FEATURE:
Spotlight
I have discovered through BBC Radio 6 Music – who recently turned twenty -, Folly Group are an interesting and very strong proposition. I have to be a bit careful when sourcing interviews, as Folly Group have added a couple of new members since their inception (their formation has changed, so apologies if there are songs included that is part of the old line-up!). I have made the mistake of including old interviews and photos of bands without the new member or with one that has since left! I am sourcing pretty recent interview. The promotion is sort of cantered around their 2021 E.P., Awake and Hungry. I shall get to a review at the end. In preparation for that, I want to bring in a few interviews with the guys. The Line of Best Fit covered the rising group back in July about their formation and growth:
“Formed out of drunken enthusiasm on a late-night tube journey, housemates Sean Harper, Louis Milburn and Tom Doherty would frequently play shows at venues such as The Old Blue Last and The Windmill in South London, before finally recruiting percussionist Kai Akinde-Hummel into the fold. He claims that at one point in his life, he was “the only drummer in Camden”. Naturally, this meant that he was involved with many different projects at the same time. “I went to go see them and thought they were terrible. I asked them, do you know what you should do…” Hummel jokes as the other members give conflicting stories of what actually happened.
In reality, Hummel was brought along to a rehearsal having been close friends with the members for years, and became the missing piece of the puzzle. His rhythmic contributions on tracks such as “Fashionista” and “Four Wheel Drive” are hard to miss, adding to the unconventional nature of their music. “We had a show the following Wednesday and he was right – it was way better!” Milburn shouts.
With Kai now in the fold, the group got to work over last summer, fleshing out demos that would become Awake and Hungry. Not every idea they had always stuck, especially with intensive writing sessions, sometimes up to 10-12 hours a day. However, they feel like has paid off. “We recorded it whilst me Louis and Tom were sharing a house in a tiny bedroom, with a mattress shoved against the wall. Thankfully our deaf neighbour was cool with it and we couldn’t have done it without him!” exclaims Harper. “It feels sentimental and almost like a sonic footprint of the experimental energy we had at that time.”
Despite being lumped in with the post-punk label like many of the South London DIY bands associated with The Windmill venue such as Squid, Black Midi and Goat Girl, Folly Group’s members are more in touch with their electronic and dance influences than anything else. That being said, Folly Group aren’t afraid of shying away from the label either. As Harper says: “It’s so much easier to explain that we’re a post-punk band when someone asks you at the pub than getting bogged down in subgenres. At the end of the day, what we make has so many other random influences. In terms of the EP we wanted to make something that was broad enough that whatever we decide to do in the future isn’t some U-turn.”
Harper says that he grew up engaged in the world of dance music from an early age – particularly material that was dark and heavy. It is hard to miss this influence in all of Folly Group’s music with the EP’s constant ambient layers amongst the other frantic instrumentation. The idea of being in a straightforward rock band isn’t appealing to him. “All those things seep into Folly Group, the most obvious one being incorporating such a complex rhythm section for a group of four people,” he explains. “I think the idea was that we wanted audiences to have the same lucid, bodily reaction they would get from a DJ”.
The lockdowns and pandemic wouldn’t have been great for a band who were changing and trying to make their next moves. Tom, Kai, Louis and Sean were recording remotely and trying to acclimatise to the changing and strange situation. WAX spoke to the band back in the summer and asked how they were faring in this new reality:
“I am very excited to interview you all and meet you virtually. How is the state of the world and the limitations affecting your creativity?
Sean: Kind of positively, in new ways that we hadn’t anticipated. I think that being pushed into these boxes has meant that we have bent into very weird shapes that we would have never foreseen before all of this. Tom and Louis are in one place, I’m in one place and Kai is in another. We have become pretty efficient at remote collaboration which was made a lot easier by the fact we have always recorded and made music at home ourselves. It is almost like running a small business at the moment; we all really enjoy fiddling with it, remixing, doing 16 bars, stemming it, passing it on to the group and then someone else will reinterpret it.
Tom: I’ve quite enjoyed doing things that way as well. You can kind of do it in your own time, see what comes back. If you’re together, they’re more gradual changes, but the stuff I send to Sean will come back and it’s gone fucking west and vice versa.
Sean: To hear another member of the band’s work when you haven’t been privy to the process they have undertaken in order to change it, you end up totally repurposing that piece of work. When we’re not all in the same room collaborating, brand new doors for this gestating piece of music are opened. You’re being made to hear something that you started in a completely new way, which for me has been brilliant.
PHOTO CREDIT: Holly Whittaker
Has the recording process changed during the lockdowns, as opposed to – for example – your debut track ‘Butt No Rifle’?
Kai: The only real difference was that I wouldn’t go to their house and record the production parts. I would do it at home and would send it over.
Sean: Kai’s been sending a lot of agogô bells and woodblock stems over email. Everything we have put out and are sitting on so far was recorded in Louis’ bedroom in Leyton. We don’t really have a set rule for writing. We chose ‘Butt No Rifle’ to be the first track that we put online as we felt it’s a perfect example of how each of us do 25% of the work; it felt like a good mission statement. ‘Fashionista’, however, was almost exclusively Tom. We fleshed it out together but it hasn’t deviated very much from the logic demo that Tom put together.
Tom: [laughs] I did listen back to that original demo the other day and it’s horrible! It’s a lot more refined now but, no, our original strategy hasn’t really changed at all.
I feel like your sound is very eclectic, drawing on loads of different influences, yet still giving the impression of unity and a shared experience. Could you perhaps tell me a bit about your individual musical backgrounds and how you came to form Folly Group.
Tom: We have all known each other in some shape or form for a very long time. Sean, Louis and I have played in projects beforehand and all three of us used to live together. Kai used to play in a band with some friends of ours. The biggest shift was moving in together, it was just like “why are we not doing this?”
Kai: My situation is a bit different. Me and Louis were in separate bands, but we toured quite a lot together. We’d always be at the same shows together around Europe or wherever. I’ve known that guy for crazy long. I just realised how long it’s actually been that I have known him, it’s a stupid amount of time. I think I first met him when I was still a teenager! We never got the chance to properly work together so it’s kind of cool to join up with these guys now.
Louis: I feel like there was one fatal tube trip where we all looked at each other talking about music and we were like “well this is pointless, we should definetly be in a band together.”
Sean: I think we were railed as well, where were we coming back from?
Louis: I feel like that was around Kai’s birthday and before we had ever considered being in a band together. We’ve known each other for a long time; this isn’t our first try.
I really love the electronic, punky, genre-bending sound you have – could you speak to me a little bit about your influences as individuals, as well as a band?
Sean: I have always loved guitar music – for lack of a better phrase – and electronic dance music as much as each other, for as long as I can remember. I’ve always tried to exist in both worlds. We are all massive fans of a lot of electronic music, and I have quite an extensive background in making it. I think you can hear that in the way we treat samples as instruments, and we flip the originals of our own tracks. Some of that comes from my love of Sheffield 90s bleak techno and old Warp Records releases. Everyone’s got a USP in this project which is kind of what keeps it really exciting to be in.
Tom: I’ve had a lot more of a guitar background. I’ve enjoyed electronic music my whole life but in a less educated way. Since hanging out with Sean I have learned so much more about it. I have started enjoying it in a different way, really thinking about how I can use it. But really, I just loved guitars as a kid
Kai: I know it’s a bit of a cliché when people say “I listen to everything” but growing up in London you are exposed to many different subcultures and groups. I’ve been playing from really early; the only drummer in my school – I was in every flipping band! But it opened my ears and my eyes to music that a lot of people wouldn’t expect me to like, and I shock myself sometimes. Similar to Tom, the latest music influence for me was more traditional electronic music – I’m not talking about anything that is produced on the computer. Techno was just like ‘what the hell?’ for a long time. But then, hanging different groups of people, going away to different countries, to Uni and stuff, you just get exposed to so much”.
I want to include a bit of an interview from DORK from back in July. The band appear self-deprecating and funny, but there is a sense it was quite tough getting their music together whilst they were all isolated. It was a struggle to record and create as they would have been used to before the pandemic took hold:
“Still, at the end of the day, we’re all here for the music, and the boys know that. Folly Group are post-punk in the true sense of the word, drawing on a whole range of influences from outside of the world of big riffs and bass licks. Or, in Sean’s words: “We make weird hybrid guitar music that is 100% just the sum of various influences.” “Right yeah,” continues Louis. “We’re a kind of four-limbed vessel for turning lots of complicated ideas into one idea that’s not really the sum of its parts.”
Self-deprecation aside, their new EP is a scorcher. For Folly Group, it’s both the closing of an early chapter (“A fond farewell to the formative period,” as Sean describes it) and a product of their recording environment. Sean, Louis and Tom were hunkered down in one house while Kai radioed in his contributions, explains Louis: “It was the three of us locked in a really, really small house — way too cramped for three fully-grown blokes in such a small, decaying—” “Shithole,” butts in Tom. “We were helped enormously by the fact that we had an extremely kind and an extremely deaf next-door neighbour called Roger, so big up Roger,” adds Sean with a cheesy grin. “Not one complaint.”
But how about contributing from outside of the makeshift bedroom studio? The band had already been playing together for six months before the first lockdown, so the dynamic was well in place, but there were definitely complications for Kai. “It was just a lot of recording percussion in my bedroom and pissing off my flatmates. I didn’t have such a lucky setup as these guys. We were all inside constantly, so having me banging away on like agogô bells and woodblocks wasn’t ideal. I have all these files on my laptop, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and it’ll just be silence and then really loud cowbells. What was I thinking?”
In 2021, the realities of being cooped up in a shithole are pretty universal, even for those of us not recording flatmate-troubling belters. That’s something the band have definitely been thinking about, as Louis explains. “It’s quite interesting, the prominence of guitar-based music at the moment, because I always think — well, it’s not mending any broken hearts, is it? It’s a very kind of active energetic genre, there’s always a transference of energy. And it’s interesting: how are people who are locked down listening to this music? Someone just sat in a room like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna listen to some loud shit now’. But maybe that’s why it’s important now because people don’t have a way to bring that energy into their lives so much. Maybe that’s why people are liking it again.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Waespi
When we suggest that listeners might be coming to Folly Group to live out their future live music fantasies, it’s met by another round of guffaws. “I don’t want to use the word escapism in an interview because I fucking hate it, but there’s definitely an element of living vicariously,” says Louis, before Sean juts in. “I mean, if we’ve made anyone look forward to anything, then job done.” It’s a strong mission statement, and one that reflects the prospect of the summer ahead. If nothing else, we can all look forward to drunkenly slurring “…band?” and ambling to a gig together”.
Their Awake and Hungry debut E.P. is tremendous. The title almost seems like the band declaring that, after time in isolation and unable to unleash their music, they are now ‘awake’ and very hungry to get going! As I said, they have been played on BBC Radio 6 Music, but their appeal and promise stretches far and wide. They are a band who are going to go far. With some gigs in the diary, I think they will ascend to festival stages before too long. If you have not discovered the band, then go and follow them on social media (I cannot find a Twitter account for them) and check out their music. It may still be early days for Folly Group, but to bet against them or overlook their music would be…
FOOLISH indeed.
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