It’s technically against the rules to crowd surf at the Eagles Ballroom. There’s a good chance they’ll make one exception on Friday, May 6.
What, are they going to kick the headliner’s lead singer out of the show?
If there is a coffee pot in the office, there’s that one guy who appears there each morning and can’t work without it. If there are cubicles, there’s at least one employee putting up photos of her pets. And so long as there is a tall thing to jump off of, Yannis Philippakis is jumping off of it.
It’s more than an exuberant expression of rock show adrenaline (although it’s that, too). It’s a workplace standard. If OSHA had any jurisdiction over Foals’ native Britain, they’d require the band to put up posters. When security guards stopped Philippakis from jumping at an Auckland, New Zealand, show, it made the papers.
“We assume that people know what will happen and will choose seats to accommodate it if they are worried about safety,” said Foals drummer Jack Bevan. “If they aren’t going to be strong enough, they’ll know to be somewhere else.”
Bevan has watched Philippakis climb and rapidly descend balconies night in, night out for years now, and Bevan no longer seems impressed by the process. “Most of the time I’m used to it,” he said. “If he doesn’t, I feel like he’s shortchanged the crowd.” He put it in the same breath as his never eating before the show (indigestion) or how he always stands up and claps at some point during the performance to get the crowd clapping, too. The band has reached a comfortable routine of raucousness. “I don’t think we have to one-up ourselves every night.”
If you wonder how much rock ’n’ roll anarchy you can fit into a nightly routine, you still can’t argue with the results. In 2013, the large European rock magazine Q named Foals the best live act in the world; by 2015, that had been upgraded to best act in the world. YouTube is filled with clips of Philippakis jumping off of one thing or another, and no one seems bored. Like their music—arena-strength polyrhythms math rock melting into harmonies and riffs split across two-to-three clashing instruments—the shows are controlled chaos.
Even controlled chaos is pretty bold at the rate Foals pulls it off. The website Songkick, which tracks these things, calculated that Foals’ 155 shows were the fifth most of any band in the world in its 2013 ranking of “Hardest Working Band.” It’s a fascinating list for a few reasons (who knew Papa Roach was still playing any shows, let alone a sixth place 147?), but none more so than how much traveling went into playing those shows. Songkick shows Foals traversed more than 217,000 kilometers on its tour—more than half the distance to the moon or double the distance of Papa Roach, One Direction or Willie Nelson—the sixth, seventh and eighth place bands, respectively.
Foals spends enough time on the road that, for a few months spell in 2013, Bevan literally lived there. His landlord sold his house while the band was on tour, leaving him homeless. The road is both an occasionally literal and consistently figurative home. It’s where, Bevan said, the band feels most comfortable.
So, of course they’ve settled into some routine, even if that routine involves jumping off of things. It’s home. There have been latter-day changes to the band’s performance—there is now an “amazing” light show—but no rush to tamper with their safest space. Even anarchists hate remodeling their kitchens.
Foals co-headline The Rave with Silversun Pickups on Friday, May 6 at 8 p.m. Joywave opens.
