Why Foals' latest Jools performance is one of their defining moments • DIY Magazine

Later… with Jools Holland has, since its inception in 1992, provided performances that have defined bands’ years, album cycles, even careers. Think At The Drive-In in 2000. Think Elliott Smith the year before. Think Bon Iver in 2008.

Foals first appeared on the show in 2007 to showxase ‘Antidotes’, performing ‘Red Sox Pugie’ and ‘Balloons’. The Oxford five-piece bounded around with a twitchy enthusiasm and clear talent, but it was clear they needed time. By the point the band returned to the show in 2012 to perform ‘My Number’, a track not out at the time, the progress they had made was abundantly clear, and proved an apt point from which to look back and accurately chronicle their rise from awkward debutants to rock titans.

If taking ‘Holy Fire’ to Jools felt like a moment for Foals at the time, then last night blew it into obscurity. Opening the show - and the series - with ‘Mountain At My Gates’, the band appeared more comfortable in themselves than ever, still stretching themselves to new styles, genres and to the absolute ends of their capabilities. Yannis Philippakis is in every way a frontman now, grabbing the microphone at regular intervals with utter confidence. Jack Bevan is still the best drummer in indie, reaching further with every turn.

It’s the performance of ‘What Went Down’’s title track that will be truly remembered though. Yannis abandons his guitar halfway through and thrashes around for the remainder of the song, thumping his chest in a show of complete passion and confidence. He owns the place.

In Foals’ cover feature in the September issue of DIY, Philippakis talks about the band’s need for time to grow. Because the praise lauded onto ‘Antidotes’ wasn’t as strangling as that given to, say, ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ or ‘Silent Alarm’, the band have been allowed to grow and change and progress without constant comparisons drawn between their debut and their every next move.

“I think we’re lucky, because some bands come out with these perfectly-formed debut records. And then it’s hard to better that. If you’re in that situation, it’s hard to know about the next step. But we never felt that. There was mixed feelings about the first record and the second record and the third - and there will be about this record.”
What their next move may be is a completely open question, and with “hundreds of untouched ideas” floating around the band, it may be closer than expected. The “mixed feelings” Philippakis cites are the sign of a band who will never stop progressing. Though last night clearly wasn’t the endgame for Foals, it’ll be hard not to remember it however many years in the future as a ‘moment’ of the same intensity and importance as Radiohead in 1995, or Arctic Monkeys ten years later. Last night belonged to Foals, and 2015 is on the way to being undoubtedly theirs too.