Yannis Philippakis from Foals: the rock star who swapped the tour bus for a monastery
The thinking person’s singer-guitarist on his visit to Mount Athos, writing songs about Brexit and why smartphones make him think of Tolkien
When a rock star comes off a long, boozy tour, they have several options. Home, to tend withered personal relationships. The beach. A spell in rehab, perhaps. Or, as Yannis Philippakis says with faint contempt, “a yoga retreat or a wellness spa”.
However, if you’re Philippakis, singer, songwriter and guitarist with Foals, there is another way. After saying goodbye to his bandmates in the spring of 2017, he headed to the spartan monasteries of Mount Athos in northeastern Greece, a spiritual centre of the Orthodox church where women have been banned for 1,000 years.
“The monasteries were like medieval fortresses, very imposing structures,” the 32-year-old says over a pint and a vegan burger at his local pub in Peckham, southeast London. No vegan burgers in Athos — for several weeks he slept in monks’ cells and ate food that he describes as “really austere”. Highlights included “some type of grain that had a skin on it, with no salt” and “green tomatoes, but not in a hipster breakfast way. Sour.” Such deprivations made him realise “that there are these other ways of living that have existed for thousands of years. I enjoyed going there and having my sense of self messed with.”
It’s certainly a long way from Phuket or the Priory. That shouldn’t be a surprise, though — Philippakis is not a man who bows to the conventions of his industry. His mother is a South African academic who met his Greek father, an architect, when she travelled to Greece for a research project. The couple have since split, but she has written a paper about “the fluid notions of Greek time and promises and obligation”.
No wonder their son doesn’t fit the template of the typical indie frontman. Philippakis studied English at Oxford University (although he dropped out) and admits that “most of the stuff I find interesting is outside popular music”. When I last met him he had been vociferously defending David Foster Wallace on Twitter from an attack from another novelist, Bret Easton Ellis, which is not something that you can see Liam Gallagher doing.
What’s striking is how Philippakis has combined nonconformity with real success. Foals, which he formed with friends in Oxford in 2005, have sold 1.7 million records, been nominated twice for the Mercury prize and have headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals. NME once declared Philippakis the 16th coolest person in the world. DIY magazine recently proclaimed the start of the band’s “imperial phase”, when everything they touch turns to gold. Releasing their new album in two parts (very Guns N’ Roses) does suggest a certain creative swagger.
Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost — Part 1 (Part 2 follows in September) combines Philippakis’s yearning yelp with rippling guitars, a beefed-up electronic dimension (“a lot of guitar music just seems a bit dusty, a bit stagnant”) and lyrics about the evils of technology and environmental collapse. Its first single, Exits, may be the first genuinely brilliant song about Brexit.
Mount Athos clearly did the trick. Yet Philippakis’s trip doesn’t smack of vanity spirituality, like the Beatles visiting the Maharishi. He speaks Greek fluently and was retracing the route of his father, who also spent time in Mount Athos. “He was painting Byzantine churches — gold leaf, egg tempera frescoes, wet plaster on scaffolding, that kind of thing,” he says. Philippakis Sr is visiting, as it happens — he’s reading at a table in the corner of the pub. Father and son share a certain stocky intensity, both curly haired and thickly bearded.
Philippakis Jr speaks eloquently about the EU (he thinks the UK should remain, but that Greece may be better off out), how Mount Athos has been used as a political football (“It’s a viable foothold in Europe for the Russians”), and the weirdness of its ban on women (“What strikes you instantly when you’re on this boat on the way there is that there are no women, which is quite a strange experience”). Among the few women to gain entry, apparently, were Helen of Bulgaria, the wife of the 14th-century Serbian emperor Dusan the Mighty who was borne in a hand carriage and so didn’t touch the sacred ground, and Aliki Diplarakou, a former Miss Europe, who in the Thirties sneaked in disguised as a man.
An all-male enclave is an interesting choice of travel destination, given the present climate. Masculinity has been on Philippakis’s mind. Having swept through the film world, Me Too has moved on to the music industry, with artists from R Kelly to Ryan Adams facing allegations of sexual misconduct (which both deny). Even unreflective male musicians are questioning a culture of groupies and sexual entitlement. And the conscientious ones, such as Philippakis?
“It’s been educational,” he says. “Being more aware in general of one’s own behaviour, but also calling out behaviour that’s inappropriate when you see it.” At the Brit awards Matt Healy of the 1975 quoted the journalist Laura Snapes: “In music, male misogynist acts are examined for nuance… while women and those who call them out are treated as hysterics who don’t understand art.”
Philippakis echoes those thoughts. Giving more credence to female victims of abuse is one of the biggest achievements of Me Too, and one of the most challenging, he thinks. “It’s something that I had to grapple with, because my natural reaction would be to be sceptical. You have to allow those voices to come through where before they were shut out through a patriarchal system that was always giving the benefit of the doubt to men.”
When he was younger, Philippakis was drawn to the Hemingway archetype, educated on one side, primal on the other. He got into fights, became interested in marlin fishing and bullfighting, all that jazz. Black Bull, a track on Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2, tackles the subject, very much in vogue, of toxic masculinity. He intended the song to be “blotting paper for that more precarious and brutish side of being a man”.
How much does it apply to him? “I definitely have a self-destructive tendency, and I can be careless and impulsive, but I feel like I’m in much better control of those things now.” That’s partly because he exorcises them on stage — crowd surfing, leaping off balconies, strutting around like a prize fighter (he has actually taken up boxing as another angsty outlet). At the last volcanic show that I saw Foals play, he roared: “Thank you from the bottom of our withered little hearts.”
Off stage he is far more placid, he says, which is largely down to his girlfriend, a charity worker whom he would rather not name. They have been together for eight years, an eternity for a rock musician, and she is “incredibly important for my overall wellbeing. I could have gone into a more chaotic situation. The work she does is so much more important than what I do. It’s quite easy to disappear up your arse in the music industry.” He mimes a rock star lolling petulantly in a hotel room. “Why is the Deliveroo not here?”
There are more important things to get het up about, he says, such as imminent environmental and political Armageddon. “We’ve been left on this precipice and none of them are around to help,” he says of David Cameron and Co. “Maybe they’ve buggered off to France or Spain, or they’re just hiding in the leafy places on the Central line that you’ve never stopped off at.”
Technology and social media don’t help, he says, referring to the title of a book by Sherry Turkle: Alone Together. “That’s what we are now. People are quite unhappy. You have all of this technology that was supposedly utopian, and it’s reduced to falsehoods, mistruths, fart gags and cat memes. The world hasn’t become a better place.” It’s dumbed him down, he thinks. He was once a voracious reader, but he increasingly finds himself drawn to his phone. “It’s got this terrible power. It’s like the Ring.”
Still, Foals are thriving, even if the world isn’t. This week Philippakis rejoins his bandmates Jack Bevan (drums), Jimmy Smith (rhythm guitar) and Edwin Congreave (keyboards) for three UK shows, with another long, boozy tour of America and Europe to follow. “When we put out the first album [Antidotes, in 2008] there’s no way we’d have foreseen that we’d still be doing it now. ‘It’s better to break up while you’re young, we don’t want to be like U2.’ But actually…”
Hang on, though, hasn’t he railed in the past about festival bills jammed with ageing bands? “And I’m not wrong about that,” he says. “Even though I got some stick for it. It’s about allowing the youth to break through the topsoil.” Just as long as there’s room for the odd hardy perennial.
It may be because he’s a few pints in, but Philippakis has come over all sentimental. He says he can’t believe he has spent a decade “making music with my friends in a way that’s been artistically liberating, not churning it out, in a studio five minutes from home. It’s an amazing thing that shouldn’t be taken for granted.” Then he adds, with a dark grin: “Hashtag: blessed.”
📰The Times 📷Alex Knowles (cropped)
Ed Potton || March 1 2019
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