Andrew Falkous Explains The Power Inherent In Fusing The Conventional With The Unconventional

There's been some pretty seismic changes of late in the life of Future Of The Left frontman and wordsmith Andrew Falkous. Six months ago he and his Australian partner Julia Ruzicka - also bassist in Future of The Left for the last seven years - welcomed their first child, a daughter, into the world, followed by the pair completely uprooting their life and moving from Cardiff to the thriving metropolis of London.

For his part Falkous seems to be taking all the tumult in his considerable stride, still striving to come to terms with life in the big smoke but not letting anything cloud his creativity or mischievous worldview.

"There's been lots of changes recently," he tells. "We moved to London - myself and Julia - about a month-and-a-half ago for her job, so we've just [been] settling into London. Have you been to London? It's one of the centres of the world, isn't it, and sometimes being near the centre of the world is great, and sometimes you can't be arsed.

"I mean I lived in Cardiff for 24 years and Cardiff is a very different place - Cardiff is a place where it's pretty much got everything you want, but you can walk anywhere. You could walk everywhere in London, but you'd become a vagrant because you'd spend all your time walking. It's got an amazing energy, but northern towns in Britain have a reputation for violence and if you go out on a Friday or Saturday night then yeah, it's almost like 'rent a punch'. But there's a pressure in London, there's a lot of aggression even if it's just lying beneath the surface. It's still a fascinating place."

Falkous hasn't wasted any time setting up a new studio space, although with space in London at a premium it's somewhat impinging on their living quarters. But given that in recent times he's been releasing the music he makes at home under his solo moniker Christian Fitness - on top of meeting all of his Future Of The Left commitments - having somewhere to experiment musically is a high priority.

"I record just in our living room," Falkous continues. "Half of our living room - much to Julia's displeasure - is where I do music and writing and stuff. She always says 'It would be nice one day to have a living room where we get to live,' and I'm, like, 'Yeah, I know, but space is space.' If you've lived in London yourself you'd understand how much space is at a premium - it's not like we have spare rooms.

"But I record my own Christian Fitness stuff here, and then go into a proper studio [for Future Of The Left] to record the adult instruments like guitars and drums, and maybe so I can do the shouting properly. We're very lucky with the house we've got in London actually, I reckon I could get some vocals done in the kitchen without anybody sending me death threats.

"Although with our place in Cardiff I was very lucky: in all my years of recording music there semi-properly I think only once my next door neighbour said, 'Stop or I'll kill you.' And I couldn't really argue, neither with the fact that he'd kill me - I'm not a fighter - or the fact that I probably would have deserved it."

The Christian Fitness outlet has gone from strength to strength in recent times, with what started as a seemingly one-off detour at the time having now spawned four increasingly strong albums in a little over three years.

"I put a lot of work into it," Falkous admits. "Some people thought that the first record [2014's I Am Scared Of Everything That Isn't Me] was a bit tossed-off, but it really wasn't. It was just that recording-wise I pretty much did it by myself and I didn't know what the fuck was going on, but I still think it has a spirit even despite that. And I really enjoyed making the second one [2015's Love Letters In The Age of Steam], but the last two records in particular [2016's This Taco Is Not Correct and 2017's Slap Bass Hunks] I've really fucking loved making them and I'm very, very proud of them indeed.

"I've got the songs for the new one now, it's just a question of finding time to finish them. I always have a song where I get to the stage of doing a verse-chorus and working it into an actual song and then I have to add something else to it, so I've basically got another 15 songs and I just keep throwing things at them to see if anything else happens or if the lyrics are particularly standout. But I'm pretty much there with the next one, and title will doubtless come again in due course.

"The last two records have been named by Michael Byzewski who does pretty all of our artwork - he did all of the Christian Fitness records and he did all of the [2016 Future Of The Left album] The Peace & Truce Of Future Of The Left as well as the artwork for [2009 album] Travels With Myself And Another. He just sent me an image and underneath he'd written some words, and I went, 'Hey mate, is that a thing? This Taco Is Not Correct?', and he went, 'No, it's just five words, and I went, 'It's the perfect title!' Because I said what I wanted for the cover was like a stone angel looking fed up with his head in his hands, and he sent me that pic with the words underneath, it was amazing.

"And then the next time I said I wanted a bee mounting the Great Pyramid - it just occurred to me as an image - and he sent it back and underneath it said 'Slap Bass Hunks', and I'm, like, 'Mate, that's the title!' And he said, 'But you're the one known for your titles?" and I was like, 'You see what goes into it?' It's always best when you're not trying, the same way that if you want to find a squirrel to fall in love with never be looking for that squirrel or you'll never meet that squirrel. And yes, I am saying squirrel. Again it's a bit of a running joke in this house: Julia thinks that I fancy squirrels because I run around parks so much. I'm not sure if it's a euphemism or not but we just run with it, literally in my case.

"So I'm going to describe to him an image that I've got in my head, and he'll come back to me and he'll write some words underneath, and everyone will think it's a really profound album title! It's quite the fucking wheeze, isn't it? He's the one who's meant to come up with the artwork idea so we've totally got that the wrong way around, but it's working so I'm loathe to change the process."

Including both of his current outfits Falkous has released seven strong albums in the last five years, an occurrence he puts down to a recent lifestyle choice rather than a particularly rich vein of songwriting.

"Well I didn't have a home set-up before that so I was a bit restricted," he explains. "It was actually on the last tour of Australia when we played Sydney and I remember having a conversation in the dressing room - I think it was the Factory Theatre, the same place we're playing this time - and I was just faced with going back to the same kind of temp job that I'd always go back to in between tours.

"And that's not to complain about that because I've made some of my best friends working those jobs, and I've got a perspective on music that you wouldn't have if you were just in music all the time, but I was faced with that and I just remember saying to Julia, 'Can I set up a desk or something in the living room so I can write some songs at home for a thing?' And as it turned out I lost my job - just because my contract ended and they didn't need me anymore - a couple of weeks after I got back, so I thought, 'Ah fuck it, I'm just going to buy an interface and start doing songs from here.'

"And obviously it was easier for me because I'd used various programs over the years and stuff so I had a bit of a head start over just anybody doing it, and because of previous bands I guess people were liable to check it out on Bandcamp. Bandcamp and everything is a very rare example of things working very well for a musician - out of all the money I make they take about 10%, and you know what? It seems kinda fair. How often do you get to say that in life? 'Yeah the company made loads of money, but it seems fair. They take 10% of my money, and it seems right.' That just doesn't happen. Wherever you've got a business - particularly in the creative industries - some fucking cunt dressed like a pirate is taking the money that you should make, so for that actually not to be the case is great.

"I will say that in the last few years - but specially in the last two years, although there may be the odd month or two where it doesn't really work - but it's usually the case that for me that just after finishing a record, the songs I write for the first two or three weeks after that are really bad facsimiles of the ones I just wrote, but apart from that I honestly can't imagine enjoying anything more than writing music: it's just so much fun. It's so much fun late at night after three beers by myself in the house, trying to stop the fucking cat from eating pesto from a pan, or stood in a room with your friends. Sometimes it doesn't work and you've got to go, 'Ah, it's been shit today,' but as long as you realise that it can be shit that day and that's ok, it's fine.

"But it's amazing, I don't feel really lucky about my financial situation as a result of being a musician but the actual chance to make so much music I wouldn't change that for the world. And I can't change it for the world, because I'm not a fucking time traveller. I heard a lot of stuff recently - because me and Julia recently had a baby girl - and people are talking about their kids, and they go, 'Oh, I wouldn't change them for the world!' and you go 'Oh, that's alright, you're not allowed to! It's not an option!'"

Falkous reveals that the songs from The Peace & Truce Of Future Of The Left have been translating really strongly on the live front, which is fortuitous given that their incendiary live show has long been one of the band's major strengths.

"Yeah, it's particularly fun live because I guess it's a rockier and less varied album than the last one [2013's How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident]," he offers. "The last one had a lot more - not necessarily 'loud-quiet' in the songs, your classic Pixies and Nirvana quiet-loud formula' - but there were wandering, creepy songs and then there were very bombastic, cartoony, poppy songs then there were very heavy songs. Whereas Peace & Truce was a bit more linear, I suppose. Not by design, it just works that way. Nobody ever sits down and comes up with a theme, because I think if you do that you're sabotaging everything you do and you're trying to give everything a narrative that it doesn't necessarily have.

"But it's been really good and I really love the record. You can always tell how much a band likes a new record and how it translates live by how many of the songs are in the live set, and depending on the occasion - because we do like to vary the setlist little by little every night, we'll probably change out one or two songs a night. But there's six or seven songs from the new record in the set, and they get some of the best reactions. So that's it really.

"It reviewed quite well, it reviewed about as well as the previous one. The only issue is that reviews don't sell you any records anymore, they're just something that you carry around with you, proudly or otherwise. It's a bit of a shame that: maybe I'm conning myself, but I'm a bit nostalgic for the days when being good could mean that more people listen to you. But it's cool.

"It's the kind of record, as opposed to the previous record, where I was kind of surprised that it didn't reach a bit of a wider audience, whereas with the last record we were kind of asking for it really, in the sense that it is quite a dark, relentless record. So it's fine, I'm really fine with it, young man."

Future Of The Left recently lost guitarist Jimmy Watkins and after five years as a four-piece reverted to their original trio formation, rounded out by founding drummer Jack Egglestone (who'd previously played with Falkous in revered rockers Mclusky). Does Falkous feel this change has affected the band dynamic much?

"Yes and no," he ponders. "There's certain stuff where Jimmy's a really, really good guitar player but he's coming from a different tradition, so in as much there were things he added, there were things we couldn't do because he was in the band. Even if we never tried them, it just didn't feel right, whereas since he's not in the band anymore - and nobody ever sat down and said this - it allows us to play with more weird rhythms and time signatures a little bit more.

"But we probably lose another element, something a little bit layered and - dare I say it - something a little bit more conventional. And I don't mean that in a bad way though, because sometimes the way that the conventional would jar with the slightly unconventional would be what made it. But part of dealing with that is just the recognition that they're just two different records made at two different times.

"I don't really listen to records that much after they're finished, but having recently listened to those two records next to each other I think they accompany each other really well. They sound like they're part of the same piece: the first of those two records sounds mightier, but The Peace & Truce is definitely more in your face and nasty. There's a real nasty quality to it, which is bizarre as fuck because it was a far more relaxed writing and recording process. Although I will say with both those records again, it was pretty fucking easy, the whole thing.

"And it has been Future Of The Left-wise for a long time now. You might have a couple of times where a couple of rehearsals maybe don't work out, but I can really only think of a lag for about three months while we were writing Travels where me, Jack and Kelson [Mathias - original bassist] played the same riff over and over again, and I know that people in our rehearsal rooms wanted to kill themselves.

"It was a song we had called 'Two Doctors', which was very loosely about the Madeleine McCann thing, the young girl who went missing on holiday in Portugal with her two parents who were both doctors. It was very obliquely about that, but we just had this riff and it was the greatest start of a song we'd ever had and we'd get about 40 seconds and just not know what to do. And we tried everything - we tried all of the things we'd normally do, and then we loved the start of this song so much I actually went away and listened to nearly every song in the world to work out what every change was, just to give me an idea about where to take it because the start was evidently so really good.

"But we never got there, and it nearly broke us because we couldn't move past it. But then one day we just moved past it and we had one rehearsal where we wrote Arming Eritrea, Land Of My Formers and another song from that record - I forget - in the space of about 40 minutes. We wrote three of our favourite songs really fast, and that's what happens in terms of writing songs - you don't necessarily know the work you're doing whilst you're doing it, and you have to fucking deal with that frustration to get to the rewards. It's not always easy, although sometimes it's really fucking easy."

Given the apparent unpredictability of the process has Falkous been surprised how Future Of The Left have inched slowly but surely away from the synth-heavy sound of the band's 2007 debut Curses with each subsequent release?

"Not really no, because in a lot of a ways I think the last record sounded a lot like Curses, albeit without the synths," Falkous offers. "There are more similarities between albums one and five than there are between the other records. But again it's not necessarily a deliberate thing, it was more because during Curses there was a keyboard there - it was Kelson's keyboard at the time - and when we kind of played out some ideas and were getting a bit bored with just the sound of things, it was just a question of putting your hand on the keyboard and going, 'Oh, that sounds different.'

"And even recently we'd get the keyboard out every so often and try some ideas, and some were pretty good and others were 'Nah, this sounds a bit like the old stuff doesn't it, so let's just leave it.' But you never know, the next record could be half keyboard songs, although I say that but to be honest I haven't got it out of the cupboard for about a year.

"So yes it could, if there's a songwriting munchkin working away in there who's suddenly going to present me with the sheet music for four songs I didn't know about, and then an adult is going to come along and show me how to read sheet music so we can then play the songs. So if that happens, yeah, it could be a full-on ELO fest. But in terms of songwriting, it's really just whatever works."