FUTURE OF THE LEFT

Every bit as pugnacious, unyielding and hilarious as his records, Falco couldn’t have a boring conversation if he tried

“Don’t listen to me”, he announces. “I’m a miserable cunt.”

We’re easing into our time with Andy Falkous – the notoriously cantankerous fucker who has torn a peculiarly shaped hole through the underground as frontman of both Mclusky and Future Of The Left – on the subject of football. He’s so far referred to the players representing his hometown club Newcastle United as “a bunch of ill fannies”, before revealing that he’d “wank off a ghost squirrel” to see them finish fourth.

A miserable one of them the long-time Cardiff-based Falkous may be – when it suits him. It’s a reputation far too established to ever disintegrate; one garnered from cutting eager hecklers down to size from behind the mic in the momentary lulls between the savage and charming slabs which make up his bands’ output. Yet despite the years spent churning out some of the most consistently startling rock music in the country, of establishing himself as one of the foremost sages in alternative guitar battery, something feels different about latest – frankly incredible – offering How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident. That’s probably because something is different. Quite a few things are different.

This is the fourth Future of the Left album, the second with the now established line-up of drummer and Mclusky cohort Jack Egglestone, former Million Dead bassist (and Falco’s wife) Julia Ruzicka, and guitarist/certified lunatic Jimmy Watkins. It feels a million miles from the band who turned out 2007 debut Curses, never mind 2002’s blistering Mclusky Do Dallas, a still-flawless masterpiece of indie noise that, in another time and in another place, prompted its producer Steve Albini to declare them the only band in Britain worth listening to. From those gnarled roots blaring out of Cardiff to Chicago and beyond, Future of the Left have blossomed into a unit with more light and shade than Mclusky, for all their bite and bile, could have dreamed of.

On How To Stop Your Brain…, the jerky, murky and decidedly un-twerky post-hardcore squall is present and correct – perhaps better than ever on I Don’t Know What You Ketamine (But I Think I Love You). But this album also dips into downtuned, sandblasted stoner riffs; a hazily thrummed, Waits-evoking shuffle, and even, on Singing Of The Bonesaws, a surreal, tumbling narrative delivered in the style of a public service announcement. “In terms of variety, we couldn’t have done those things in Mclusky” Falco confirms. “That’s partly because of the personnel, but part of that is myself as well. I just wanted to make loud noises when I was in Mclusky, whereas now I only want to make loud noises 94% of the time.

“It’s always meant to be pop music”, he continues. “It’s always meant to have tunes. You’re meant to be able to sing along to it, even if it’s smashing you in the knee and trying to steal your Motorola. And I’d suggest that if you have a Motorola you might deserve to have it stolen.”

Part of the new record’s diversity can be attributed to restraints; restraints of time, money and resources. “Pressure’s a very important thing”, Falco says. “Whether that’s time pressure, or the pressure you put on yourself, or pressure to provide for 14 hungry young African footballers you’ve smuggled into the country. Too much of the existence of bands, whether they’re your stereotypical local amateur band, or a very successful band, is based around doing things at your own pace, and sometimes it’s nice to give yourself a time limit in order to fucking get some work done.”

The band’s previous release, The Plot Against Common Sense, showed a lyrical departure from Falco’s usual freeform tirades; more openly satirical, even pseudo-political. But How To Stop Your Brain… gathers melodramatic and irresistible snapshots of ideas; more mature maybe, but less specific. Fourth track The Male Gaze might be presumed to be a product of touring in a band with his partner, witnessing the nightly leers of largely man-made crowds upon her. Yet close listening reveals a more complex mindset.

“With The Male Gaze I’m thinking about the male gaze on the man himself ” he explains, “looking into the reasons, or more pertinently the excuses for the male gaze. For me it’s very important, as somebody who sits within society, to be aware of the excesses of misogynist males – of which there are many – but also to be aware of the occasional, slightly hysterical reactions at the other extreme. There’s something to be said about looking at the male gaze and working out how to get men to deal with how they might objectify a woman, but it’s also important to acknowledge that even though part of it is a societal construct, part of it is biological.

“It’s not claiming to have answers, it’s all just swimming around in the confusion. It’s about setting up a situation and saying ‘what the fuck are you gonna do about it?’ You can bring me the balls of every male, and that would be a solution in the first place, and it’d be a solution a lot of people would be happy to partake in.” His voice takes a turn for the severe. “But I can say that if someone has shouted something along the lines of ‘get your tits out’ to Julia whilst she’s been in the band, then I haven’t heard it. And I can guarantee that I haven’t heard it, because I’m not in prison.”

As time has gone on, Falco’s ire has become less scattergun. He practices a very personal form of politics; one of general dissatisfaction and relentless piss-taking. He’s not an apolitical person, or an apolitical writer. But he also has no intention of utilising his limited, grubby pulpit to purport to offer answers to not having answers in the grimly answer-free landscape of political discourse. “I don’t think about party politics”, he reflects. “I perhaps did at one stage, and I’m of the slightly simplistic notion that the Conservatives are worse than the others, but truth be told, I think the lot of them are, to coin a term, like a carriage full of pricks waiting for the fucking buffet. It’s an archaic institution that works in an increasingly bizarre way, it’s so bad it’s almost beyond cynicism or satire, and I think the only way to sort it out is probably revolution. But I’m afraid I have neither the organisational skills nor the necessary love of violence and sedition, so you’ll have to count me out of being involved at the planning stages.”

The band’s position to the left of acclaim and acceptance fell into pleasant crisis last year when The Plot For Common Sense was awarded the Welsh Music Prize – the Welsh version of the Polaris prize, which is the Canadian version of the Mercuries, which just got awarded to James Blake’s ambient chillax odyssey Retrograde. It’s intriguing to know how a Geordie who’s been presumed Welsh by osmosis, simply by living in Cardiff for well over a decade, as well as someone who craves validation like a vegan craves corned beef, reacted to such relative glittery praise.

“Being presumed Welsh is fine” he laughs. “I’d just as happily be presumed Welsh as English, or Swahili. It was very nice to win that thing. It’s important to receive something like that in the spirit it’s intended, not to be a total hypocrite because you can’t spend your whole life saying things like that are shit and then when you win one say it’s OK, but similarly not to be too cynical about it. It doesn’t change my view of the record, I still think it’s a very good record, and it was a very good record before we won that prize, and it’s a very good record after. I did resent people then taking the record more seriously, because the notes on the record have not been fundamentally changed in some way or made more significant by the fact there’s now a trophy attached to it.”

But the praise wasn’t universal, and a review from Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen provoked prolonged discussion. Despite the caveat of declaring Falco to be ‘something of a personal hero’, he proffered a particularly vindictive display of flailing snobbery: singling out lyrics and affixing misleading thematic tropes, accusing the band of ‘corporate-slick production’, pining limply for the days of Mclusky, and even calling into question the motives behind the band’s continued existence. He ain’t exactly the most sensitive soul, but it struck a chord with Falco. “The thing is”, he insists, “an individual’s opinion is of no consequence to me whatsoever. If they don’t like it, then hey, join the fucking queue, lots of people don’t like it. But I genuinely had hopes of that record helping to take us to a slightly wider audience, and the moment I saw that review it effectively put an end to that. So it was important for me a) to lash out like a fucking child, but b) also, to levy it. If you’re hanging these negative opinions and assumptions in a review which was probably read by tens of thousands of people, certainly more than actually bought the album, then I reserve the right to fucking reply.”

And reply he did, in an open letter to Mr. Cohen a few days later. It was a humdinger, a distillation of all those years spent kicking against the pricks, expressing his displeasure at what he felt was an unbalanced piece which favoured hits over fairness. Opening with the disclaimer that ‘rebuttals of unfavourable album reviews are lame, self-serving and immature – this one is no different …’, the letter goes on to systematically deconstruct Cohen’s review (or, as Falco puts it, ‘efuckidate in an easy- to-understand fuck-by-point manner’). Taking particular affront to the allegations of ‘corporate’ rock, he drops the bomb that, ‘It must indeed be tough to attempt to write from the perspective of the anti-corporate outsider when you are, apart from the mastering engineer (Sean, who did a really good job) probably the first person involved in the whole process of making and releasing the album to get paid because of its existence.’

While he in no way regrets his actions, Falco seems reluctant to over- egg the incident. “I don’t want to place too much emphasis on it, cause I know there are cases after that where people were scared of writing critical things about us” he grins. “And in one sense that’s very funny and cool, but in another sense it’s missing the point. You shouldn’t underestimate with me how much I fucking love an argument. Particularly a written argument. I honestly believe that if there were Top Trumps for human individuals, I wouldn’t score that highly in most, but if there was one for ‘written argument capability’ then I’d do alright.”

This was just one example of a wider engagement with his audience that Falco has long nurtured. Be it through his endlessly entertaining Twitter feed, or even offering to play Words With Friends with fans, Falco has embraced the digital age to become a knowable, approachable figure to those who’ve supported his music – as well as those who haven’t. As such, the process behind the making of How To Stop Your Brain…, as surprising as it was, made sense. Because after years of putting up with the logistical nonsense which accompanies the making of any record, Future of the Left chose to embrace the trend for crowdfunding and release the album independently under their own Prescriptions imprint. It was a brave move; you might even call it a rare display of vulnerability. Yet for a band who have stuck so staunchly to traditional values of making music with no compromise, of touring tirelessly, and of connecting directly with their audience, it was actually a very potent opportunity to transfer their fans’ dedication into something tangible and immediate. The total was reached within five hours, and it kept growing.

“It was fantastic” Falco beams, allowing himself a little – just a little – sentimentality. “The amount of faith and – I don’t use this term loosely – love it showed. It was fantastic sitting there for those five hours and watching it hit 100%. I can honestly say I fell asleep that night agog at the wonders provided by the human race.”

See, it’s this kind of talk which makes you wonder: did he always have this streak of underlying positivity coursing through him? Can it all have been a masterful ruse? Is Falco actually not in fact a massive angry bastard, but a nice bloke? The answer is … maybe.

“Well, sometimes you meet people you don’t like and who don’t like you, and they’re a prick to you, and you’re a prick back” he says. “There are things that make me miserable. Getting the train up to Newcastle gets on my tits, and I hate playing venues with shit soundsystems. I hate it when venues can’t effectively refrigerate beer and make me feel like Axl Rose because my demands include, and end, at a cold beer. But I think I’ve probably got that reputation because people see what they see onstage, and assume that’s an extrapolation of the actual character. And I suppose it’s because a lot of people in the music industry are outrageous, galloping twats and if you don’t immediately say yes to every stupid fucking idea they come up with, you become a curmudgeon and someone who’s grumpy. ‘Oh, why don’t you dress up as a penguin for this photo shoot?’ Cause it’ll make me look like a cunt, fuck off. So yeah, I can definitely be grumpy, but you know what, apart from the occasional day, I’m actually an alright guy and I get on with people just fine. I have my moodswings, but mainly because I want our music to be presented in the best possible way, and if not it makes me fucking miserable because I’ve ruined my whole life to do this. Some people aren’t gonna like me, but that’s alright, I don’t like most people, so we can all agree not to go on holiday together.”

Hearing him speak of the mythical ‘industry’ in such terms is no surprise. Future of the Left have been stung, which makes becoming independent all the more satisfying. Having released their debut on Too Pure, for Travels With Myself And Another they were passed on to one of the world’s most respected labels, 4AD. But it wasn’t so simple. “Being on Too Pure was always fine” recounts Falco. “Being on 4AD was a horrible experience.” He’s clearly agitated. “It felt like we didn’t even exist. We were told through friends of ours who knew people there that they were going to drop us a week after Travels… came out. I’m not bitter about that, I don’t want to imply some petty agenda that slowly eats away at me; I’m fucking angry about it, y’know. But then again, some people go to prison. I was on 4AD.”

To this day, Falco aspires to be a full-time musician. But he’s not. He’s an office temp. He’s not asking for sympathy – he’s simply asking to be shown the same levels of dedication and respect for stupid fucking rock music that he’s shown throughout his career. “Don’t get me wrong”, he stresses. “Nobody asked me to make those sacrifices. I made them off my own back and, occasionally I punch myself in the balls in reproach.

“But it’s the person I am. I was the person I am and it’s probably the person I ever will be. I’m very lucky that my beautiful wife doesn’t just play in the band, but also understands, and is addicted to the idea of rock music as much as I am, perhaps stupidly. It’s something we both feel about passionately and without compromise. The dream is always to do it on a full-time basis, it really is.” He doesn’t sound resigned. In fact, he sounds enthused. “I’ll never stop making music, it’s simply not an option. Whether anyone wants to listen to it or not is a different question, but it’ll never stop being made.”

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How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident is out now via Prescriptions

futureoftheleft.net

Words: Geraint Davies