“Little milky skinned girl pissing in the play-ground” Is this FOE speaking or is this alter-ego Hannah Louise Clark? Whatever, an EP and then a single have dropped out of the sky like trucks caught up in a tornado. Leading the way was ‘Tyrant Song’ which has a definitely cracked video, tells scary tales of a clown in a g-string, and made enough of an impression on Shirley Manson (her out of Garbage) for Shirley to re-post it everywhere back in March. Mere months before that, FOE / Hannah did the classic thing of ‘posting some stuff on MySpace’, leading to more than a bit of attention and getting signed to Vertigo at what some might consider a ridiculously early stage. You’ve only got to listen to the music though to hear the assurance; the crunch heavy tales of perverted english life show way more than mere promise. It was convincing enough to render it a no-brain decision to drive two hours over the pennines to catch up with FOE backstage at Leeds’ venerable Cockpit before her gig there this weekend.
GIITTV – Do you want to tell us who you are?
I’m FOE, I’ve been under that name for about 2 years now but it’s been quite a slow build. It was a bit of a bedroom project to start with. I bought an organ from a charity shop for 40 quid on a bit of a whim…before that I was doing acoustic singer songwriter stuff and I didn’t really want that to be my main musical project, so I got this organ and I started writing on Key-base, a computer programme, writing the music and the drums and all that ….using the same ingredients of sound and trying to build a coherent sound, and the organ was probably the catalyst of that in a way
How much have you got out now? I’ve only heard about half a dozen tracks
Yeah, there’s not much, it took quite a while to get to a point that I was happy with, it went a few different ways (first). There’s the EP ‘Hot New Trash’ which is 4 tracks, there were a couple of rough demos before that, and now the single ‘Deep Water Heartbreaker’, that’s about it
…and you’ve already answered one question, you say it ‘Foe’ not F.O.E.? I had to ask where did ‘Foe’ come from
Yes, like friend or foe. I quite liked it as a word…and I’ve always felt like music was my only friend in a strange way. I’ve always put all my effort into that. It’s kind of like…at odds with people. A bit dark really, not that optimistic
Ah, we’ll come back to dark. What’s Entrepreneurs then? (Both her records claim songs by FOE, production by Entrepreneurs)
He is my musical partner, who’s a producer and does his own stuff as well. We’ve been friends for ages and he plays in the FOE band as well. He has a bedroom set-up and we just recorded it there. All the FOE stuff, he does all of that
So the songs, like Genie In A Coke Can, your songs but produced by him ?
Yeah exactly. Normally I’ll record them as demos and he’ll re-record them with me
It sounds from the outside as if you’ve just arrived and been dropped like a bomb, and awful lot has happened, the BBC Introducing stuff, magazine attention, what’s that been like?
Amazing, I first started putting some stuff on MySpace and within maybe a month I had people from labels getting in touch, and it’s all sort of spiralled from there. It’s as though as soon as one person starts talking about it….
…and tell me about Shirley Manson? (The ex-Garbage singer has a pretty massive facebook following for her various utterances and one day posted the video for Tyrant Song with an exhortation that her ‘darklings’, what she calls her fans, simply had to listen to this)
That was totally random as well, but awesome!
What really drew me was the sound, you’re so self assured about it…
…I’ve been writing music for a long time, it’s just finding what you’re comfortable with
I’m trying to avoid using words like dark, but those lyrics in there, the little girl in the playground, tell us where that’s coming from? It sounds like “child psychologist here I come”.
Yeah, that’s been a big inspiration, I had bit of a weird childhood, in school and stuff, that fits in with the whole thing of being called FOE
It sounds in parts like the voice of a ten year old?
Yeah, some of it is quite child-like. It’s weird, it’s like the voice on an inner child-demon or something
What was with the EP being in re-used old record sleeves? Is this some sort of artistic multi-media assault?
It was kind of taking the piss out of the whole idea that music has got so disposable…but yeah, artistic
What’s next?
I’ve actually just finished recording my album, been in the studio the whole of June, it was written over the course of this year and the end of last year. Now I just want to play as much as possible live, because that’s the thing really, it’s all been quite backwards. We didn’t get the chance to play loads of gigs live and then get the attention, it’s been pretty much the other way round, so I just want to get in the zone. And it’s not really a conventional band either, those guys are playing all the parts, so it’s getting all that together…
When people interview you, and they ask all the obvious questions, what should they really be asking to find out what makes you tick?
I guess it’s all about the songs, what spurs on the songs and the lyrics, that what makes FOE tick
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Of course we stuck around for the gig. For a band allegedly just getting to grips with the whole live show thing, it was thrillingly convincing from the pulverising opening of ‘Genie In A Coke Can’ through the all too short 7 song set. It’s a mark of something that she can sing about “millions in marketing pop-star trash” while being signed from the get-go to one of the majors. The new single, ‘Deep Water Heart Break’ was satisfyingly immense played live. But it was closing track ‘Tyrant Song’, the one that grabbed mine and Shirley Manson’s attention equally, that just keeps going round and won’t switch itself off in my head. It’s an itch that currently demands that I keep scratching, and it’s getting raw.
