- 2024-09-02
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MUSIC
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Yannis & The Yaw Releases Debut EP “Lagos Paris London” featuring Tony Allen
British rock band Foals frontman, Yannis Philippakis' solo project Yannis & The Yaw released his debut EP “Lagos Paris London” on August 30, 2024.
The EP comprises a 5-track, featuring Nigerian-French drummer Tony Allen, produced by Vincent Taurelle and Yannis Philippakis.
Yannis Philippakis recorded the EP with Tony Allen twice in Paris since 2017, but after Tony Allen's death in 2020, the EP remained incomplete. He finally completed the EP in 2022.
Yannis Philippakis said of the EP, “Making music with somebody, and then death happening, being in proximity to mortality, but having this record at the end of it, it's been such an important experience for me. Understanding the power of meeting somebody and making something, those serendipitous encounters, meaningful ones where you make something are to be treasured and cherished, because, in many ways, that's all that's left at the end.”
He continued, “For that experience to have been with Tony Allen - one of the greatest drummers of all time - makes this all the more bittersweet. He made his own rhythmic language which, above all, feels good in the body.”
He added, “It's one thing to come up with a technical fingerprint that's new. That's hard in and of itself. But to do that and have it still feel good to different generations of musicians from different cultures all around the world? There's so much rhythmic information but it never stops feeling good. And he had no father in that. He came up with it. That's the magic of it.”- Yannis Philippakis said, “There was an imperative to finish it in a way that I had never felt with another record. There was a deep duty to do it, to finish it as well as possible, and to pay respect to him by getting it out there. Going through some of the drum takes was a moving experience because those recordings were some of the last pieces of music he ever worked on. There's an eternal quality to these drum tracks, and you feel a continuity of his life and energy through them. He wanted people to hear this, and it's good to be able to do it for him - but of course it's slightly bittersweet.”
He said of working with Tony Allen, “I remember that moment of being in the room with a musical hero of mine who was good 50 years my senior, he had existed in my mind as this like mythical musician for a long time. And so just being in the room with him initially was something incredible, but then seeing him light up when I started singing, and realizing that we were both mutually excited by this project. And that doing something as natural as just singing or as bringing an idea that you may have had can connect across years and across cultures and across times and experiences, and then create something together that is like this amazing nugget of chemistry, which is what this all became, just like. I'll never forget that.” -
Yannis Philippakis explained track-by-track for the EP via Apple Music.
“Walk Through Fire” featuring Tony Allen
“This is the first thing that we wrote. It was within the first hour. I was just trying out different amps and I started playing that riff and before I knew it, Tony had come in silently and started playing—and at some point somebody pressed record. I think we played it twice, the first time it was 10 minutes and the next time it's five minutes. Then we cut it down to something that resembles the track that you're hearing now. I did the vocals later in conference with Tony. I wanted to approach the lyrics slightly differently from what I would do with the band, and also because it felt like something that we had concocted together. I discussed the lyrics with him and he was like, 'Let's make the music about the time. I want it to be about the time and the streets.' I think he wanted it to live in the world. He didn't want it to be too cerebral or too introspective. He wanted to feel like the music was part of the landscape that was outside of the studio.”
“Rain Can't Reach Us” featuring Tony Allen
“This is one of my favorite pieces of music I've ever worked on. I hadn't gone with the intention of working on this with him—this was something that I'd probably intended to become a Foals track—but because 'Walk Through Fire' came together so quickly the producers were like, 'Seeing as you two are in the room, let's do something else.' I didn't have any vocals before we played it and I was just singing in the room. Tony got really excited when the vocals started, he was visibly energized and inspired. That was an amazing moment for me, to be like, 'Oh, Tony's as excited by this collaboration as I am.' Obviously it's only been me talking about [the EP], which is a shame. I probably haven't communicated how excited Tony was by the collaboration, how into it he was. I think that there was this real feeling of meeting somewhere, that we were on two little rafts in the sea and we managed to build our own little island and meet there in the middle, creating something that belonged to the two of us. I think that that's most clearly captured on 'Rain Can't Reach Us.'”
“Night Green, Heavy Love” featuring Tony Allen
“This was the last thing we did on the initial session and we did it at night. It's super off-click, very wonky. It felt very voodoo and had this slightly macabre energy to it. The middle of this track is probably the heaviest thing that Tony's played on. I've got the sense that we were in quite uncharted territory for both of us. He was playing a time signature and playing in a way that was almost antagonizing the riff that I was playing in the middle. For him also, he was in quite uncharted territory with me playing this heavy slabby riff. This one remained instrumental for quite a long time and the vocals were only finished after Tony had passed. But I had the window into it the whole time, this nighttime escape into an Alice in Wonderland, trippy universe.”
“Under the Strikes” featuring Tony Allen
“This was the last thing we finished on the EP. It was recorded probably a year after the initial session. I went back to Paris to work with Tony a bit more and we did the takes once we'd started drinking whiskey. It remained as an unedited jam for a long time. I felt like I'd known the direction to take it in, but it remained messy. You can hear Tony not wanting to do a second take, which I think is pretty awesome. It was super wobbly. You could hear the Chivas Regal in the microphones basically, and then he's refusing to do a second take, you can just hear him just saying, 'No.' It's probably the most straight-up Afrobeat one, which is almost in homage to Tony. We laid the brass down recently and I finished the vocals recently. The end of the song acts as a kind of farewell to Tony. I wanted to write lyrics that said goodbye to him because those drums were the last drums that we worked on, and they are some of the last drums that he recorded.”
“Clementine”
“This was done in a day when Tony wasn't at the studio. I can't remember the reason why, but it was part of the same session, me and the other collaborators from The Yaw jammed it out. It's the only song to not have Tony's drums on it but it is written with the other collaborators from The Yaw. To me, it's one of the purest pop songs I've ever written. It's got this clear visual world of Pirelli Calendars from the '70s, like digging out the ice from the bottom of the drink looking for the maraschino cherry at the bottom of the cocktail but not quite being able to get it.”
Photo by Kit Monteith - source : Apple Music
