Power To The People

Many people will tell you that a particular song changed their life, but Mark Foster, Mark Pontius and Cubbie Fink can prove it. Just a couple of months after the synth-happy band formed in Los Angeles, Foster posted one of their first compositions online as a free download. Within a few weeks, the song had been featured on every blog from here to Liechtenstein and his inbox was clogged with emails offering record deals, distribution deals and pretty much anything he wanted.

As is to be expected in the frankly bonkers world of rock ‘n’ roll, what happened next was even more bizarre. Having secured a multi-album deal with Columbia Records, ‘Pumped Up Kicks’, spent eight consecutive weeks at number three on the Billboard ‘Hot 100’, making it the first alternative number one to crack the US top five since Kings Of Leon’s ‘Use Somebody’ in 2009. The track has now sold at least three million copies, has been viewed 45 million times on YouTube and… well, the numbers just keep getting bigger and bigger from there.
Without really thinking about it, singer-songwriter Mark Foster had become the international poster boy for free downloading as a method of promoting music.
“That really put us on the map,” he tells me, as the band prepare for their second ever Irish show in Dublin’s Olympia (it’s a sell-out). “We were like, ‘Yeah, please pirate our stuff! Please! Make ten CDs and hand them out to all your friends. Email it to 100 people if you want!’ It gave the song life and gave it the freedom to do what it was going to do.
‘I think the hardest thing when you’re a new band is really just making people aware of you. There’s so much competition, there’s so much music out there, that’s the toughest thing, but if you’re on people’s radar, that’s much more valuable than trying to make a couple of bucks off an EP. If you’re an unknown band trying to sell your music right away, just give it away! Give it away for free until you can parlay that into some real success. That was definitely one of the most important decisions we made.”
Now one of the most sought-after new bands in the US, Foster The People opened their Irish account in September with a rousing show in Stradbally Estate.
“I’ve been wanting to play here again since the Electric Picnic show,” Foster beams. “I mean the crowd was just so good. This is the last show of our European tour, and I’ve just been looking forward to it the whole time.”
Twitter informed me that the lads have been in town for a few days now; what does an international super stud get up to on a day off in Dublin?
“I went to the Guinness Factory and had the best pint of Guinness I’ve ever had in my life! It was incredible! Then I went to a few pubs, had a good dinner and ended up losing some money at poker at the end of the night!”
Sounds about right. At least it worked out better than a recent Thanksgiving spent in Germany.
“Well, I did have a turkey sandwich in the airport!” Foster laughs. “That counts for something.”
Unless I grossly misunderstood the plot of This Is Spinal Tap, no-one ever said that touring was easy, especially when you’re trying to get stuck into your second album.
“I’ve built a studio on my bus, brought on all my gear and started writing for the new record on the road. It’s really tough to write on the road because we’ve been so busy, but it’s nice to get some songs started and to get a vibe.”
As if writing new material, playing shows and answering endless questions about Foster’s previous musical incarnation (he wrote ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ while working as a commercial jingle writer) wasn’t enough, the band, along with drummer Mark’s sister Rebecca Pontius, came up with a way to put their almost instantaneous fame to good use.
“It’s called the ‘Do-Good Bus’,” Foster explains, “and it followed us on tour in the States. We raised $120,000 through fan donations to get this bus on the road. It picked up 25 volunteers in each city and teamed up with a different local charity that day and did something for the community.
‘Our focus with the ‘Do-Good Bus’ was to do things with charities that were small and didn’t have a lot of resources. A lot of these charities only have like four or five people working for them, so when the ‘Do-Good Bus’ showed up with 30 people volunteering, a lot of projects got done that would have normally taken two-and-a-half months!”
Surprisingly enough, the band’s charitable aspirations have been strong since day one.
‘That was our main focus when we started the band besides the music,” Foster says, “hence the band name. All of us had been involved with humanitarian stuff separate from the band and it was something that was important to us. It’s kind of been our mantra.”
In another act of philanthropy, Foster The People stuffed their debut album Torches with impossibly catchy up-tempo numbers, leaving the ten-tracker totally ballad-free.
‘We paid attention a lot to the flow of the record. I had Mark and Cubby come over to my house when we had the record mastered and we turned off the lights and just listened to it all the way thorough and then started moving songs around until we found the right order. There were a couple of songs that just didn’t fit on there so we trimmed the fat.”
If there’s one man who deserves an extra large glass of port this Christmas, it’s Foster’s production sensei Paul Epworth. Everyone from Adele to Friendly Fires to Florence + The Machine owe part of their year’s success to the Londoner’s magic touch.
“I’ve been wanting to work with Paul for years,” Foster beams, “before I even started the band. He was one of our top choices for producers but he wasn’t really working on records at the time so it didn’t look like we were gonna have a chance to work with each other. We ended up moving forward with a couple of other guys and half-way though he was like, ‘Guys, sorry to take so long to get back to you but I have to do this!’ So we went over there for three weeks and did three songs with Paul. I’d been working on ‘Call It What You Want’ for like a year in a half, it was one of those songs where it was really hard to crack the code. I had most of it done and then I went in with Paul and we finished it and now it’s one of our favourite songs on the album!”
While I imagine Epworth has been blessed with the power to produce some kind of ‘bottleable hit juice’, Foster says there’s no magic formula behind the man’s success.
“He’s just got really good instincts.” he says. “And he’s got vibe. He really understands vibe and is very careful not to kill the vibe. He’s also got that modern touch to make something sound fresh and new. He’s one of those few guys who comes from playing with rock bands but also has a very heavy electronic side to him as well, there’s not a lot of producers out there that have that combination.”
When a band debuts with a tune as big as ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ it’s inevitable that they’ll get pinned with the one-hit-wonder tag, although something tells me that Foster isn’t losing any sleep over it.
“It’s all about an emotional connection and laying a foundation early on, having those true fans that can tell their friends, ‘I was listening to these guys a year before you, I’m the real fan!’ You want people to take ownership over it. If you’re an artist that gets signed and nobody knows who you are and you put out this pristine record, there’s not that connection there. Touring is a huge part of that because nothing connects someone to you as an artist more than playing live, that’s something that we’ve been aware of when you look at bands like Arcade Fire. They’ve done it maybe better than any other modern band right now, they’ve slowly built a rabid fan base that will do anything for them and each record is bigger than the last because of it.”
The rise of Foster The People has been one of the most head-spinning of the year so this next question is one not many people can answer. What’s it like to become world famous in less time than it takes to wear in a new pair of shoes?
‘It’s funny,” Foster reflects, “when I was playing poker with those guys last night, they were like, ‘Where you from?’, we were just like chatting and stuff. They said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I was like, ‘I play music’, and I said I was from Foster The People, not thinking that any of them would know who we were and they all just flipped out and started singing ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ to me! That was surprising, but it was really cool... and then they took all my money.”

Torches is out now on Columbia Records.