Ahead of their Pit Pony support slot at Hyde Park Book Club, I joined by Mehul, Ally, James and Tess of The Foxgloves for their first ever interview.

The brainchild of singer and guitarist Mehul, who started by writing the songs in his room at the age of 15, he describes the origins as “I’ve been doing songs since 2020. I’m 22 now, I was 15 or 16 when I started. For a long time I’d be playing them in my school band, and then when I got to uni, my second year I decided to actually record an EP of stuff. We put that out in 2024 and started playing a few shows around then. It’s been very random though, we’d show up, play something and vanish for 5 months.”

On realising that he had a gig but no band, Mehul reached out to some friends in the Leeds University Band society, where they all knew each other from playing in different outfits, “But then meeting each other, and playing on the same bills and stuff we ended up kind of coming together and it’s kind of like an amalgamation. A bunch of different bands. Foxgloves is a supergroup!”.

This is reflected in The Foxgloves revolving line-up, although officially the band has seven members, only four were available tonight, which brings an interesting philosophy and dynamic to playing music, in which simplicity and improvisation are the key. “I just tried to rope in as many people as we could,” Mehul explains. This looseness does not affect the relationship between band members however, “It’s really natural, it’s very important we were all mates. We played a big show at Brudenell at the end of the year and that’s the first time we had all seven people up”. This flexibility allows the band to perform whenever an opportunity comes up, “This is the first time with this line-up. I feel like Mark E Smith, every time I show up there’s a changing lineup and so no two gigs are the same” Ally remarks.

Foxgloves free spiritness does have its occasional challenges however, in one incident the band dub ‘Great Tuning Incident of December 2023’ Ally notes “Our guitarist who’s not here today, he forgot to tune his guitar apparently, and Mehul didn’t realise and he never had a stop between songs. So every time Luke wanted to tune his guitar, he would go into the next song. So he was out of tune for the next set.”

Following this unconventional live-set up, Foxgloves have a similar method to their writing process. Mehul describes how he initially wrote their first EP “I tried to do it 1 take for every instrument, very lo-fi, I just put shoegaze cos I’m using a pedal. It’s kind of funny cos I only have one pedal. We don’t have big pedal boards for a shoegaze band.Pretty minimalist. With the newer stuff, there’s a lot of Beck influence. I’m too lazy, so I’ve been taking bits of demos and random bits I’ve got and I’ve been trying to make new songs out of cutting things around. It’s been really fun.” Their first EP 2024’s ‘the car beside the road’ was driven by Mehul wanting to release songs before he turned 20, using songs he’d written over the past four years, using an incredibly stripped back recording process “I started a makeshift thing in my bedroom, one of those really cheap beginner amps. And it’s recorded mostly on my phone mic. The annoying thing is, when you hear it back you can hear things like me clicking my pedal.”

“You can’t get more DIY than that” the band enthuse. Adding to the lo-fi spirit of the EP, “I like the fact that some of the songs, when you’re rehearsing, if you’re listening to Spotify, it’s really hard to play along, because Mehul never tunes his guitar. So his guitars went out of tune over the recording. So if you’re practising at home, it’s impossible because you’re never in tune.” Ally recalls.

The Foxgloves are particularly appreciative of the diversity of the Leeds Music Scene, “ It’s great!” says Tess, with the rest of the band adding “It’s the best scene I’ve ever found, I’m big on the hardcore scene, there’s a big jazz and rave scene, if you’re into Indie Poo, there’s Indie Poo. No matter what you’re into, there are spaces and events going on.”

Words by Dan Brabban