Q+ A with Edwin Congreaves from UK band Foals who will be playing a DJ set a Cassette Nine tomorrow night (Thursday 5th Nov).
We noticed that you guys are Myspace friends with Auckland band Cut Off Your Hands, are you guys actually friends? When and how did you guys meet?
They spent a lot of time in the uk recently and we went on tour with them for a while. quite a while actually. They're remarkably good at having fun despite the relentless rain and misery that accompany all northern europe tours. In fact they're much better at it than us. They introduced us to the joys of the rap spew, and for that we are always thankful.
Do you find you get quite a different crowd to your DJ Set performances as opposed to when you play with the band?
Yep. older... er, for obvious reasons. at least in the uk a lot of our fans are teenagers and so can't get into clubs. The ones that do get in do more drugs, and they have worse sleeping habits. a lot of them have an unhealthy love of dubstep. I don't know why.
What’s your view about the integrity of the medium of DJing as opposed to live performance?
Mmm. It's easy for people in bands to dj badly and get paid well, and the integrity of that is... questionable, i think, at best. I guess so long as it's done with the best of intentions and ambitions then it's alright. I try really hard. Really. I'm fairly obsessed with it actually. We are without doubt a much better and more interesting live band than I am a dj... but I think the two can go hand in hand. We all love dance music and making people dance, so... y'know.
Can you mention anything about the forthcoming album you and the rest of the Foals are doing? Are you working with David Sitek again?
Uh. Yeah. It's almost finished. It just needs mixing. We did it in Sweden with Luke Smith, aka the hand, aka the migraine. He's definitely not Dave Sitek. In fact he is nearly the opposite of Dave Sitek, temperamentally speaking. This time round we actually have time to finish the record and feel happy about it. I think--and I know this goes without saying--that it is about a hundred times better. Maybe. It's more textured, bouyant, melodic, dynamic, etc. the working title is pump iron and fuck. There are songs about aristocracy and drowning and ... er, the beach. Not that know much about beaches.
Where did you get your haircut?
Jack Bevan and his ropey, drunken buzz cuts. He caters for most of the band actually. A few beers, a few snps, a few tears... that sort of thing.
Why did you decide to come down to Australian and New Zealand for a holiday and DJ tour?
My good friend at Brisbane's Lick It Tim Sullivan invited me down. He spent a year in London recently and we played together a bunch of times and found that we liked the same disco jams and lounge house. So he asked me to play Lick It's birthday party, and... I was hardly going to say no. It helped that I needed to get away from Sweden’s crushing grey monotony and the onset of pleurisy. The band was actually supposed to come down at the end of last year, but for various fairly bullshit reasons we couldn't make it, and... I dunno, I was more unhappy about that than anyone else, so I was keen to at least make it down myself. We’ll be touring properly next year once the new record is out.
What are three things that every good party should have?
sub bass. jack daniel's. a lack of seating.
Interview thanks to Epaulette.
