If you have ever been privy to the 1995 cyberpunk film of cult notoriety, Strange Days, built around paranoid thinking then you almost certainly have heard of Philo Grant. For those of you who haven’t, Grant was a music industry mogul with an interesting take on this thought process influenced by anxiety and fear, profoundly commenting on this theme throughout the film.  Perhaps the most profound of all, however, was his observation that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness, which given some consideration actually makes perfect sense.  Particularly when you put it into the context of London foursome Foreign Office, whose lyrical angst based chiefly around themes of paranoia and phobic tendencies demonstrates perfect awareness without trying too hard.  It’s a bleak self-conscious commentary taking place from song to song, that exercises intelligence and depicts this responsiveness Philo Grant talks about seamlessly.  Furthermore, set against dance influenced beats and electronic triggers, a consistent groove that would get Alex James permanently aroused and a combination of guitar and bass lines that leave you under no illusion that these guys are serious musicians, it has a bittersweet nuance stamped all over it and boy is it bloody good.

Writing and gigging for just over a year, Foreign Office have perfected the art of crafting left of field indie-pop doused in their soulful influences and undulating with anthemic choruses.  Electro-esque keys bring an atmospheric tonality to proceedings, that lightens the mood and gives it the dance factor and when all the parts come together in the live environment they call home, this band makes for an intoxicating pastime.

Already comparisons have been made with Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Hot Chip as a reaction to their brevity of pop sounds that encompass era’s from the 70’s, 80’s and today and realistically this isn’t far from the truth as they capture many of the superlative facets of all of these bands.  Right now though, with a single release in place for the 29th March on new music arbiters This Playground Records, Foreign Office are laying down their own foundations to ensure this passion and flair for popular music takes them as far as possible in their quest to reach a large audience and garner widespread mainstream appeal.

www.4ortherecord.com spoke with frontman and bassist Paul Cousins and talented guitarist George Hume before their ferociously superb White Heat show to bring you an introduction to a band who we predict will soon have the industry on its knees.  Meet Foreign Office and enjoy. 

4or The Record: Foreign Office, give us the background on why you formed this band and what you had hoped for it since its beginning.

George: Well Paul and I have known each other since we met at college in Great Yarmouth when we were 16 and knew early on we wanted to do something musically.  Then we moved to London and met Jim and started writing together and then Duncan was kind of the missing part of it all after he joined us on keys.  We've always kept it really internal constantly writing songs and doing exactly what we wanted to do. In fact before we’d written any tunes we had worked out exactly how we wanted Foreign office to sound because we agreed to put together our influences and come up with something that resonated.

4TR: And can you explain what that was to us and how has it developed if at all?

Paul: I think we wanted it to be guitar music fundamentally because I play bass and George plays guitar but it was always going to have an electro influence to it.  But we never wanted that to overshadow the fact that we want to have songs, we didn’t want it to be a dance project or anything like that.  So we were quite keen on having a classic structure of guitar based songs but with other things involved which I guess lead us to the whole 80s thing in terms of pop, even more specifically pop written by British males.

George: I think also what always kind of fascinated us was the white reaction to 80’s disco, so those great 80s bands who took all the best parts of disco like Orange Juice and Talking Heads although they were more 70s.  That was what we really loved and we could relate to more than a band like Earth Wind and Fire who we love but couldn’t relate to at all 

Paul: Foreign Office is ultimately danceable music, but to say like dance slash indie makes you think of some really awful bands [laughs] but essentially I guess that’s what it is

George: I think its indie because it’s played by us; I think anything that 4 white guys with guitars do in London is going to be classed as indie really 

4TR: But arguably FO is very pop as well as you amalgamate big choruses with pop melodies that invoke pop themes in a big way.

Paul: Yeah absolutely.  I think a lot of bands try too hard to be indie and a lot of bands certainly try too hard to be pop just to try and kind of be successful or commercial.  We ‘ve never really seen it like that, its just what we do so writing choruses that sound poppy to people is just natural, its not like we tried to write like that.  Likewise we’re not trying to write 3 minutes of white noise because we want to be seen as fucking avant hipsters; we’re not into anything like that we just like music basically.

4TR: So was there ever an intention to have a mainstream or cross-over commerciability across the band’s sound or have you arrived at this purely as a result of your influences and writing style?

Paul: I think the music we’re mainly influenced by has a commercial element to it but I would hesitate to say it was something we specifically tried to do.  But just from our influences and also having subconsciously in the back of your mind that at this point in the music industry you are either going to be one or the other if you want to be successful, so I guess we lean towards writing stuff that’s going to be a bit more accessible to a wider range of people rather than going right we are pinpointing 21 year old males who live in a one mile radius of Hoxton Square.  So we would like to be wide reaching but I wouldn’t say that was necessarily a burden on the way we write.

4TR: One of the most startling things about Foreign Office is the lyrical context that most songs reflect, revolving largely around the theme of paranoia.  Why has that had such a direct effect on your writing?

Paul: I was just keen for my lyrics to reflect a certain mood and that mood isn’t necessarily going to be happy, it’s kind of bittersweet and very self-conscious.  I never sat down to write in a certain way but after you have written like 20 songs you start to see patterns emerging and the pattern emerging here was about paranoia and phobia.  I read a quote once by someone like Thom Yorke and he said it’s so much harder to write a happy song than a sad song, he explained it like it was an easy way out, but I don’t think it’s an easy way out at all.  Anyone can go and write a song about peace, love and the birds but I think what I write about comes from my head.  It’s authentic without being pretentious and while it definitely means something to me, hopefully people who listen to it can relate as well.

George: That has always been interesting though because that’s the style of the band, we all love soul music and ironically in the twists and the vocals being like they are is where people have picked up on this soulful aspect.  The music is all in major keys and is fairly uplifting but having the lyrics over the top has hit a sweet spot in terms of how people have interpreted it, which I think is a crucial factor for us.  Having that balance.

Paul: We were definitely keen to have a black and white side to the music, ‘Leaving the House’ is a really good example of that because its got an uplifting beat and chorus and has a pop sheen to it, but then if you were to break down the lyrics and read them on paper as a poem or something its dead bleak.  It makes a nice juxtaposition to the music.

4TR: It definitely demonstrates a hidden depth and also an implied intelligence, which is a good thing as people don’t necessarily associate pop music with being intelligent.

Paul: Yeah I certainly intend for that to come across but like I said before I never sat down to write in any specific way; I mean there’s so much I’ve written that has been discarded because I thought no I wouldn’t want to hear anyone singing about that nor would I want to sing about it, so I have kind of honed in the style of it definitely. 

4TR: Personally, being a big fan of pop music, I find it interesting when you can listen to a song and think I love the melody, the chorus, the way everything sounds together and is arranged but on top of that the lyrics are also resonating in some way.  That is the difference between mainstream pop and its fringes, there is a difference in intention I think.

Paul: I totally agree with that, like I have been listening to music for years and years but only connected with the lyrical side of music about 2 or 3 years ago and then I really started to care about what it was about and that was kind of a bit of an epiphany.  But I am cautious about writing songs in this band; I ultimately want it to be pleasing to the listener and relevant, but not too morbid or self-obsessed.

I would never profess myself to be a poet, I’m a musician; the lyrics are a part of that and they don’t necessarily have to be this big deep and meaningful thing, but I think it’s a balance because our music is definitely about honesty, which is part of the charm really.

4TR: Live, Foreign Office are incredibly slick and having seen you play on numerous occasions I am always pleasantly surprised by the changes in arrangements, the musical interludes, and the fact that every time you seem to grow in confidence. But is it hard to translate your songs into the live environment?

George: We’re constantly going back to the live set to see what would work here and there, constantly structuring and restructuring and changing things around.  But that’s part of the writing process for me, you have to keep your head busy at all times to the point where you are constantly waking up and thinking about it

Paul: Liking a record and having that passion for the song blown apart when you see it live because they can’t play or it doesn’t come across for whatever reason, is something we are quite aware of.  A live show is always going to be different from a record but we like ours to be as similar as possible, because when I like a band or a song and see it live and they pull it off its like fucking hell that’s ten times better than the record; but if they don’t pull it off then its ten times worse. I would rather be in a position of having people who are fans of the band wanting to see us play because they know its going to be a live experience and fulfill the reason why they liked it in the first place.

Plus ultimately everything is quite groove based so bass heavy with the drums and we try to maintain this throughout all our songs.  I suppose it’s a common thing to say but if you imagine a dj playing a set there is no let up; we try to recreate that with the rhythm section that comes from the Jim the drummer so a live band playing a groove is always going to connect with people 

George: Imagine if you saw your favourite DJ with a live drummer, how cool would that be, the aesthetic of watching someone play.

Paul: a lot of people confuse making their sound danceable with getting programmed stuff up on Ableton and pressing play.  What we are about is having the raw elements, the bass and the drums and then having funky keys and guitar on top of it and I really think that works.

Leaving The House - Foreign Office

Foreign Office | MySpace Music Videos

4TR: You are releasing your debut single ‘Leaving The House’/’Voices’ on This Playground Records this month.  Tell us about the tracks.

George: We recorded ‘Voices’ with the people we did ‘Leaving the House’ in an old windmill in Norfolk. We wanted to have coherence between the two and have known those guys a long time as they tapped into what we do quite early, which is very important to us.  It was really enjoyable and we are very pleased with how it came out.  Its interesting how it’s affected how we play live now especially ‘Voices’; you know when you strip something back so much to get the best out of it then go back and play it, so that’s the next step I am looking forward to with the band getting in the studio to do an album and stripping apart all our songs and seeing how they come out differently

4TR: You employ a system whereby you are always 3 songs ahead of yourselves in terms of writing, so I am assuming you already have a large chunk of a possible debut LP already written?

Paul: Yeah, we have a large proportion of the back bone of what could make an exciting album I would like to think.  I don’t necessarily think that a lot of bands in the same situation have as many songs as us; it might sound like we are churning them out which doesn’t sound special but we have a strong ethic and high work rate.

George: Yeah we work really well together to a high standard, but always keep the fun there because it’s all we want to do.  When you work shit jobs to pay your rent it gives you something to aim for.  But we want everything to flow so any new song has to fit in right, otherwise the whole thing doesn’t work.  To be honest I think at the moment things are the best that it’s ever sounded.

4TR: And finally, we have to mention the humerous video for ‘Leaving The House’. Explain this please.

Paul: [Laughing] It is a cross between a Carry On Film that didn’t quite make the cut and a public access tv show.

George: [laughing] Mixed in with a budgerigar and some Dutch liquor.  

Paul: I’ve seen so many videos made on a budget with a band looking broody and kind of the yeah we are in a band vibe, so we definitely wanted to veer away from that and put more of a playful spin on things [laughs].  Not to be farcical but if you were to film a video of the lyrics to the song as a poem it would be shot in a bedsit in fricking Canada Water somewhere with an exposed light bulb, filthy mattress and a pot noodle in the corner and we weren’t really into that depressing imagery.

George: Funny story from the shoot was we bought the budgie for thirty quid and took it home in the van after but it was quite vocal and we realised we couldn’t live with him.  So Duncan called up the pet shop and said can we bring the budgie back and the guy was like [adopts deep cockney accent] “look boys if you wanna hire a budgie you gotta go somewhere different for that, you cant come to a regular pet shop, I’ve already been bollocked by the RSPCA about that kind of thing” so Duncan was like what’s going to happen to the budgie now then, pulled on his heartstrings a bit and he was like “no you can’t bring it back, oh alright for fifteen quid you can bring it back”   So we sold it back the next day and he is going strong we hope, and still for sale if anyone wants to buy it.  The fish is a different story; he is now residing in the Libertine pub in Borough.

The debut single from Foreign Office is out now on This Playground Records in limited edition 7” and digital downloads available from I-tunes.

www.myspace.com/foreignofficemusic

Words: Francesca Strange

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