The shadows of the past loom large over anyone’s future creative endeavors, none more so than musicians. Fans and critics of any band are constantly looking over their shoulders to a time when things were better, or to an album or a band that was overlooked. Call it reductionism, call it hypernostalgia, or just look at it like Future of the Left’s Andy Falkous does.
“It’s a fucking farce.”
The farce that Falkous is talking about mostly concerns the rose-colored glasses that most writers have been putting on when talking about the irascible and groundbreaking mcluskey, the band that he fronted for nine years.
“The way people talk about it, now that it’s a thing of the past... Where were these plaudits when the band was going? I swear that if that sort of thing happens to [Future of the Left], I’m going to hunt down each reviewer and torch their patios. I refuse to be a victim of this regimented band nostalgia. It’d be a crying, fucking shame if these songs get lost in the ether.”
It would be a shame for such late blooming interest to infect the history of Future. The band’s first album, Curses, packs the same sonic wallop of mcluskey, but the sound is streamlined, cutting straight to a feedback-heavy point, and bolstered by each member’s contribution to vocals and songwriting.
It’s a sound that feels like it blazes out in arcing flashes of inspiration, but to hear Falkous tell it, nothing in the band comes as easy as that. “We played for about nine months without anything happening before we came up with one song, ‘The Lord Hates A Coward,’ that we felt we could declare as our own.”
They went through a similarly long process when trying come up with a name for the band or, as Falkous puts it, “a sequence of words that didn’t make me physically sick.” Early gigs saw the trio take the stage under the names Mooks of Passim and Dead Redneck, mostly as a chance to try out new material without the pressure of hundreds of mcluskey fans showing up. Their current moniker is one that evokes some sort of liberal political bent, but Falkous eschews that idea, saying that the band is simply “trying to conjure up an image. It’s a slightly pretentious name, but whatever it’s meaning really depends on the person who reads it.”
The name’s meaning, as with most things having to do with Future of the Left, is not something for which Falkous and the band would want anyone digging deeply for. From the way he describes the group, he has obviously spent a lot of time breaking things apart and analyzing the pieces, mostly in hopes of shutting down any criticism of this new project before it gets sent his way.
Take, for example, the question of whether he was worried about people making undue comparisons between his new band and mcluskey. “The person most concerned about that would be me, even before we recorded a song. I would be absolutely horrified and ashamed if I got on stage and played a reduced and filtered version of what had gone before. I just couldn’t do it to myself.”
In speaking with Falkous, one gets the impression that he applies this type of thought process to most things, from hauling bags of compost into his flat (which is what he had just finished when we spoke) to seeking out music, which, he admits he doesn’t do much of anymore. “I don’t have the time and inclination. Most music I find proportionately doesn’t reward me for the amount of time it takes to seek it out and listen to it.” For Falkous, though, this might be a good thing, as he says that, “If I heard music that I really liked all the time I probably wouldn’t make any of my own.”
And for now, making music is the order of business. The band has just returned from doing their first headlining tour of Europe and was gearing up for another run through the UK before taking a much-deserved break. From there, the band is going to take on Australia in March, and then, with any luck, they will land Stateside. “There’s nothing concrete as of yet,” says Falkous, “which is worrying because really I thought with mcluskey, and with this band, if this band is going to sell any records or play good shows, it would be in the States first.” Future of the Left isn’t completely out of the shadows yet, but they are well on their way.
--Bob Ham
Future of the Left’s new album Curses is available now from Too Pure / Beggars Banquet Records.
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