Shortly before Christmas, when the Stallions were discussing potential locations for a new video, Ukraine topped the list. Frontman Yannis Filipakis had traveled there alone when he was 18, and he still has “a kind of map of what was in my head forever.” In recent years, when the Stallions played some shows there, Kyiv was exactly as he remembered it: a beautiful, peaceful city that loved to party. The band wanted to work with Tanu Muinho, a famous Ukrainian-Cuban director who worked with Lil Nas X, Cardi B, The Weeknd and Harry Styles – she turned out to be a fan of Stallions and so the old workspace in the industrial yard was sought after. . At that moment, Russian tanks had just begun to assemble at the border, but, as Filipakis recalls, “the idea of turning this into a full-scale war seemed rather remote.”
They happily shot the choreographed video at 2 a.m. in January, then watched ice skating, visited bars, hung out with the team and talked about politics. A perfect day ended with hugs and group photos. “The optimism of that day was captured in the video,” says the singer with longing. “It’s weird to think how quickly this was brutal.”
After the Russian invasion – after which Foals canceled upcoming concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg – the band found it difficult to connect with Ukrainians with whom they had spent time. “In our video, there are people who now have to take shelter for their lives or take rifles to defend their city,” says Filipakis. “The choreographer left a message that she and her husband should hide from the shelling.
I meet the Stallions in March in their small studio for rent, rehearsal room and writing area in Peckham, London, with coffee. “I certainly feel weird doing promotions,” admits guitarist Jimmy Smith, and his recently dyed blond hair reflects his current status as an Englishman living in Los Angeles. Nor is it a loss for them that the album we are here to talk about – the seventh and best of their careers – is a euphoric party record worthy of a band whose latest album reached number 1 and ranked high in Glastonbury this summer and Latitude Lineups warming up with four sold-out nights at the London Olympics this weekend.
Life Is Yours – full of sunny, motor disco / house-influenced dancers like Wake Me Up and the upcoming upcoming single of 2001 – compares to Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem and 80’s Duran Duran. With more keyboards and fewer guitars, its ecstatic, airy atmosphere could not be further from the horrors of Ukraine, the pandemic, climate change or the economic crisis.
Live Stallions at Usher Hall, Edinburgh, April 2022 Photo: Roberto Ricciuti / Redferns
Filipakis explains that when they made the group of socially conscious albums for 2019, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost (Parts 1 and 2), “the climate crisis suddenly came to us and books about the sixth mass extinction came out. However, it felt right to engage with the threat on the horizon. “However, while life is yours, it is also a response to the world after Covid, in which there is what he describes as” everyday danger or darkness that is now impossible to ignore. ” , this time the mood rises.
“It was written in the midst of the blockade,” explains the soft-spoken singer, wearing a DH Lawrence beard and wearing the same loose-fitting shirt he wears on stage. “Winter, gray, there is no life on the streets. So we would come here and take shelter from all this by writing music that felt like escape and joy, but also hope for the future to come back. ”
When the pandemic hit, Foals managed to make a date from an Asian tour in February 2020, before the concerts suddenly began to cancel. “We didn’t know what the hell was going on,” says Filipakis. “You think, ‘Oh, that’ll be over soon,’ but it doesn’t happen.” After returning to the UK, it was nice to spend an unexpected time at home – their group had prevented them from meeting partners – but the singer remembers the “surreal strangeness” of the first block. “We all grew up in apocalypse movies like Contagion, World War Z, or whatever. So there was this aspect of committing to something we were all worried about. “
At the heart of being a musician is not sitting in a studio. This is the performance and connection with the people of Yannis Filipakis
Jack Bevan, the well-maintained, kind, gentle self-contained drummer of the band, was one of the first in the UK with Covid. On his return from Asia, he got essentially the worst flu I’ve ever had. After about 10 days I started to feel a little better, but then I had symptoms of pneumonia for a week and then this kind of extreme fatigue for about a month. That was long before the blockade, when Covid was a mystery to the people here. I was just watching the news, with all these horrible statistics and cases from abroad. So there was no certainty how this would work. “
Smith, meanwhile, fled to LA to see his girlfriend, who was stuck there during the blockade (hence his permanent residence in the United States) and also contracted Covid. “It was in my lungs for a month,” he says. “It was certainly a shock enough to make me quit smoking. When the band eventually regrouped in Peckham, playing for hours every day became a way to block what was happening outside.
The foals made Life Is Yours as a trio. In 2018, co-founder bassist Walter Hervers, the band’s most stable “father” and advisor during quarrels, left abruptly to start a family. Last year’s departure of another founder, pianist Edwin Congreeve, was less unexpected, but just as significant. He graduated from the Open University to study at Cambridge and, as Filipakis explains, finds it difficult to combine drinking and the adrenaline of a touring lifestyle with academia.
Stallions in 2010 Edwin Congreave (far right) and Walter Gervers (bottom left) have since left the group. Photo: Andy Wilshere / Redferns
“Poor Edwin,” Smith says, smiling. “We were going to get on the bus at 3 in the morning and he would be in the back room with his documents, trying to study for the exam at 9 in the morning. The other members insist that the departures have strengthened their own ties, but such changes in the line-up could devastate the group’s dynamics, especially the loss of people they have played with for 15 years.
“It can be destabilizing,” Filipakis admits as we enjoy a second cup of coffee. “And you miss them as a social presence. Spending your life with your friends is a beautiful way to spend your time, so when someone leaves, you think: we will never spend so much time with that person again.
This partly explains why life is yours, sometimes there is a sadder underwater current. All of Foals’ albums are different – whether it’s the “career gamble” of the ambitious Total Life Forever of 2010 or the harder terrain of What Went Down of 2015. Somehow Life Is Yours recalls the dizzying energy of their 2008 debut d. Antidotes, but viewed through a rear-view mirror.
“We were thinking about when we started,” said Philippackis, now 35, referring to their days (after originally meeting in Oxford) as a math rock band living in a Peckham squat called Squallyoaks, sharing meals at home. and playing “wild parties” in the squat scene. “There was optimism that didn’t really exist anymore. It was a golden age of nightlife: great clubs, house music, pre-social media and smartphones, all the cross-pollination in music, art, dance. I think of songs like [Life Is Yours track] Looking high, there is sadness, now that the clubs are closing. When we were making the album, we got stuck in order to live life, so you think about old parties and times when you could get lost in a moment. ”
You will see Yannis hanging on a balcony with a guard holding him by the buckle on his belt and thinking, “What is he doing now?” Jack Bevan?
The foals are reappearing in a very different climate from the one they started in 2004, one of the printed NMEs, CD singles and a thriving chain of live bands and smaller venues. “There are many positive aspects to social media and the internet,” says Filipakis, lazily playing Spanish guitar, “but one thing that is destructive is the devastation of the geographical architecture around music: local places, record stores, accessible rehearsal places and studios. This is affected by the way people make music together, or the idea of making friends and making music together. Everything migrates online, but if you walk around our cities, there is no record store, no place to racketeer. Everything is a little deprived. When I was still in school, I would go [club night] Garbage in London every week and Horrors, or Arctic Monkeys, or Klaxons would be there, and there was a feeling that everyone was part of something.
The idea of music as a shared experience is central to Stallions and, ironically, is partly why Congreve left. After embarking on a tour in an old Royal Mail van, the avid conservationist was uncomfortable with the band’s carbon footprint. Stallions compensate for their carbon, but Smith says that if the group wants to sustain life and income – even the one that unfurled a banner reading “No Music on a Dead Planet” at the Mercury Prize in 2019 – it is impossible to avoid some impact on the environment. “But it’s not just income,” says Filipakis. “For me, the very core of being a musician is not sitting in a studio. It’s about fulfilling and connecting with people. ”
He recalls a specific discussion with Congreve on the tour bus before their canceled Asian tour. “He said, ‘We shouldn’t do these shows,’ not because of Covid, but because of the influence of the band, which has flown thousands of miles.” “We had a very frank and sensible discussion, but in the end we said, ‘We want to be musicians.’
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