Foals live for Fact

A piece of wide-eyed hyperbole from Feb 2007, an online review of the first Foals headline tour. Yeah, they were really, really good:

Bliss it is to be alive, and to be young is very heaven: Foals are the revolution. Soon the knife-sharpeners will call us liars, but we know what love is. Their set was more than a great set by an-up-and-coming myspace b(r)and soon to have the hype-rug pulled. It felt like the stuff that might, one day, maybe, be legendary.

Fair enough, an arty band with a set of clever influences and a set of clever haircuts were never going to do badly in Brighton – Death Sentence: PANDA sold out the other week, for God’s sake. The crowd, however, was more than the usual scene kids and record-shop workers – old ravers, this dubstep producer I vaguely know, even (shock, horror) some boring-looking people were down to pack the place out. The sense of anticipation, man, you could feel it. When Foals came on stage, Audio screamed. We were dancing to the soundcheck.

They destroyed live, by the way. The second the sound check faded, they blasted into some hi-NRG spidery afrobeat that made the kids say “yeah!” Yannis (yelping, guitars, channelled charisma) jumped off the stage against the barrier and avoided getting smacked by Walter (bass-lines, strutting). At the end of the song, he said “what is this fucking barrier about?” only to spoil/emphasis the rockstar cliché by following it with “if anyone wants to come up, we’d be cool with that.” The banter was tightly pitched and perfect. By the time Hummer’s “QUIET HEARTBEATS” chant started, every person that had been dragged to the gig by their mates were in love. A few people have cussed the boys for sticking to the Bloc Party line, but, basically, fuck them. This band pack more ideas into a three minute record than I ever learnt in school, and at the end of the day the mark of a great band is making you need more songs just like the one before – not playing a set of handbrake turns. And, whisper it – they're young, stupid and bright enough to walk the beaten path of disposable pop and precocious rock and snotty punk, and they're just about fast enough for it to sound blissfully NOW. At the breakdown of Balloons they raise their hands into the trance shuffle – it’s fitting, and euphoric.
This was their homecoming, after all.

This is why they deserve every inch and blog post and friend add. A lucky few were there at the off, seeing them tear apart squat parties and make girls dance. They’re the smug ones. In these diagonal days, when a band’s first single is the difficult second album, when there’s ten passably amazing music experiences available a week and one genuinely thrilling one a year, Foals are a revelation. A fist pounding, swaying, jumping revelation, for the simple reason that they torch every last-week notion in the way that new rock music always has done.

This is why the Foals are the band of 2007. They are not consciously revolutionising rock: they are simply playing the music that they dig as they see fit, and are unashamed of who they are. They know that there is nothing strange about being into indie and dance music, nothing out-of-sync with an iPod playlist that jumps from Don Cab to Timbaland, nothing contradictory about digging hands-in-the-air techno and knowing who Kurt Vonnegut is, nothing novel about making adventurous, high-concept music that’s closer to Steve Reich than Razorlight that the proverbial milkman could whistle along to. Where Foals set themselves apart is by taking this formula (pop + abstract + guitar + brains) and playing it so naturally, so assuredly that it hardly seems strange. Which it isn’t, when it comes down to it. Why the Klaxons have dated so badly (can you imagine a time before Gravity’s Rainbow) is that they sounded like a novelty band when they were just playing an absurdly natural mix of music, like a kitchen sync drama with canned laughter.

This is why Foals absolutely destroy. Believe, they are Cool (that's what Arena will be telling you in ten months) but their studied charm is both furiously worked and genuine and shy and barrel-chestedly confident. That’s why you got people dancing on the stage three minutes into the set. It’s why people yell in the faces of bouncers who tell them, politely, to get off the stage. It’s why Foals felt like whatever the fuck rock n roll was supposed to feel like. It’s because Foals are ours.

We want a band that delivers that the things I’ve rambled about, but without any pretensions, without any knowing winks or smug spot-my-references. We want a band that feels it. That doesn’t need a pat on the back for liking grime. That gets where we’re coming from. That can get on with the job of moving 300 heard-it-all-before Brightonians. That grabs today, this minute, this second in a chokehold. A band yells in the face of (the) Zeitgeist “THIS IS HARDCORE!!!” One that makes us dance and say “YEAH!!!”

Snottily charimastic singer Yannis, equal parts Che Guevara and Hugh Grant, was dancing and yelping, unaware to the manic energy of the stage rushers when the music cut out. The spider’s jazz punk ended and a quick apology, laughing rather than fawning, was issued like a manifesto: “This has happened every single fucking night of the tour. Hold tight!” They calmly twiddled knobs and jangled nerves. Driving bassist Walter, who looked like the Student Union Paul Simonon, span round on his heels as soon as the drums started to twitch into life, at once glorious and unaware and worked. And beautiful. And triumphant. Foals are now!