London Thunder

Album: What Went Down (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • Foals vocalist Yannis Phillppakis wrote this track about touring and knowing that when he returns home, some things will be different. He told Mojo: "That song, basically, I wrote it at an airport at night and it wasn't very busy and it had that kind of weird, eerie, cold melancholy to it. I was coming back home and I realised that the home that I was coming back to wasn't the home that I left, that something had happened while I'd been away. That song is about being away from home."
  • A music video was shot with a CCTV camera of Foals playing this song live at the Studios La Fabrique where they recorded What Went Down. Studios La Fabrique is located in the same village in the south of France in which Vincent Van Gogh was hospitalized after savaging his own ear.
  • Phillppakis elaborated further on the song's meaning to HMV.com, telling the site it "deals directly with the idea of being absent and always being in departure lounges, the idea of not being able to put roots in anywhere."

    "When I was younger I didn't care so much about where I was, but on the last tour in particular I really felt like I was treading heavier, I wanted to put an anchor down, I wanted to stay somewhere," he added. "That song deals with being away and how when you come home your is never the same. The idea of home and belonging is recurrent in quite a lot of our songs."

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