Foals for Life

July 28th, 2010 by Jo

Obviously, all of you have recently done very little other than listen to our new single “Even Your Friend” over and over again. Some of you may even have briefly bothered with the B – SIDE, a song sung in Spanish called “Friendo For Life”. (listen to them both here) Those of you who did are now obviously bearing one burning question in their hearts: why a song in Spanish? Well, here’s why…

We were asked to write it by a very talented young German film director named Benjamin Heisenberg. He needed something which sounded similar to a traditional Cuban love song, as covered by Robert Wyatt, to be included in his new film, “Der Räuber”. Benjamin had tried to get the rights to that song but had been turned down. So, since none of us speak a word of Spanish, we got to work using various online translation engines.

We had to do a lot of cross-referencing with  texts on Spanish websites to get the syntax right but were later told that a Spanish speaking person had confirmed the lyrics to be grammatically and syntactically correct. Well done us!

The words make very little sense. In fact they are probably the worst love song lyrics of all time. Luckily, it’s quite difficult to actually make them out under all that delay and reverb. We’re too vain to reproduce them here in their entirety but to give you an idea, at one point in the song, we sing something like “the guitar in my head is permanently singing ‘au revoir'”. Impressive, eh?

Anyway, this whole thing then allowed us to attend our first ever film festival premiere, as “Der Räuber” was chosen for the competition at this year’s Berlin film festival. We got to walk across the red carpet, with Keith in particular cutting a rather fine figure in his suit and, of course, sporting his formidable beard. This led all the camera guys to believe he was some kind of celebrity they had better focus on, so there he was, zoomed in on on the huge live video screen at the entrance of the film palace for his entire walk across the carpet.

Later, inside the film palace, Johannes nearly killed a woman by accidentally dropping his mobile phone from the ten-meters-high balcony and only very narrowly missing her head. Understandably, she vocalised her feelings about this in no uncertain terms across the rather large crowd of people.

So there, now you know all about our latest b-side. The digital single was released yesterday, and you can find the 7″ single in your local record shop on Monday.

In other, equally fascinating news, we have just realized that the video to Foals’ single “Miami” pays, shall we say, close homage to the video of our very own song “Fun and interesting”.

Not sure what to make of that.

Anyway, have a nice day!