If you haven’t already heard of FEET, don’t worry – you soon will. The Coventry based indie-rockers have had a whirlwind year; after releasing their debut single ‘Petty Thieving’, they received high praise from the likes of NME and DIY Magazine, and hit the road in the summer of 2018 for a slew of festival appearances and support slots with Declan McKenna. Now, they’re ready to kick off 2019 with their first national headline tour, which comes to Birmingham on March 9th at The Bristol Pear. I had the pleasure of chatting with Harry from the band.

Firstly, how are you today?

Pretty good. Today’s the last day of our finishing off recording our first record actually. It’s all pretty exciting stuff really. It’s sort of been getting a bit crazy with the last couple of days, fine tuning, listening to the same sections of song over and over for hours and just ploughing everything into it that you can.

It’s been a crazy past year for you guys as well…

Yeah, we’ve actually created our own record label as well called ‘Clapped Records’. It’s nice to have your own label, which is really exciting actually.

When did you start ‘Clapped Records’ then?

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We want to put on nights and have a ‘Clapped’ night, starring a band or a few bands. We want to take the extra step and go a bit weirder, have like a magician or somebody playing FIFA in a corner

In the past couple of months really. We were umming and ahhing about whether or not to do a record deal. We had conversations with our manager about the benefits of both, and we decided that, in the long run, it would be a bit more beneficial to have our own record label, especially if things don’t work out. The hardships of being in a band, y’know, in a very pop-singer songwriter-esque world. We thought this would be much more exciting. We’ve got stuff planned for the record label so hopefully we’ll be able to do some stuff with other bands. We want to put on nights and have a ‘Clapped’ night, starring a band or a few bands. We want to take the extra step and go a bit weirder, have like a magician or somebody playing FIFA in a corner or whatever it might be. Whatever comes to mind we’ll just try to make it work. We’ve only really had that idea in the last week or so. It’s all things to look forward to.

Is that ‘Do-It-Yourself’ attitude important to the band? Your ‘Petty Thieving’ music video has that kind of feel to it. Is that an important theme in your music?

Yeah. Before we got ‘picked up’ by our managers, we just sort of bowled around in Coventry because the music scene there was never very impressive. It’s all club nights, DJ nights, sort of pop stuff. Being people who love band music and the live scene, we put on a lot of our own shows in Coventry, and just wanted to continue that. Then, when the idea came to us to have our own record label, it was like: ‘Yeah, that’s DIY, that’s cool.’ I guess we just want to do as much DIY stuff as we can before it gets phased out.

You’ve talked about the ‘pop singer-songwriter’ aspects of music. Is that your view of the music scene in Britain right now? For example, IDLES have been nominated for a BRIT award- do you think there’s starting to be a more shift in focus to more guitar driven punk style music?

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Band music isn’t just ‘done with’ so to speak, there’s still so much to do.

Oh yeah, definitely. There’s definitely a shift you can see happening. You mentioned IDLES- that’s an excellent example. It kind of feels like ‘bands’, so to speak, phased out for a while in a strange way- I guess that’s easy to say from the perspective of being a band member, but with IDLES, that’s just good to see because they deserve it. They’re amazing. Which is also good to see because it’s sort of creeping back into the public consciousness. Band music isn’t just ‘done with’ so to speak, there’s still so much to do.

So, high hopes for your DIY efforts?

Yeah man. I mean, hopefully with the shows and stuff we put on through the labels we’ll probably like, never play at them. That’s just something for us to be busy with while we’re not doing our own stuff, but yeah. We don’t really book our own shows; we have an agent and stuff, but hopefully we’ll be able to book these nights ourselves. That’s something else to do other than write songs play shows: write songs, play shows, post something on your Instagram story every day or whatever.

Supporting Declan Mckenna must’ve been an incredible experience. How did that come about?

It’s not actually that exciting. The tour, of course, was exciting, but the way that it came about – we just have the same manager. I mean, if he didn’t want us on the tour we wouldn’t have got on it, but yeah. It was a really great experience. We played a lot of different songs; the line-up was different, we had our old drummer, the songs were a lot more sort of ‘plinky’, ‘plunky’, sort of – we were very much still like a uni band. We missed the first three weeks of uni to go on the tour, but it was great. It was pretty much where our entire fan base comes from- obviously not all of it but yeah. The best show was one we’ve just played: KOKO in London, which was just insane really, and it was packed as well. We kinda walked out on stage and thought ‘Woah, this is mad.’

Do you know how many people you were playing to?

I don’t know. I think it was sold out, in fact it definitely was sold out I remember, but I don’t know if everybody was in at this point. It looked pretty full, which was pretty cool.

So, ‘English Weather’. Am I correct in saying you wrote that in a barn in Bedfordshire?

Pretty much, yeah. We had an early incarnation of it towards the last days in Coventry, but, with those sorts of things, you just keep writing and keep changing things. We actually recently listened to our version from Coventry because we just found it on an old laptop, and the one we’ve just released is so much different, so much better. It’s got a lot more going for it, a much clearer vision. It’s always nice to work with a producer as well, because it’s like a sixth mind for us.

Cam Blackwood, right? What was that like working with him?

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There has been a sort of shift in the way we sound; it’s much less sort of ‘polite indie’, and it’s a bit more, not super serious, but a little bit more going for it.

Yeah, he’s great. From the first time we met him, he just knew what we wanted to do. We played him loads of tracks, and he was just really excited by it. We didn’t actually meet any of the other producers, we were just like ‘Let’s go with this guy, he’s great.’ We actually recorded ‘English Weather’ with him in the summer last year. We recorded it for the record and tweaked a few bits, changed lots of stuff. He’s just great, just so easy to work with and just the nicest bloke ever.

Got an impressive resumé as well.

Yeah, George Ezra, Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, Jack Savoretti and the likes. He gets phone calls every half hour from his manager saying ‘So you wanna work with this band?’ He’s very much in demand. I think we’re quite lucky.

I’ve seen you guys described as indie rock/indie punk. How do you feel about that? Do those genre labels reflect your influences?

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Influences are a fluid thing. You can see something in a film and be like: ‘I like that sound. What’s that sound?’ We do that so much.

Ah, that’s such a hard question! Sometimes yes, sometimes no. We spent this time in the barn, as you mentioned earlier, writing our songs, curating our sound, but for every song that’s going on the record, there’s two and a half songs that have just been binned off because we just didn’t think that they were good enough, or we didn’t want to sound like or be ‘that’ band. There has been a sort of shift in the way we sound; it’s much less sort of ‘polite indie’, and it’s a bit more, not super serious, but a little bit more going for it. We think it’s more exciting; I mean, we’re gonna be playing these songs for at least another two years before we think of doing a second record. I can’t even remember when, there was like a pivotal moment when it was just like ‘Okay, we don’t want to be like the classic twangly jangly indie band that ‘Macho Macho’ and ‘Back Seat Driver’ would’ve lead you to believe that we are.’ I think ‘English Weather’ bridges the gap between that and the other stuff coming up from the record. But yeah, going back to your question, I guess  indie is the term you would use, but I think indie is such an umbrella term that you sort of have to sub-categorise it. For a laugh we’ve been calling ourselves ‘crease-pop,’ like when someone makes a joke and you go ‘Ah, that’s crease.’ We just got drunk one day and were just like ‘Oh, we’re a crease-pop band,’ and it’s just funny. Funny to say as well, y’know. We never want to seem too serious in interviews; when they go ‘What sort of music do you make?’ ‘Oh we make indie rock music.’ Nah, we’re just like: ‘We play crease pop,’ and no-one really knows what it means. Not even we do.

What are your influences as a guitarist?

Influences are a fluid thing. You can see something in  a film and be like: ‘I like that sound. What’s that sound?’ We do that so much. It’s such a weird thing. You can never think of an example, but we’ll be doing something and someone will go ‘That’s mad. That sounds like this part from this film’, or it’s got that kind of vibe to it. We always just dick around and just move bits of pedals and just see what we can find. A lot of it is just trying to fuck up pedals and amps and see what comes out.

Musical influences for me personally, I really don’t know. I listen to loads of stuff. There’s a track recently that all the lead stuff we’ve done is sort of Shuggie Otis vibes. It always changes depending on what we’ve listened to. I mean, there’s tonal changes, where we’ve gone for different guitar tones just from being in London and seeing various bands and going: ‘Oh that’s sick! I love the way that sounds.’ We had this rule that we’ve been following for the first record that we don’t really want the guitars to sound like guitars all the time, but also we’ve not allowed ourselves to use synths or anything that’s not a guitar, bass, vocals or drums. I don’t know why we wanted to do that; we just wanted to challenge ourselves to see what we can come up with, and I think it’s kind of worked. In the DIY article we were in yesterday, they thought Callum’s lead part in ‘English Weather’ was done on a synth, and we were like: ‘Yes! We’ve won!’ But yeah, influences always change. Playing the songs to our producer, nearly all of them have changed, and definitely for the better. We’ve gone through them so many times; we get the vibe of the song, and then change stuff to see what works.

Where do you want to take FEET?

Where would we like to take it? Out of this shitty weather.

Out of this shitty English weather?

Out of this shitty English weather yeah, pun intended I guess! Onward and upwards I suppose. We’ll see where this record lands us; as I said, there’s a lot of sounds on there. If people listen to ‘Back Seat Driver’ and ‘Macho Macho’, we’re not too different,  but we’re not that happy-go-lucky band anymore. There’s a lot of people who have stuck with us and have been waiting to see what we come back with because we haven’t really been around for a lot since university. We did the festival tours over the summer, and since then we’ve been away writing and playing the odd shows here and there, literally just writing and writing songs. We’ve got ten songs now that we all love, but we’ve probably written about fifty songs. You really need to cycle through the rubbish to get to the good stuff. It’d be nice to definitely spend a lot more time in Europe, go over to America and the likes. Any bands dream is surely just to be in it for as long as possible, and self-sustain it. Rock and roll, the dream is on.

‘English Weather’ is available now via Clapped Records. Tickets to see FEET perform live are available here.