“It’s been one of the peaks of my musical life”: Foals’ Yannis Philippakis on his long-awaited project with late drumming great Tony Allen

Foals played some of the biggest shows of their career off the back of their 2022 seventh album Life Is Yours but with the Oxford art-rockers enjoying some downtime in the wake of that mammoth tour, frontman Yannis Philippakis has thrown himself into his debut solo project. Well, sort of solo – eight years ago the singer and guitarist went into the studio with Afrobeat drumming legend Tony Allen but the material ended up gathering dust on a shelf after the death of Allen in 2020. Last year, Philippakis returned to the sessions and completed the tracks and it has resulted in an excellent EP titled Lagos Paris London, being released next week under the Yannis & The Yaw handle.

Recently, the Foals man spoke to The New Cue about getting the project to the finish line and his favourite memories of working with Allen. Looking back to the initial recordings, Philippakis said he went to Paris after an enquiry from Allen’s team if he was interested in doing something but had no idea what to expect. “It was all quite French in terms of the communication!” he laughed. “Genuinely, when I got to Paris that morning, I didn’t know whether I was playing on a written piece of music that I was going to be slotting into, or if it was one tune or many. In terms of expectation, it was quite loose. All I knew was that I was going to go into a studio with Tony Allen and I was excited. I guess I was a bit anxious about how it was gonna go. I didn’t want to get there and be like, ‘Oh, this isn’t clicking’ or ‘I’m a letdown’ or something.”

Philippakis says the realisation that he and Allen were going to write a new piece of music together, there on the spot, was a liberating experience. “That moment was like, ‘Alright, OK’,” he remembered. “Once we started playing and just how natural it felt, it’s been one of the peaks of my musical life, the fact that it flowed so well with Tony and there was this innate understanding and appreciation that felt like it was a two way street.”

Following the release of the EP next week, Yannis & The Yaw will play a handful of live dates in September. Watch the video for standout track Rain Can’t Reach Us below:

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.