FEET are redefining their sound to become the band they've always wanted to be

Speaking via Zoom from the FEET flat in North London, where the Coventry-born five-piece have been living and writing together since September 2019, frontman George Haverson talks candidly about the band’s journey. White-vested and moustached, the singer has a calmness about him. There’s a sense of a new lease of life, both musically and personally, for the band and its members. FEET are a band who feel they’re right where they’re supposed to be.

“It’s been such a long time since we’ve done any proper music,” FEET frontman Haverson tells me, “but in our minds this is the new inclination of the band in its more mature form. It’s been two years since the [debut] album and it’s just exciting having something new out that you can say ‘this is my band and this is what we sound like’ rather than say ‘I’m in a band, listen to an album we did two years ago’, it’s [better now we can say] ‘this is what we sound like now’.”

It’s been far from a conventional path. FEET’s origins are rooted in their idle student days at Coventry University where Haverson, bassist Oli Shasha and guitarists Harry Southerton and Callum Parker gravitated towards each other through a series of fateful pub encounters, open mic nights and impromptu flat gatherings. “We all met pretty much through my music society that we then ran into the ground. Coventry’s nightlife is pretty Danny Dyer to be honest and I think after we met up and played music together, a lot of time was spent just hanging out in our flats.”

The band’s early sound made waves beyond student gigs; their shattering, mischief-making debut single “Petty Thieving”, released back in 2017, launched them onto the scene. “What’s the attraction?” Haverson snarls as his opening lyric, and it seems its success came as much as a surprise to FEET: “When we released ‘Petty Thieving’ in first or second year of uni, we had a bit of response on Facebook from our [old] manager. They were quite a prestigious management company so we were like ‘oh we could actually give this a go if people are interested’ — we didn’t expect anything like that to happen, to get someone to come back that quick, and we rode that into the first album.”

For FEET, this marked the opportunity to make ‘proper’ music as a ‘proper’ band. The management company in question had worked with the likes of Foals and Metallica. Even more, their early material was picked up by Felix White of The Maccabees' very own Yala Records. I ask Haverson if this felt like the first ‘break’ for the band: “Absolutely. They introduced us to a booking agent and this whole new world of building a team around you. You just assume that through BBC Introducing you get a good radio play and are like ‘Oh fuck I’ve made it!’ but there’s a few more steps that you don’t realise.”

As a young outfit navigating attention and opportunities, the band promptly pushed forward to working on their debut album. It saw the addition of drummer Ben Firth (formerly of Dead Pretties) only two weeks prior to recording and the final completion of the five-headed FEET unit. What followed was their debut album, What’s Inside is More Than Just Ham in 2019, a title they all groan over now.

The natural next step was to begin writing a second album. Isolation and national lockdown had yielded a fresh collection of new material, written and recorded in the close-knit living quarters of their home studio. However, the conception of this next album brought FEET to a practice room crisis. Despite having a healthy collection of 11 or 12 songs, the band were faced with a body of work that lacked cohesion. “When we tried to play them next to each other it was like ‘these songs don’t make sense’,” yet Haverson sees the brighter side: “It led the way for ‘What do we want to sound like live? What can we actually play?’.” Soon after, a lost FEET album was left on the cutting room floor. Now they assume their ‘mature form’ and have created a statement of sound; a new manifesto in the form of their Walking Machine EP.

A phrase that follows FEET in most interviews is ‘Crease Pop’. I wonder if this is a way of handling probing interview questions about the state of guitar music; an attempt at classifying their own sound before ‘lazy journalism’ can. “It gets a bit boring saying ‘we’re not this or we’re not that’. Every band says ‘we’re our own thing, you can’t put us in a genre’ — it’s bollocks, obviously you can,” Haverson says. “But to give it a label means you can flesh out what fits and what doesn’t. At any point during the writing process it’s like ’is that still crease?’ If it gets too emotional or too wanky, too many guitar riffs then it’s not simplified and it’s not easy. It should be easy — I think the whole ‘Crease Pop’ sound is that any five kids who’ve been learning guitar for about two months should be able to play our songs. That’s the approach I want for our music. We use the term ‘Crease Pop’ to keep us in check more than to define this new genre.”

The first single to be released from this new FEET era was “Peace & Quiet” – a nonchalant wall of ramshackle guitars and homespun truths, taking aim at everything from ‘lazy journalism’ to ‘squeaky clean indie boys’. The raw melody of its chorus feels like it could find its home in football-grounds in years to come. The music video is equally unvarnished; under the buzz of hair clippers, Haverson scorns straight from the barber-chair. It sees the band perform in the chiller section of a corner shop, North London’s famous Audio Gold and local chip shop, The Fish Palace in Muswell Hill. These feel like places where we could stumble across the five members at any given time. It forms a ‘shop local’, unpolished ethos and it has become an important cornerstone of the FEET aesthetic.

“For me, if I look at imagery in terms of bands that I like and look up to, if you go as far back to Ramones or The Strokes, they have such a clear image of where they’re from — New York and those cool areas. We’re not a Northern band or we don’t necessarily hold a certain place in the identity of the group, so in terms of ‘Peace & Quiet’, we thought ‘let’s try and form a bit of an identity in Muswell Hill’ because that’s where we’re living at the moment and we really like this area. There’s a bit of culture here and we can grow it from there. ‘Peace & Quiet’ is our ‘this is where we’re from’ kind of thing.

With that in mind, is “Peace & Quiet” a conscious comeback single? “You’ve got to find a balance when you’re making a big statement because if it’s ‘we’re back and we’re massive’ and then it only reaches about 300 people, what’s the statement if you’re just telling people that already know? I’m super happy with the music and I hope the approach on this EP is all going to sound better. I hope it gets the ball rolling and changes people’s perspective of the band from the first album”.

It seems as though ‘FEET mark. II’ has come less from conscious influences, instead from knowing what they don’t want to sound like, and Haverson agrees with this. “We’re our own little echo chamber. It’s taken a while, we’ve lived together now for four or five years [and we’re] in the same environment all the time – it gets quite crazy and hectic.” Offering a simple dilution of this new sound, he smiles and says it came “off the back of writing 15 songs we didn’t like. Everything had to be under a microscope. If it didn’t cut the mustard we just scrapped it, so these are the songs that I think passed... just.”