Interview with Edwin of Foals

I was in the middle of transcribing all of it when my computer froze, I'm not going through it again, it took 3 hours to begin with. I'll give you guys the general answers though, it won't be word for word as I was originally going to have it but most of it will be exactly what he said.

Neader: I'm here with Edwin of Foals, not The Foals, how do you feel when people call you The Foals?

Edwin: We're over it. It use to irritate us years ago but we're use to it now. Here in America foals aren't as well known or common like in England, in England generally everyone knows what foals are.

Neader: Yeah, when I first heard of you guys, I didn't know what foals were, so I searched on Wikipedia and found out. Now, when I search you guys, you come up. How's that feel, all this success, Mercury, NME, everything?

Edwin: That's a good question. We didn't mean to change the definition but it feels good, we feel more self-assured. We use to be quite anxious about our recordings. We would worry about where we were going. There's an enormous amount of the music industry focused on breaking new bands and we feel like we've done that, we've done two records. We've received some good nominations and won some awards so we feel a bit rooted now.

Neader: A bit different from your humble begins as house parties. Are those over now?

Edwin: Yeah. It wouldn't really work with our new material. We use to get hounded in the U.K. after the Skins thing through Myspace messages of people just messaging us "Hey I'm turning 16 next week I'll give you £50" some actually offered us a lot of money. It ruins the point though. The last house party we ever did was so busy it actually felt a bit dangerous. We're on tour now, so there's no need. The whole point of house parties was playing shows when we didn't have any, and I think now, on a day off, the last thing we would want to do is play a show.

Neader: How's the tour been so far in the U.S?

Edwin: It's been good

Neader: Disappointed you had to miss the Royal Wedding?

Edwin: Not at all. I didn't even know when it was happening. People talk about it, and people chat about it, but I don't care.

Neader: Earlier this year you were working on an album in Australia, can you tell us how that went?

Edwin: That went badly. We didn't really accomplish much in terms of songs. It wasn't like wasted, it was kind of disappointing. We went over and recorded with the brother of Dave Ma, Jono Ma. The two brothers are really talented, one does videos and Jono's the producer. He's got his fingers all over the place. He's opened our eyes to a lot of possibilities on the new record, synthesizes and drum machines that we haven't used before. It's given us a foundation to take our new record.

Neader: How would you describe that foundation music wise?

Edwin: A lot of old synthesizers, drum machines, and sound samples which I think we're going to stack pile.

Neader: You have a new song you're playing live right?

Edwin: Yeah, it's not a song, I mean it is a song. That had nothing to do with Sydney or Australia. That's just something we decided to play. I think it's important when we go on tour that we're doing something to enjoy ourselves. We've been touring for 14 months, and it's not that any of us think it's boring, it's just that we can easily get complacent about how we play them.

Neader: So what's happening with O-Funk? Is it dead?



Edwin: Unfortunately, different members of the bands have different opinions of the song. It's one of my favorites, I wanted it to go on the last record and I want it to go on this record. The approach we have to have is that only the best stuff goes on the record. So hopefully it makes it. I think it will be a little bit different but it's definitely one of those songs that has that live energy.

Neader: You have a lot of cover with Foals, from the Police, to Holy Fuck, to Gwen Stefani. How do you have such a wide variety?

Edwin: It's usually because we're told we have to do one. If you do various radio sessions the producer of the show says we need you to do a cover and we're given like a weeks notice. And there's a couple arguments like "Oh do we have to? Do we have to?" Sometimes it works, like our Police one.

Neader: I like your Swedish House Mafia One

Edwin: That one worked surprisingly well. Something them aren't the best ones in the world I'd like us to do more it's just a question of priorities. It's something that you should do for fun, and we don't do it for fun, we do it because we're told we need to do it.

Neader: Sorry that you're forced into it.

Edwin: It's not that we're forced into doing it.

Neader: What's next for Foals?

Edwin: We're going home, for ages. We're doing some festivals in the summer not very many. We have mid-May to the end of the year to do an album. We're just going to see what happens there's no real program to it, I think we're going to try and spend a lot of time together though, in a quiet easy manner. We're going to try and find a good producer and everything because that's our weakness. It's not that we've made bad producer choices, just in the writing process, we write too many songs, and when we go into the studio we have 30 songs that are unifinished and the producer has to bang our heads to together. And it's quite stressful, I think we're trying to do it...better this time? I don't know, I think we're going to let the process evolve naturally this time.

Neader: You have a lot of songs in your catalog that I feel don't get enough attention live, such as Brazil is Here, Dearth, Tron, why is this?

Edwin: I don't know. It's one of those things if a song doesn't really get written live then there isn't often a motive to start playing it live because there's a lot involved in putting it together. Brazil is Here was more or less composed in a studio and I don't think more or less we ever played it. Dearth is a different topic because that was kind of loved. There's this thing in this band where we always want to move on to different stuff and there comes a point where a song is just over, and that's happened with Dearth and it's a shame. We play it once and it was terrible, we did a surprise encore at the Squalor in London, it wasn't terrible but it wasn't amazing well.

Neader: Were they just like, what is this?

Edwin: Yeah, exactly. Tron same thing really, we just haven't played it in ages. We're trying to make our setlist more towards the new album.

Neader: Okay well I think that's it thank you.

Edwin: Thank you so much, cheers.