseflute record”); and ones where he’s just a lad (“Our shows wouldn’t be the same without [booze] … it’s sometimes slightly drunken mania”).

I’m not sure what to expect, then, as I head into his local in a rare, ungentrified corner of Peckham, south London. Inside, the clientele – average age, 50 – are awaiting an open mic night. Philippakis appears in a green Barbour jacket with corduroy collar, looking like a city accountant on an away day. He’s affable and unassuming, with diva demands extending only to a request that we sit outside so he can occasionally take a drag on an e-cigarette (he’s trying to cut down on the real thing).

Of course, a lot has changed since Foals formed in 2005 – playing raucous Skins-style parties, touring in an ex-Royal Mail van, and peddling angular, arty post-punk at the nation’s toilet venues. For one, most of those venues don’t exist anymore, nor do the majority of the mags and club nights that kept them in business; for another, the indie movement is no longer a continuum of long-fringed teenage boys in dingy rehearsal rooms, but 12-year-olds teaching themselves Logic and emo rappers with face tattoos.

I half expect the singer to get a bit dewy-eyed as he recalls dropping out of his English degree at Oxford to join the skinny-jeaned circus, leading to rites of passage like headlining Reading and Leeds, two Mercury nominations, and, er, going on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Unsurprisingly, it was a whirlwind, with standout memories like a scuzzy squat party down the road in Camberwell in the Antidotes era (it was released in 2008), where “a whole wall got knocked in ... it just felt great, not specifically the wall but being part of something that had that youthful energy that was on the verge of being dangerous”.

However, there’s also a lot of relief mixed in with his nostalgia. “Indie bands were two a penny back then,” he says. “At that point, guitar music was more in the cultural spotlight, and I think it’s not a bad thing that things have moved on.” Even so, he’s clear that he doesn’t like the closure of record shops and rehearsal rooms, which he sees as a “denuding of the landscape ... what are you living in afterwards? It’s just Prets.”

At least, he says, Foals “carved out our own space”, which allowed them to keep shapeshifting long after many of their contemporaries probably did become accountants. If Arctic Monkeys went down the “dad’s LP collection” route, then Foals were rifling through an older sibling’s Radiohead CDs and, later, a younger sibling’s metalcore cuts, with a back catalogue that lurches from the ambient swell of “Spanish Sahara” (from 2010’s Total Life Forever) to the stadium throttle of “Mountain at my Gates”. The latter is from their last album What Went Down, released in 2015, when much of the press coverage focused on the frontman’s love of jumping off balconies during shows, and the jetlag and hedonism gluing the band together. Things seem slightly more salubrious this time around, even if Philippakis swiftly annihilates a vodka soda.

He’s here to promote Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1, the first of two Foals albums to be released this year. Although they were written and recorded in the same period, Philippakis explains that it “felt like there were two palettes, two different bodies of work”. Part 1 is a concept album of sorts – though “not in a wizard prog beard way” – about the abject state of the world, and finding solace in the small things. It has the distinct sound of the era it was created in, when he was “craving domesticity” after two years on the road, before slowly returning to the studio when he felt restless. “I wanted to spend time in the garden and hang out with my cat and my girlfriend, and then I was going to Greece [where his father lives] a lot as well,” he explains. “We all branched off for a bit, and just spent some time away from the band. There was probably about eight months where I didn’t play the guitar or anything.”

The band also lost bassist Walter Gervers in 2017 – though there’s no bad blood there – slimming down to a four-piece. While it must have been a wrench after so long, Philippakis sees the positives; Gervers’ leaving was part of “a catalyst for us to do something that we feel is great. There was an urgency to it and there’s a conviction to making this record, and it didn’t feel laboured.” If I was expecting braggadocio (I was) it never comes, with Philippakis instead talking about the themes that underpinned the record in a largely earnest way.

If Part 1 were a TV show it would, he says, be Black Mirror, which is fitting given that show’s appetite for retrofuturism, and the fact that lead single “Exits” manages to sound both entirely current and like an homage to Talk Talk and Simple Minds. “Syrups”, despite its nonchalant sound, asks the question, “when the end comes my way/will I drop to my knees and pray?” and imagines a world where AI has taken over. It uses a repeated image of foxes. Philippakis says he loves that there’s a “wild creature that’s in London in such an urban environment… I’d walk back from the studio late at night and I’d be walking under these Victorian brick arch railways and see them. It made me think about the future of the city, and the fact that most of this was built in a 100-year span, when Britain was this industrial powerhouse.” He asks himself what the men and women who built the city would think of it now, and wonders what will it be like in 100 years’ time.

Ultimately, it’s a record he made to process some of what’s going on right now. “I feel a lot of the problems of where we’re at are because of individualism, we’re all the star of our own movie,” he explains. And what of Brexit, surely the biggest cipher for individualism in our times? (People had told me he was “Brexity”, because he seemed to be in favour of leaving the EU in a BBC News piece published in 2016.) He sighs as he remembers the way his quote – which included comments on immigration – was construed, looking briefly like a schoolboy being hauled into the headmaster’s office. “I should have known better than to give that answer in the way that I did but really, I was kind of basically playing devil’s advocate and saying that these are the concerns of the people who want to leave,” he explains. “I am definitely pro-Remain. I think that it’s just been so destructive for the country and for Europe in general. I feel deeply disappointed by the way that the country has dealt with it. The adults, the politicians, I think that the lowering of the standards of truth and political discourse and transparency has just been really, really shocking. Brexit feels like an act of self-harm.”

The sense of being abandoned by the previous generation continues throughout the record, too; while “Sunday”, with its refrain of “our fathers run and leave all the damage” could be seen as a comment on his once-fractious relationship with his own father – which he says is now “remarkably good” – the bigger message is one of resentment towards baby boomers. Besides, he’s at a stage where the concept of fatherhood isn’t purely abstract. “I’m getting to that age now where I’m thinking about being a father – not imminently – but I’m closer to the age at which my father made a decision to not be with his kids, and I’m like, well how am I going to respond to that responsibility? How am I going to behave?”

As the quiet pub might seem to preclude, Philippakis enjoys operating outside of the fold, and initially seems a little more hesitant to speak about the bigger scandals in the industry. He speaks cogently, if in broad strokes, on equality, and decides that regarding sexual abuse, “Ryan Adams is probably the tip of the iceberg in some way ... I just feel like certainly in my world with the people that we come into contact with, if we saw any behaviour that was out of line, we would call it out.”

‘I feel a lot of the problems of where we’re at are because of individualism’ (Alex Knowles)

It sounds a little like a PR statement, but it seems instead as though he’s honestly not had to think too much about it, a position that’s both unsurprising given the band’s low-key nature (Foals are, he says, “quite an insular thing”) and also maybe slightly naive given moments like The 1975 talking about misogyny at the Brits. I’m loath to mention Matty Healy at this point, however – the first time I do, while talking about guitar music, he describes them as “more of a pop band” in a tone that’s maybe the closest we get to stink eye.

But, maybe in time his views will become more concrete. It’s clear that he is someone with a great capacity for change, which has underpinned his experiences promoting this new record. “The types of conversations that I’m having with people this time around are just more meaningful on a one-to-one level… it’s just better to be engaging with some of this stuff rather than being like, ‘oh, this song is about, you know, Marty down the road’s breakup’.” Although, you imagine – after 14 years and still breaking ground but also enjoying the low-key contemplation that only a drink in your local can provide – Foals would’ve made it fly.

Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, the new album from Foals, is out on Friday 8 March