When Yannis Philippakis first immersed himself in the classic Afrobeat records featuring legendary drummer Tony Allen, the Foals lead vocalist felt like he was listening to music that was being beamed in from another planet. Imagine, then, what it felt like when Philippakis entered the studio with Allen, invited to a two-day session with the drummer, and discovered that they were kindred musical spirits. “It was like being invited into a portal where things made sense on a musical level but had a magic to them that was out of the ordinary,” Philippakis tells Apple Music. Those sessions initially took place in Paris in 2016, with Philippakis returning again for another round in between Foals duties. However, the recordings were incomplete at the time of Allen’s death in 2020. For a few years, the songs sat gathering dust, save for a few impromptu late-night listening parties when Philippakis would play his musician pals the unfinished versions. After the culmination of the tour to support Foals’ 2022 album Life Is Yours, Philippakis was determined to get the project to the finish line. It has resulted in Lagos Paris London, an EP that captures the vibrant, exhilarating sound of what happened when the duo played together, a union that pairs Allen’s tightly wound, tumbling grooves and Philippakis’ explosive riffs and yearning vocals. For Philippakis, it was a creative pact that went far and beyond the usual coming together of two artists. “Collaborations can be so rote and mercenary these days,” he says, “where people just get together in a studio and try to capitalise on each other’s standing. This was the opposite of that. It felt like Rufio meeting Peter Pan, being invited to this magical world.” And now you’re being invited there, too. Let Philippakis take you through Lagos Paris London, track by track. “Walk Through Fire” (feat. 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” (feat. Tony Allen) “This is one of my favourite 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 energised 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” (feat. 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 antagonising 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 night-time escape into an Alice in Wonderland, trippy universe.” “Under the Strikes” (feat. 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 whisky. 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.”