Foals - Spanish Sahara (2010

The joy and power of the internet allows me to research songs, to juice them for their deeper essence. The stony spectacle squeezed for drops of meaning.

Foals are a "English indie rock band" according to Wikipedia. Their songs 'Miami' and 'Spanish Sahara' are the only songs I know by them but they are great.  

'Spanish Sahara' starts off like Talk Talk's Spirit Eden album: a high-pitched English voice wandering through a light haze of ambient guitar...

So I walked into the haze
and a million dirty waves.
Now I see you lying there
like a lilo losing air, air

A 'lilo' (lie-low) is a British air-mattress.

The song is singer Yannis Philippakis's (recall that George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou) attempt to capture the intensity of a bleak moment gazing out at the Aegean Sea: "I came up with the lyrics while visiting my dad in Greece. I went for a walk on this really remote beach. It's the deepest point in the Aegean, and locals think it's an evil place. The beach was littered with refuse and I saw a dead dog floating in the waves. It was a twisted, hallucinogenic scene, but it had a weird beauty to it. I wanted to capture that sense of malignancy." [https://www.songfacts.com/facts/foals/spanish-sahara]

I've been to a few of those places; well, not that evil, but still spookily remote. My itinerant Newfoundland was basically to follow paths until the ocean prevented me from following it further. North to Dungeons Park, south to Harbour Breton and a ferry ride out to sea. Remote places do have trash-heaps, including a memorable smoldering one down near Harbour Breton (my description of "Hobb's Hut" has a reference to this) and exploring any small inhabited island quickly reveals the local dumpsite. Finding trash when you quest for remoteness is not uncommon and I have assumed the Mediterranean was badly polluted since watching David Attenborough's The First Eden (1987) with its shocking underwater footage of a devastated seafloor.

The metaphor of a dead dog deflating like an air-mattress among the dirty waves is near Skinny Puppy territory in terms of the band name. The sentimental and innocent canine now an abject object, just as the romance of walk on a Aegean beach is turned to dross and clogged with refuse. A dead animal on the side of the highway can have the same effect as the skull peaks through our civilization's glossy exterior. The casual cruelty of shorelines can test anyone's sanity.



The signers sighs out the 'losing air, air' like he is the one deflating, but as his sigh goes silent the kick drum begins and for the next 3 minutes (1:15 to 4:10) that kick drum will be the steadily beat until my calf aches in sympathy.  As the Foal's drummer explains, "For me as a drummer, it was quite hard to get the restraint to sit back and not play over the first couple of minutes and then gradually come in, but when it does kick in, it's probably the most fun part of the set to actually play."



Black rocks and the shoreline surf
Still dead summer I cannot bear
And I wipe the sand from my eyes
The Spanish Sahara, the place that you'd wanna
Leave the horror here

The haze of high-noon - especially over baked trash and black rocks - is a vision with elements of the post-apocalypse, it is why it fits Australia so naturally in Mad Max, or why people go mad staring out at sea in the middle of the day. The actual place name of  "Spanish Sahara" was taken from "a local band's cassette that I bought for a pound after a show in Oxford. I never listened to it, but it was wrapped in a map, and on that map it said Spanish Sahara. It seemed to fit with the song's mood, which is lunar and apocalyptic, but beautiful. Hopefully it allows different interpretations."

With the talk of the "horror" discovered in remote places and best left there, we are in the realm of Colonel Kurtz....



Forget the horror here
Forget the horror here
Leave it all down here
It's future rust and it's future dust

Forget about the dog and trash, in a year they will be rotted and rust, in a century nothing but dust.

Now the waves they drag you down
carry you to broken ground.
But I'll find you in the sand
wipe you clean with dirty hands
So God damn this boiling space
The Spanish Sahara, the place that you'd wanna
Leave the horror here

The 'you' in the lyrics is the deflating dog corpse, being tossed by cold waves and tossed on an uncaring shore. The singers imagines overcoming his disgust and burying or in in some way dignifying the dog's body, but I would be pleasantly surprised if he did, maybe this song and its video serves as a substitute cremation for that dog.  Disgust wins out over compassion, the singer's "goddamn this boiling space" being akin to Kurtz's "Exterminate the Brutes!" The lure of the exotic entices many an Englishman into a boat and when the exotic reveals its all too mortal seams, the Englishman damns it all and heads home - bring back whatever souviniers, trophies, STDs and furies he picked up along the way.


'Cause I am
I'm the fury in your head
I'm the fury in your bed
I'm the ghost in the back of your head

Yannis explained, "Furies are the avenging angels of Greek myth, referenced in Homer's Iliad ... That idea interested me. You experience trauma and it stays with you, it's a vortex in your head that recurs, and can echo through generations. But you can also sort of become that trauma, make it into a positive thing. It's the idea of taking on things that are against you."

In the context of this song the "fury" is still the deflating dog corpse, now haunting the singer; but this fascinating imagery is only available if you read interviews with the artist. As we read earlier, the Foals promote "different interpretations" - as does every post-modern artists! I first encountered this attitude with Micheal Stipe and Skinny Puppy and it is endemic. The lyrics without any context suggest just another 'failed relationship' song; with context they have some solidity, this solidity doesn't make a good song but it song that can be meaningfully discussed.

I'm not going to start talking about "the Furies" because they were one of the first monsters I researched as an adult and don't want to open that door yet. I will just point out that there is an obscure (i.e I couldn't find easily it on the internet and had to dig it up out of my own notes) Greek saying that states that 'beggars and even dogs have their Furies.'  Songs about revenge are some of my favorites.

The video is full of great bleak monochromatic landscapes and waves filled with ice shards. At 4:13 you can watch his face turn orange in reflected firelight before the video is invaded by the crimson cremation. At 5:49 you can see a tear; I'm not sure I can do that sort of straight-forward sentimentality but Yannis Philippakis' first band was called the 'The Edmund Fitzgerald' so I give him a pass. He also says wanted to be "more disciplined with my lyrics, less cryptic, and I think Spanish Sahara is a good example of that."

Wait! Are the strange blue ashes left by the dog's cremation the same blue 'peace powder' used in the Foal's 'Miami' video?