INDOOR FOXES: THIS HAS ALL GOT A BIT OUT OF HAND
WORDS: SAMUEL WEAVER
PHOTOGRAPHY: NATHAN DUNPHY
Girlrock Icon, Recovering Weird Girl, Ethnomusicologist, “Scottish Nationalist” & Indoor Fox Martha Barr shows Madness around Leith
“It’s dreich man, dis wevvar - isnae shite. Dreich”. The Scottish penchant for free elocution lessons never fails to humble. Madness is in Edinburgh to meet Martha Barr, known for her project ‘Indoor Foxes’, for whom 2026 bodes to be a massive yea- OKAY, enough of that, enough of that; I am extremely nervous in anticipation of meeting with Martha, I am in a location of personal harm. I feel like an American on a walking tour of Nagasaki in 1946. I pace down Leith Walk and tune into tourist’s conversations as my conscience starts to eat itself. Jambos and Hibees, alkies and wankers, Protestants and Catholics, Scots and colonialists, everything feels binary to a foreigner crossing this border. Martha is running slightly late (“sorry! My mum was in the bathroom!”) and I pensively begin to understand that both the future of myself and Caledonia is in very safe hands.
Indoor Foxes is an outcome of the Scottish choice; does one writhe in post-colonial depression, languishing in painfully Waitrosian limitless subjectivity, captives of angloist hatred à la its shite being Scottish! - or does one channel Marx, placing devolved nationalism as the impossibly beautiful unifier of objectification and self-affirmation? Indoor Foxes have gambled it all on the latter.
Talking and walking with Martha is a wonderful experience. She is mad, gentle and funny. Her lack of concern for celebrity and immense self-awareness is so refreshing. Her shoes have concrete soles. She actually pays for the 10p bag in Tesco, she compliments my questionable jacket, she tips 10% for self-service coffee, she fills awkward pauses generously, she laughs at herself, she passes on the bait to slander the Brit School (what serious journalist would dare attempt to evoke that!), she vocally compliments every passing dog with camp Azaelia Banksian hype.
Martha has been Indoor Foxes since her schooldays. She can be ‘really ill’ and has been connected with service providers, therapists and doctors in one way or another for as long as she can remember. ‘I would be a fucking paralegal!’ she laughs when pondering how her future could have turned out had this not come to fruition - ‘or dead.’ Indoor Foxes’ sonic maniacal haze is a lot of things, part early 1990s Green Day demos, part Avril Lavignian femrock, scalically Sam Fender, but her history and blood overwhelms all - it truly is nothing but itself.
We talk about the light and darkness of her adolescence as we walk past her old school, saunter through Leith Links (the site of her first drink-induced chunder), and pass a port side former warehouse now converted into a Swedish-style fish fucking restaurant with uncomfortable stools and guaranteed shite service twinned with an automatic 20% tip system, all accompanied of course by a slight eyeroll and mumbled awkward laugh. Music has been the key theme in Martha’s life; the piano she played in the house as a child, hailing from a family of talented local musicians, readily-available music lessons at school accompanied with instruments, the Scottish government subsidising her musicology degrees. The State and the Family invested well, and will inevitably reap the rewards of her stardom and all it will do for generations of fans.
It could have been so different. She acknowledges her privilege, whether it be her brother’s ‘free labour’ (he is an excellent guitarist and part of the live band), growing up somewhere ‘so fucking cool’ that has changed so much to become a safe, if gentrified, home, her receipt of State support - it is by embracing pleasure and interest that she has survived. Her screams on stage, she notes, are not musical; it’s a release, a wild surrender to the emotion and struggle of the moment. Later that day outside Edinburgh Waverley a tearful woman screams as she is taken by the Polis. It is good to have a place to scream. It retains your liberty. And what about the English - our dialogue destroys fear around voice, presence, form - Indoor Foxes celebrate themselves, not what limits, a rare example of love overcoming resentment in the 21st century - this is how their chains have been lost.
Scotland; a colony, Britain’s nuclear garden, is laden with natural resources; oil, gas, timber, wool, sheep, lamb, shortbread, heavily cut cocaine. But as Martha gleefully points out, Westminster exploitation and exportation of these has not stopped Scotland from looking after themselves; whisky, culture, tourism, music, fitba, all act as a middle finger in the face of post-Thatcherite economics. ‘Just cut out my heart and leave me my liver’ Martha screams on Manic - no matter how personal, she cannot help but echo the political death of her country; an industrial pogrom propagated simultaneously with being awarded the coveted ‘Most Drug Deaths in Europe’ prize in 2025. Thanks Maggie!
To an outsider perhaps the depth of her music isn’t obvious; the fun and crazygirl exterior belies the darkness; on Maggot Brains abuse and manipulation is paired with 2000s sleazebop that can’t help but make you smile and nod - much like the pipers on the Royal Mile, the jingoistic atmosphere combined with Vietnamese chatter and camera flashes conceals their shared omnipresence on the Somme, or coalescence with the deathly breeze of Colleville-sur-Mer. Is this the brave face of your Nan, shattered by 90 years of abuse and alcoholism into smiley, Catholic acceptance, or is this something deeper; the celebration of subjectification. After all, it is only by forgiving that one is forgiven.
Indoor Foxes have a massive 2026 - an upcoming support slot with the Libertines and the promise of a new EP; if Sadolescence was the chronically overwhelming experience of young adulthood in the age of individualisation and atomisation, the new EP promises to reflect Martha’s own mental development, surviving love and self-destruction but within a medicated bubble, of which has been simultaneously prescribed and avidly disencouraged by the State. It is girlrock-Scotpop-Sertralinica. Anhedonia is a reduced capacity to feel pleasure, and is a common side-effect of antidepressant medication. For those with ‘disorders’ this can be especially painful; it is like being Scottish and being allergic to sunlight - the moments one has so missed can feel minimised, reduced, even pointless. But as will be explored on the EP - life never ends with a reduction, it only ever gets bigger and bigger. The only pre-requisite is the capacity to understand, relate, love, and appreciate. Heed Martha’s call to arms - buy a ticket to Indoor Foxes, do not kill yourself, kiss that human that you fancy, go out and drink in a park, love yourself, dance with your friends, fuck shit up. Everything is going to be okay.
Stuck in the Union, drowning internally in anti-migrant nationalism as social services creak under the limits of Westminster neoliberalism, Indoor Foxes are an example for anyone struggling to stay afloat amidst the madness of Scottish modernism. Indoor Foxes echo Solzhenitsyn - “rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul”. ES
