Music: Future of the Left | Andrew Falkons | Jack Egglestone

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The Review - MUSIC - grooves with RóISíN GADELRAB
Published: 9 April 2009

Future of the Left: Andrew Falkous, Jack Egglestone and Kelson Mathias

Left to their own vices

FUTURE of the Left are loud. So loud in fact that frontman Andrew Falkous has taken to wearing earplugs for every gig.
“I’ve got significant hearing loss,” he says. “I’ve worn earplugs for the duration of this band. If you’re a professional musician you owe it to yourself. I tell our bass player at every single rehearsal but he never listens.”
From their onstage appearance you’d imagine some serious TV-throwing aftershow parties, but the reality is different. Their rider reads like a Holland and Barrett shopping list – bananas, nuts and vitamin wate– and a few beers.
“We’re a very normal bunch of people, deathly dull in fact. We try to reserve all our rock and roll for the bit when we’re on stage,” admits Andrew.
“If it disappoints people that we’re not a cartoon caricature selection of individuals then fair enough, but real life invades our everyday experience as much as it does everybody elses.”
The band will play the Purple Turtle’s Artrocker magazine stage alongside Hatcham Social, S.C.U.M, Danananakroyd and Pulled Apart by Horses, for the Camden Crawl’s under-age X-Crawl – to an audience of 14 to 18-year-olds.
Andrew says: “It’s a step into the unknown. Most of our crowd is older and cynical.”
The worst places he’s ever played, in terms of “general inertia”, he says, were Northampton and Peterborough – “they’re the dark places”.
But he adds: “In terms of crowd reaction to my old band it would always be Paris. Parisians are just so rude. That was the really mystifying thing. I would turn to the crowd sometimes and go ‘am I mistaken or did you pay 12 euros to come here, put your elbows on the barriers and look at me like you’re watching the devil?’ “I really hate playing Paris.
“One could spend time in Paris and confuse Parisians with the French. The French are lovely but Paris needs to be launched towards the sun.
“The best shows I’ve had in my life were in Seattle, Melbourne and London.”
Andrew took the band name from a newspaper article, on Nicolas Sarkozy’s election, which read: “What now for the future of the left?”.
“It struck me straight away,” he says. “Some people hate it. Some thought it was either very explicitly political or referring to art like we were saying we were the future of leftfield music.
“If they’re going to be wound up by something they’ve implied themselves then I’m happy to wind them up.”

* Future of the Left’s new album Travels with Myself and Another is out on June 22.

* The Camden Crawl and X-Crawl take place on April 24-25 – www.thecamdencrawl.com

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