Yannis Philippakis of Foals: ‘There’s something feral in me’

Foals’ brand of fierce, amorphous rock has brought them rare success as a guitar band in the age of the solo artist. As they prepare to headline Reading and Leeds, frontman talks touring, fighting - and DIY

It’s 3pm, sunny. “Are you drinking?” asks Yannis Philippakis, lead singer of the Oxford-born rock band Foals, looking hopeful. Go on then. “Great. I’ll have a pint and a vodka soda,” he instructs his PR. She raises an eyebrow. He smiles, and wanders off towards the garden of the Old Nun’s Head pub in south London: “It’ll save you coming out twice.”

At a time when you could accuse indie musicians of going soft, Philippakis takes the job description of “frontman” very seriously. He is notoriously gobby, surly, or both; in one noteworthy outburst he complained about old-timers clogging up festival lineups and depriving bands like Foals of their rightful headline spot. On stage, he’s a beast: no Foals gig is complete without him diving headlong into the crowd from the stage, from speakers, from a balcony. When a security guard tried to stop him once, they had a punch-up. To put it another way: Philippakis is a separated-at-birth Gallagher brother – but one whose route into music included a period studying English at Oxford university.

“The band came out of playing house parties, so we were always enamoured with the excesses of the road,” says Philippakis. “And that’s become uncool in a way now. The feeling I get from a lot of newer bands is that by and large they look after themselves, and I always feel we’re the last ones at the festival still. They are trying to get us out of the dressing rooms backstage and everyone else is long gone. People in other bands look really fresh in the morning.”

There is something both heroic and slightly naff about these sentiments – something that Philippakis, a smile flickering on his lips, seems to recognise. “In some ways I’d like to redo it,” he goes on. “There’s part of me that feels we could sustain doing this for longer if we didn’t tour the way that we tour. Or play shows the way we play shows. But I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this is the way Foals operates. To try and do it any other way, at least for me, doesn’t work.”

Despite Philippakis’s half-hearted reservations, Foals are doing all right just now. In August the band will top the bill at Reading and Leeds festivals, and they had a plum spot on the Pyramid stage at this year’s Glastonbury. They are not quite at Muse or Coldplay level, but they are perhaps the contender most likely to make the jump.

It’s not simply about their torrid, sweaty shows either. Their fourth album, What Went Down, released last summer, is the closest Foals have come to capturing the energy and bombast of their live performances in the studio. It made top 10 in six countries, from the UK to Australia. Philippakis’s often semi-autobiographical lyrics are full of intrigue, and they are backed up by fierce, muscular guitars and percussion. You might not immediately be able to hum a Foals “hit”, but they have a sound that’s distinctly theirs.

More than a decade after forming – with guitar rock seeming to be in sharp decline – Foals are thriving. “Yeah, definitely there’s a pride in that,” says the 30-year-old Philippakis. “I got in trouble for talking about the whole heritage rock thing, about how it bungs up the pipe a little bit. You’ve got this clotted mass at the end of the pipe and it should be stuff that grows and progresses and gets bigger and falls away. You look at the top line of festivals and it’s like, ‘Really, the Chili Peppers again?’ So in that respect we’ve far exceeded what we set out to do. We’ve always felt we were a great band, but there are so many great bands that I’ve listened to and that I love that have not done that.”

Does he feel under an onslaught from the mild-mannered, electronic bedroom auteurs? “There’s another way of looking at it,” he replies, sucking on a Camel Light. “The whole thing with guitars, you could see it becoming petrified and fossilised. There’s tons of dross electronic music, but there’s the ability to create something more unexpected and maybe more stimulating in some ways. So the onus is on the bands to up their game. Either you have to reformulate what’s become quite a conventional format or you just need to write songs that are so good that they transcend it.

“You’ve just got to write great music that touches people,” he continues. “And maybe all the bands that have fallen away just didn’t.”

If you’d had to bet on which mid-2000s indie band would be an international success in 10 years, you’d probably not have chosen Foals. Bloc Party, Razorlight and 2007 Mercury prize winners Klaxons all made bigger splashes. “I wouldn’t have put money on us,” admits Philippakis.

He didn’t, in fact, start out as lead singer. That was Andrew Mears, who left after one single to concentrate on the now-deceased Youthmovies. Foals coalesced from the rubble of various Oxford post-hardcore bands: Philippakis was in the Edmund Fitzgerald with drummer Jack Bevan; Walter Gervers (bass) and Jimmy Smith (rhythm guitar) came from Face Meets Grill; Edwin Congreave (keyboards) completed a line-up that has been stable ever since. Initially, Philippakis – who dropped out of Oxford to concentrate on the band – imagined that Foals would be essentially instrumental, with lyrics an afterthought.

The impression is that Philippakis wasn’t sure he had the confidence and charisma to be a frontman, which now seems ridiculous. He’s a natural. Born to a Greek architect father and a South African academic mother – they spent the first four years of his life in Greece, a year in South Africa and then separated – Philippakis was always smart and somewhat complicated. Your eyes go to him wherever he is in a room. Today he wears jeans and a white T-shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal a sprawling octopus tattoo on his forearm; he is compact and muscular. His hair is sculpted, and he’s had a beard so dense that he’s grown suspicious of what’s underneath it.

“I had no intention to be a singer,” he says. “I wanted to play guitar. So once I started singing, I knew there was something I needed to step into before a show. Basically I have to get charged. I can’t go on in a mental dressing gown and slippers. It’s something animalistic, feral in some way.”

He’s a different person on stage then? “I think so. Nothing in my domestic sphere, my normal sphere, exists any more. But it’s definitely something I know is there – it’s not something I’ve invited in. It’s not role play, it’s from within me. I got into a bare-knuckle boxing fight after a show in Charlotte the other day. I met this guy, we were doing shots and having a great time, then we went outside and we just looked at each other and it was implicit that we were both like, ‘Let’s get it on!’ It terrified some of the guys in the band. They were like, ‘What the fuck were you up to last night?’ But I felt great about it, I loved it.”

Having just broken the first rule of Fight Club, he grins broadly. “When I talk to my mum, or when I’m at home, that bit’s not in me. But people aren’t one thing. So it’s good for me to be on stage because I think that probably if I wasn’t, I’d get in trouble.”

There’s certainly an edge, an unpredictability to him, most evident when he’s performing, but it simmers away, never far from the surface. I ask if coming from Oxford, base for Radiohead, Ride and Supergrass, was an inspiration to Foals – or at least encouragement for four out of the five band members to eschew university to make their 2008 debut Antidotes. “I felt chippy,” he says. “There was great music in Oxford, but a bigger fuel on the fire was feeling chippy against London. This is the thought of an 18-year-old, but we felt like the underdogs. We felt that other people had a leg-up. Or were part of a cooler circle. Obviously the circumstances have changed, but I feel the kernel of that idea is still there.”

Foals, on all available evidence, are a tight unit. When they made their second album, Total Life Forever, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2010, four of the five (all except Gervers) lived together. “The band grew out of friendship,” says Philippakis. “We’re not some fabricated, put-together entity, there’s no session players. We came out of a very natural DIY scene in Oxford. The way to do it in Oxford at that time was that you should have a bunch of mates, rent your own tinny van, book your own shows and make your own merch. And that’s the way it should be done if you are in a rock band. Anything else is not the right way.”

Foals might be playing Wembley Arena rather than Oxford house parties these days, but Philippakis insists that some aspects are not so different. “To be honest, the business side of our band is fucked, it’s an absolute bird’s nest. But that’s always been secondary. The primary thing will always be the fact that it’s us making music together and living the life we want. I think that’s badass.”

The band keep a studio in Oxford – they call it the “stinkbox” – but are more scattered these days: Smith moved to Germany and Philippakis decamped to south London with his girlfriend. “I wanted to keep adult life at bay,” he says a touch wistfully. “To make a little weird treehouse for music and for it to be a bunch of lads making music. I wanted it to be wild, and it was, and it was great. But we did it for a long time, we’re in our 30s now, so we can’t live together in a house.”

Philippakis gives the idea serious consideration. “It would be unhygienic, I think,” he decides.

Another pint and vodka soda arrive and he becomes expansive. He is off to Greece to see his father the week after we meet, and he has strong, conflicted views on Brexit. “It feels like a rightwing position to want to leave, so I recoil from it a bit, but I do think Greece should have left the EU. When the Greeks voted against austerity measures, they were just steamrollered. The democratic power they have has been lessened, and now they are asset-stripping the country. People’s circumstances have really changed: I don’t know if any of my cousins have jobs; my father’s work has deteriorated massively. They have just increased VAT to something like 24%. It’s savage. My dad just starts swearing about it every time I Skype him.”

Philippakis is just back in London after two months in the States when we meet, before Foals go on the road again for most of the summer and autumn. “I used to transition from being on tour by going on a bender, just the first night,” he explains. “So I’d go out and get smashed in order to continue the ethos of the tour, but also because it would feel weird to go home and then just tuck up in bed with a Horlicks and a Dickens or something. But now I’ve got a girlfriend I’ve been forced to slot back in quite quickly.”

Re-entry into domestic life isn’t always straightforward: “You disrupt their routine. They might have started sleeping on your side of the bed.” But he has found that the quickest way to decompress is DIY and gardening. “I become obsessive about stuff, so I just become obsessive about wanting to fix up the house,” he says. “It’s therapeutic.”

The goal, ultimately, when Foals finish their current tour, is to get bored. The band will take a break, and Philippakis thinks it might be a while before we see a fifth album.

“There’s a gang mentality to Foals, and we’ve done it as friends from a young age, but the downside to it, four records in, is that it becomes overly familiar. That’s not to say that we need to change members or anything like that – not by any means – but we just need time away from each other.

“I want to have time to get bored, basically. I remember being at that age when I was too young to go to the pub, or I couldn’t go every night or every weekend because you’d get ID’ed, so I spent time in my room and I was bored. I had that suburban malaise you get, and I think my appetite for music or for any form of creativity was at its most heightened then.”

Before the boredom stage, though, there’s this summer’s festivals. Philippakis was never much of a camper when growing up: “I went to Truck, a local festival in Oxford, twice and I K-holed both times. That was the only thing I did.” This year is Foals’ third time performing at Worthy Farm, and he is a total convert. “You realise that Glastonbury is something magical. And there’s the fact that it takes place in Britain, where people are relatively reserved in many ways, but then they go to this place for a weekend and it’s absolute abandon. It’s the best. It feels tribal in the best sense of the word, not in a cheesy Thailand-tattoo way.”

Next come Reading and Leeds. Having kicked up a fuss about not being headliners before, Foals have to pull off something epic, right? “We joked about all sorts of stuff, like pyro, leather pants, having a zip wire, like Ace Frehley from Kiss zipping his way over the crowd,” laughs Philippakis. “But the big Reading show I grew up with was Nirvana in 1992. You look back at that now and there’s no production, no fucking CO2 cannons, no video screens. It’s just a band playing well on stage.”

Don’t hold your breath for a one-off special guest either. Philippakis snorts: “You know they’re not friends, and they don’t talk to each other backstage. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but we’re going to play those shows and they’re going to be banging. And at the end of those shows, no one is going to say, ‘Why didn’t you do a collaboration? Why didn’t you do a cover?’”

Foals have finally made it to the top, and they plan to savour it. “It’s our moment, and I want it to be about the five of us and what we’re about.”

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