The Curse Of Uniquity

"I cannot identify the bloodied bodies of my loved ones. They were killed whilst watching a new television show on the MTV network/One where Kim Kardashian is chased through woodland by a giant bear wearing a mask which carries the visage of recently deceased film director Michal Winner/The bear has apparently not qualified for a work placed pension and is angry with Daniel Day Lewis for what he perceives as the relative lack of action in There Will Be Blood/Which he otherwise enjoyed but found a little precious for its tastes.”

Could this lyrical tract be penned by anybody from the current musical landscape other than Future Of The Left frontman Andy 'Falco' Falkous? Unlikely. The random narrative – from the faux-spoken-word diatribe Singing Of The Bonesaws, the centerpiece of their recent fourth album How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident – speaks volumes about the band and their inimitable approach to their craft, although the author is certainly not one to bask in his own reflected glory.

“Lyrically there's not really nearly as much work goes into it as people would assume,” Falco chuckles. “The work for the lyrics is essentially done by our personalities and conversations, and the conversations that we have with other people in the months and years leading up to the album. Singing Of The Bonesaws, for instance, the lyrics of that were written in my lunch-break at work, just in one stream of consciousness and then kind of tinkered with a little bit to suit what we came up with as the structure for the song. It was written pretty much in the time that it takes to sing – and 'sing' is the operative word. I'm doing an impression of Stephen Fry taking off a 1940s' newsreader or something – I'm the one doing it, and even I find it a bit demented. Which should tell you everything you need to know about it.”

Even when the eternally-acerbic Falco is mercilessly skewering targets, it's not who or what he's bringing down but how he goes about it which gives his lyrics such vitality and strength.

“I love the way words come out and the way they feel – you can tell a story or you can make a point just by alluding to things or by painting a picture, effectively just throwing them down onto the canvas rather than saying, 'X did Y',” he continues. “It just really brings the whole thing up and makes it alive. There's so many bands who are so prescriptive in the way that they approach the language in their songs, and subjects they tackle are so fucking predictable. They never surprise you with a word. I just want to hear the word 'unctuous' in a song by The Enemy, or I want to hear some dickhead fucking pop star sing 'flabbergasted' or 'soliloquy'! Just something that shows that they exist beyond the dream of having their cock sucked by a different woman in a different bathroom in a different city. I want to hear about fully-rounded individuals, although when I say I want to hear about them I don't want to hear what they did with their fucking day, I just want them going off and articulating themselves all over the place. Maybe that's just me.

“But the problem is that there is some humour in our lyrics, [which] means that we end up getting talked about like we're a fucking comedy band.

When people talk about humour in music it's always done to downplay the actual quality of the music – 'Well, it's comedy music' – like you've either got to be bloody Morrissey or the Bloodhound Gang, and there's nothing fucking in-between. You're either some po-faced paragon of this literary pure kind of perfection, or you're this jokey bunch of cunts with plastic boobs on. Whereas real people have more dimensions to them than that, and rock'n'roll so rarely reflects that, because people believe – rightly or wrongly – that audiences can't deal with that on a mass level, and to be honest with you on the evidence from bands filling larger venues, they don't have any humour in them, do they? Or if they do it's buried deep under fucking twenty layers of twat.”

Writing Future Of The Left off as a joke band would be doing them a great disservice – their oft-brutal music is as hook-laden as it is visceral – although Falco believes that this brings with it another set of problems.

“I think people look for reasons to disregard [the music],” he offers. “Maybe if there's a weakness that Future Of The Left have in having a wider appeal – and we're not looking for a huge appeal – but we're not a difficult noise band, we're not an experimental band even though we experiment within our structures and don't want to keep things simple and we want to find hooks in unexpected places. But if you're a vaguely experimental band when you tour Europe you're called a 'noise rock' band, and it completely confuses me the bands we'll be thrown in with. If there's a strength for our band I think that it's that we're for better or worse 'unique', but it's a problem in regards [to] how we're written about or viewed because where do you fucking put us? Who does this band tour with? We can't tour with a metal band because we're not a metal band, we can't tour with an indie band because we're too heavy – there's not a place where we fit. Which is great for our eternal souls, but so not good for our bank accounts.”