Horse Stories
Recent Heineken Green Spheres stars Foals talk to Peter Murphy about the splendid isolation in which their remarkable new album, Total Life Forever, was made.
Peter Murphy, 15 Jun 2010
Oxford quintet Foals have made something of a quantum leap with their second record Total Life Forever. Expanding on the syncopated white funk/Krautrock/post-punk remit of their debut, the new album is a panoramic and multi-layered affair, described alternately as “tropical prog” and “a dream of an eagle dying” by its makers. The recording necessitated the band’s decamping to Svenska Gramofon studios in Gothenburg at the suggestion of their producer, Clor man Luke Smith – although, as frontman Yannis Philippakis and keyboardist Edwin Congreave are at pains to point out prior to soundchecking for their Heineken Green Spheres show in the Dublin Academy, the process had as much to do with sequestering themselves away from the early Swedish winter as much as soaking up the atmosphere.
“We had some discussions with Luke,” Yannis explains, “and we wanted somewhere that would be an immersive experience. This place was built by musicians for musicians, and you could live in the studio. It had a lot of old reverbs and just felt like quite a special space, it didn’t feel like a corporate studio, it felt quite virginal.”
“It doesn’t sound like a space in Sweden,” adds Edwin. “The doors were closed most of the time.”
“Firmly closed,” adds Yannis. “I think it’s our own space.”
If anything, Yannis says, the album’s genetic code was formulated back in Foals’ group house in Oxford, where the songs were written.
“That itself was quite a private experience,” he says. “I feel this album, much more than the last one (2008’s Antidotes) is very internal, private, very little contact with the outside world. The material itself didn’t, and we had less, it was definitely much more of an isolated thing.
“Oxford feels like a capsule, a lot of the architecture’s obviously quite archaic. In a way you can get away with being fanciful and imagine things. You can to an extent walk around the city and ignore... I don’t know how to put it exactly, but there’s something about it that allows you to live in your head. You can avoid certain things quite easily.”
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