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Mar 21, 2025 Issue #74 - The Protest Issue with Kathleen Hanna and Bartees Strange By Mark Redfern Photography by Sarah Piantadosi

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For this My Firsts we talk to Faris Badwan, frontman of the British band The Horrors.

Badwan was born in 1986 to a Palestinian father and English mother and grew up in the English towns of Leamington Spa and Hillmorton (a suburb of Rugby). It was at a boarding school in Rugby, which Badwan had a scholarship to, that he met Tom Cowan (aka Tom Furse), future bassist and synth player in The Horrors. Badwan went on to study illustration at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, but dropped out to focus on music. The Horrors formed in 2005 and released their debut album, Strange House, in 2007, but really found their footing with 2009’s Primary Colours and 2011’s Skying, which featured the anthemic “Still Life.” Throughout these releases the band successfully straddled multiple genres, including post-punk, shoegaze, neo-psychedelia, and art rock, all while having an influential sound unmistakably their own.

The Horrors’ new album, Night Life, is their first full-length in eight years, since 2017’s V (although in 2021 they released the Lout and Against the Blade EPs). Night Life also finds the band on a new label, Fiction, and with a revised lineup. The band still features Badwan, bassist Rhys Webb, and guitarist Joshua Hayward, but those founding members are now joined by new members Amelia Kidd on keyboards and Jordan Cook (of the band Telegram) on drums. Absent are original members, keyboardist Tom Furse (who left the band in 2021) and drummer Joe Spurgeon.

Badwan and Webb began working on demos in Webb’s North London flat, with recording done in Los Angeles with producer Yves Rothman (Yves Tumor, Blondshell). The album was then finished in London along with Hayward. Kidd also contributed remotely from Glasgow.

Outside of The Horrors, Badwan has also previously teamed up with Canadian opera singer Rachel Zeffira to release music under the name Cat’s Eyes. He’s also an accomplished painter and artist and has had exhibitions in Milan and Dubai.

Read on as Badwan discusses his awkward first kiss, being into ’60s TV shows and music in the ’90s, knowing the late electronic musician SOPHIE when they were teenagers, an interesting first job, and the school concert that didn’t go quite as planned.

First person you kissed?

I was on a caravan holiday with my family, who were asleep. She was chewing gum. We kissed for a while and at no stage did she get rid of the gum. Her friend was watching in silence! Then we went and rolled around in a nearby field fully clothed and emerged from the dark completely covered in mud. We never spoke in person again.

First TV show you were obsessed with?

The Sooty Show. So much of my sense of humor comes from it. Dennis the Menace as well. And then ’60s spy serials like The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Prisoner. It has occurred to me that everything my parents were aware of culturally was about 10-20 years out of date. I would talk about things at school assuming they were current and people would look at me blankly.

First record your parents played for you?

My parents didn’t really listen to albums. There were a lot of “Sounds of the ’60s” compilation tapes which meant I got to hear things like The Walker Brothers and The Ronettes, which are still two of my favorites. I loved The Kinks. I used to dig through the tape collection and make mixes on my own. It felt like a private, personal thing, and I was always looking for things like that. You had to manually record between cassettes and I was obsessed with getting a smooth fade at the end of the song, which meant cranking the volume so you had further space to drop. My grandad used to tell me that radio DJs talked over song outros to stop people home-taping and I still aspire to that level of cynicism.

First album you bought?

With my own money I’m pretty sure it was Savage Garden. I used to go to Boots and buy whatever was in the bargain bucket while my mum went to the opticians. No wonder I stuck with my ’60s and ’70s compilation tapes. But “To the Moon and Back” isn’t as bad as I remember! Haha. Oh wait I forgot about “Truly Madly Deeply.”

First favorite band?

The MC5 just represented total freedom to me, right from when I saw the sleeve of Kick Out the Jams. Something about how chaotic and colorful the aesthetic was seemed really exciting. And then how the record itself begins is kind of unforgettable. Kids always love chaos! I had a lot of favorite bands. The Yardbirds, The Ronettes. I don’t know why I connected with girl groups so instantly. I remember the first time I heard “Be My Baby,” in the background coming out of a car stereo.

I was definitely more into the ’60s and ’70s as a kid, and without older brothers or friends into music it was kind of random what I ended up liking. My parents’ collection was basically all best of compilations, with a couple of NOW! That’s What I Call Music compilations thrown in. I listened to about three complete albums in childhood—Abbey Road, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, and a Beautiful South album. I fucking despise The Beautiful South, so much so that I don’t even want to capitalize their name properly. That song “Perfect 10” makes me want to puke!

I got into electronic music when I bought one of those ’90s ambient chillout albums at a petrol station. I can’t remember the exact name, but there were so many great songs on it. Groove Armada, Zero 7, Massive Attack, Everything But the Girl, I Monster. I was so used to listening to music in that format and I loved the fact that you could discover loads of different artists at once.

First favorite song?

Lee Marvin: “Wand’rin’ Star.” My grandad would sing it to me when I was three or four and I had it on a cassette later. The guy’s voice is so deep and guttural that he’s one step away from throat-singing. It sounded so unique. I loved the Land Before Time theme song by Diana Ross as well.

First concert you went to?

Technically my first concert was SOPHIE—although she wasn’t SOPHIE yet. We were 13 and she was already a professional-level house DJ playing at parties for older kids. She hadn’t discovered synths at this point but we would share music a lot over the next few years. Bowie, Pixies, Flaming Lips. We used to really like [The Flaming Lips’] The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

First music festival you went to?

I went to Reading when I was 16, somehow without a ticket, or a tent, or anything else. In 2004 I remember seeing The Fiery Furnaces, The Datsuns, Secret Machines, Supergrass, some kind of version of the MC5, LCD Soundsystem. Being in a band wasn’t even a dream at that point, it seemed totally inaccessible. Two years later, almost to the day, The Horrors started.

First job you had? First time you got fired?

I was 18, at art school in London pre-Horrors. Josh and I applied to be games testers, it was a trek to Woking every day but we were expecting this to be the ideal job. We arrived at the secluded building to find 50 people at a row of consoles, with the given objective of performing a series of repetitive tasks to try and crash the game, thereby finding bugs. The result of a drive towards healthy eating, the offices were filled with rotting fruit, which no one ate, preferring chinese takeaways which were scattered around half-eaten. The gamers were exclusively male, outcasts, and wargames enthusiasts with a noncommittal attitude towards personal hygiene. The ceilings were low and the dark blue carpet made the space feel even smaller. Everything else was gray or white. The lighting was horrendous.

We were testing a racing game called Burnout 3, and a Harry Potter RPG. There was some kind of health and safety presentation on the fifth day and I fell asleep, unaccustomed to early mornings. I was fired, by a hairless man with cauliflower ears, sighing at my lack of discipline. Rugby player build, shirt was too small. Josh stayed working there for three months.

First country you visited outside of your own?

Jordan. A lot of my Palestinian family moved there when their village, Annaba, was destroyed by Israeli troops in 1948. We would go to stay at my grandad’s house for months at a time. It’s so hot there, the walls are all light tan-colored or white, and there’s a level of dust in the air that you would never encounter in England. The car tires can smell like they’re cooking. Even at midnight it can be 30 degrees [Celcius, 86 degrees Fahrenheit].

The roof of my grandfather’s building was flat, and at night my mum and I would go up to the top where the washing was hung out to dry. People don’t lock their cars or wear seatbelts. I miss it. I’m glad that I was able to go there—and Palestine—a lot when I was younger. All my arabic memories are a real sensory overload, they’re so vivid.

First computer?

We didn’t get a PC until I was 13 or 14. If I’d had Sonic or Zelda I’d probably have never gone outside. I made do with Microsoft Football and Minesweeper.

First book you read outside of one assigned for school?

It was a book called Ellis and the Hummick. It was a bit like tales of the Jabberwock. I read a lot as a kid. A mix of literary classics and then absolute trash like The Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton. I did like books of fables and proverbs, especially if they were illustrated. I was six and I had a small wooden flip-top school desk in my room, which I would sit drawing at before the rest of the house woke up. I had an illustrated encyclopaedia and I would draw things from it. We never had plain white paper which I found really annoying. Instead we had this weird recycled paper in the worst colors imaginable.

First instrument?

My mum had a ’90s Yamaha keyboard with a load of sound effects on it. There was a motorbike noise on it that I loved and have spent my career trying to recreate. If you hit the “demo” button at any point it would launch into something that sounded like the theme tune to Family Fortunes.

First professional recording session?

The Horrors did some demos at Selfish Cunt’s practice space in Hackney, with Pat engineering. We did covers of “The Witch” and “Jack the Ripper,” an early version of “Death at the Chapel,” “Excellent Choice,” and another song called “You Think I’m Lonely.” We put them up on our MySpace. The Rotters was before that but to call that a professional band would be a stretch.

First synth?

When I was 20, I spent a couple of weeks house-sitting while my friend Sylvia was out of town. She is a huge black metal fan with a great knowledge of music and I spent the stay going through her book collection—reading books like Lords of Chaos, getting into Leviathan, Ondskapt, Bathory—and also playing her Jen SX1000 mono synth, which I borrowed for a while. I bought a chorus tape echo unit and a DD2 delay and used to spend nights recording, learning how things worked. Chris Cunningham had recently given me the Cabaret Voltaire attic tapes, Selected Ambient Works, and the OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music compilation and I was making my own attempt.

First band you were in? First time you performed in public?

I was 16. There was a school concert and at the last minute I formed a band with a group of people that had been kicked out of their respective bands. The drummer wanted to solo all the time which added an unusual side to our cover of The Who’s “My Generation.” I’d never sung before. I was nowhere near singing at the same tempo as the rhythm section. There’s a recording of it. I was on such a high after the first rehearsal, like part of me had woken up for the first time.

www.thehorrors.co.uk

Read our 2017 interview with The Horrors on V.

Farris Badwan was one of the artists on the cover of our 20th Anniversary Issue.

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