Foals

Tue 1st Feb, 2011 in Features

It may be a bad international phone line, but Walter Gervers is in good spirits. With good reason: being the bassist for Foals has its benefits, from supporting the reunion shows of seminal Britpop band Blur to releasing one of 2010’s most acclaimed records, Total Life Forever.

Coming to Australia later this month to headline the St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival, they arrive for the second time in less than a year with a reputation that precedes them. It’s a reputation, he tells me, they’ve learned to deal with easily, despite the small things getting in the way.

You seemed to have a world of hype even before putting out your debut record antidotes, most notably with your appearance on the soundtrack to UK teen drama Skins. Was it particularly difficult to work around that level of hype, especially with an audience already waiting on and judging your every move before a long player was released?
It was quite difficult to kind of deliver after that. We were put in a position where we had no experience in putting out a record before, being a band in the spotlight. And then, of course you do get the opposite effect of that, which are people being like, “What’s this band I’ve been hearing so much about?” Then, y’know, if it’s forced down people’s throats too much it becomes that their immediate reaction may be, “I don’t think I’m that into this.”

I think at the time we had to put all that out of our mind and take the bad and the good as it were. We tried not to think too much about the hype and the buzz. We just tried to represent what we were doing the best we could. Back in those days we were still working our way up; still playing a lot of support slots and playing our first festivals. We were so kind of busy, anyway, that we didn’t have too much time to dwell on those kinds of thoughts.