Gary SteelWay back in 2005, GARY STEEL had a chat with Finn Andrews, who was just starting to make waves with his group The Veils. Here’s the transcript of that conversation in full for the first time.
Gary Steel – You’re hanging out in New Zealand at the moment. Are you actually living here now?
Finn Andrews – It was just to write, that was the initial idea. After the touring schedule, it came the time for another album, and I hadn’t written anything. A terminal block with it, a straitjacket, it was partly… as far as the record company is concerned I’m over here to write and to form a band, and that’s mainly what I’ve been doing, but it’s also to get away from all of that for awhile. It’s just allowed me to make another one, really.
Gary – On the first one the songs were written over quite a long period of time?
Finn – Yeah. Probably two or three years. And the first two years of that I’d never considered taking them anywhere or playing them to anyone in particular. It was just for my own benefit. But it’s a very different thing when you have companies staring over your shoulder. I always knew that was the case, but I never thought it would be quite so restrictive and quite so terrifying really. So much expectation. Devonport’s always allowed me to get over that and just to be with my family and friends… I just write when I wanna write and I don’t think about anything else.
Gary – Musicians you hired for the first album, are they gone now?
Finn – I think I’ll be working with the drummer again, but I’ve found two other players over here, who I went to school with and played with when I was quite young. I think we’re heading back there in about a month, so we’re coming to the end of this.
Gary – I imagine you won’t get to hear any of the new songs fully fledged until you get the band under way again over there.
Finn – Yeah. I’m still working in the dark really. It’s starting to feel a lot more real now that the tickets have been booked. It’s great that I’m excited about going back again, because I genuinely didn’t feel I could make it through another album for quite some time. It’s just the excitement of hearing it with a band and playing it in front of people, and to get in the studio again… it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been in the studio. I’m starting to miss it.
Gary – It’s good that you’ve given yourself that gestation time, because so many people come off the live and promo stuff for the first album and they’re stuffed.
Finn – We’re very fortunate. There are a lot of labels that wouldn’t have allowed me such free reign. I didn’t realise at the time quite what I was demanding. That I want an entirely new band, and that I would need to be far across the world for the next eight months to do it. There’s a lot of trust, and I’m very grateful and very lucky. But you do need to get away sometimes to make anything.
Gary – One would think this was the 21st Century way of going about it, rather than the old-fashioned thing of suffer that period and get on and make a bad second album.
Finn – It’s only in the last few years that I’ve seen that, in the wake of their first album, and they’re just working like dogs, and losing their minds from working like that, and a lot of record companies don’t see that… they just work them until they can’t do any more. It’s a horrible thing. I’ve never wanted that, they knew that from the start, that I wanted to do every record as it comes, and that I didn’t want any money for the second record until I was confident that I could do it. It’s such a natural thing.
Gary – Your Mum still lives here?
Finn – Yeah.
Gary – Is she from England or New Zealand?
Finn – She’s moved around her whole life. She’s spent most of her life here and England, and a lot in Malta.
Gary – Did she meet your Dad here?
Finn – She met him in Britain.
Gary – Do you keep in touch with your Dad? [Barry Andrews of XTC and Shriekback].
Finn – Yeah, very regularly.
Gary – I had no idea your Dad was Barry Andrews until this morning!
Finn – He’s an action figure in some XTC thing. They’ve got his keyboards as well, an exact replica.
Gary – I probably interviewed him 20 years ago or something.
Finn – Oh, when he was over here?
Gary – [Gary explains his sordid appreciation of XTC, League Of Gentlemen, Shriekback] I was quite surprised at the connection, because your music is so different. It’s a long way from other father and sons, like Jeff Buckley sounds a bit like Tim Buckley.
Finn – It’s crazy that anyone would want to make the same music as your parents.
Gary – I think it’s quite inevitable that you’d have quite different influences from your parents.
Finn – I’m scarily seeing more and more similarities. Not so much XTC and things, I never saw that as Dad’s band so much. There’s a lot of similarities in our tastes are incredibly similar. It’s just the style of it is somewhat different, but the reasons you do it and the reasons you love it are the same.
Gary – I guess he’s a person who’s always had a lot of drive and conviction.
Finn – Yeah, and he’s still going, churning out three or four albums a year. He has an amazing amount of stamina with it, he just loves it to bits.
Gary – I know it’s early to say, but do you think the direction you’ll go in, will you keep the essential sound of the first album, or change a lot?
Finn – I’ve tried not to allow myself to think of that record as being set in stone as any kind of indication of anything other than what it was at that time, and I really think the second record will be… my voice will possibly be the only link. I hope that’s the case, because I see no reason to repeat it. I was so young making that record, and I was really just playing what I felt like playing at that time with absolutely no forward thinking with it at all, you know, ‘This is the beginning of this kind of sound, here’s where we’ll take it’. A lot of it I’m proud of and a lot of it embarrasses the hell out of me and a lot of teenage concerns with it… it’s really just that for me, a reminder of that time. I think the second record will be very different.
Gary – It’s amazing that you managed to make – I hesitate to use the word mature – but a fully formed album at such a young age. When you look at other young musicians who have made albums, when they were 18 or 19, say Betchadupa, it’s just the sum total of its influences. You’ve made a record that while it’s relatively easy to see some of your influences, it’s still YOU.
Finn – Thanks. Thanks.
Gary – I wondered if there’s some difference in the way you approach the whole songwriting thing?
Finn – Um… for me it doesn’t sound mature at all, it sounds like a little kid! It’s possibly a lot to do with my parents and the way I was raised with music, and they always had very firm opinions about what was great and what was bullshit. I think it’s possibly the result of extreme points of view. I throw away an awful lot of what I write. I don’t know, is it strict discipline?
Gary – That’s kind of what I was thinking. Your music sounds as though you’re very close to it and it’s incredibly emotionally driven, but at the same time one has to assume that you’re very disciplined and research oriented!
Finn – I think that’s one of the reasons I’m back here. I did work very hard in those studios. Just to make it what I wanted it to be, and it drives me up the wall how much you’re expected to just let stuff go into the hands of other people, and it does take a phenomenal amount of work just to keep it your own, it’s exhausting, it’s a big fight, the whole thing. You do need time out, occasionally. But I’m ready now, I’m going back into the ring.
Gary – Reading through all the press coverage you’ve had, it seems an odd… the sound of the music has almost a polarity with the image.
Finn – Yeah. It was a mess, there was no… We hadn’t grown up together, and I asked them to come and play with me on the record. And the whole image thing was something I didn’t understand or care about at all, and still find a pain in the arse a lot of the time. We were expected to dress together. And that’s such a thing now. Franz Ferdinand dress a lot like the Gang Of Four did. It’s bullshit. A lot of the press and interviews… there was no thought to it.
Gary – You don’t mind the fact that the fashion mags capitalise on your image? I suppose admiring the Bowies and people like that, you’re quite happy with an image that’s quite visual in terms of the way you’re photographed and presented; but at the same time it has nothing to do with the music.
Finn – It’s quite simple. When I was very young I was obsessed with sound, but the visual side I always enjoyed it, the videos and so forth. I just see it as fun, a chance to indulge that side.
Gary – And play.
Finn – Yeah. It’s an amazing thing to be able to do really. To get money to dress up, to do whatever you like, the belly of a whale, sailors and a trapeze artist. It’s playtime, yeah!
Gary – Would you ever do a record that showed your folk roots?
Finn – I guess. A lot of people thought that first record was very folky, I didn’t see it myself. But like I said those folk festivals… a lot of it wasn’t the real hardcore folk stuff. There was a lot of different music at those folk festivals. It’s coming out on this one a lot more. A lot of the people I really love, but the storytelling aspect I really love, but I’m a huge Tom Waits fan, and there’s a side of him… I’d consider him folk as much as anything else I suppose. And Dylan. Everything has to have elements of everything to be interesting.
Gary – I take it you went through a period of really enjoying Echo & the Bunnymen?
Finn – No. I don’t know a single song. That was a surprise when the album came out and a lot of people said that.
Gary – It was the first thing I thought.
Finn – Ian…
Gary – McCullough.
Finn – I was probably liking a lot of the bands that took from them, or that they took from as well. What period were they? ‘80s right?
Gary – Most of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. ‘81-‘82 they put out their best stuff. Very much a part of the… Franz Ferdinand are very much worshipping that era. It’s inevitable that listeners like myself are going to attribute influences that don’t exist, and whether they do exist on some cosmic plane…
Finn – Well honestly I couldn’t name a song. It’s more a collision of other influences: The Smiths, Joy Division, Tom Waits, the Velvet Underground.
Gary – I heard you’re into Patti Smith as well.
Finn – I always forget to mention her. I love Patti Smith.
Gary – I love Horses.
Finn – Easter is brilliant as well.
Gary – Are you really curious and interested in checking out what everybody’s doing, or more interested in concentrating on your own muse?
Finn – There was a period when I was in England. I was 17 and had just started making the record and was hugely out of my depth, really. And there’s a lot of music that had been made and people would talk to me about, and I had no idea about, and I discovered a lot of stuff in that time, just from trying to research where a lot of the stuff I liked had come from. And my Dad and my Mum as well were helping and flinging me records. That really helped a lot, and definitely influenced this next record a lot more. That’s a really exciting time… I had enough money at that time to just go out and buy things at random. Record company swag bags. It was really educational.
Gary – And you’re fairly committed to staying in the UK for a long period of time?
Finn – We have to be in London initially, because that’s where our management and record company is. I don’t think I could ever make an album over here. There’s a point I get to and I’m approaching it now, where I just feel a little too comfortable. If I made something here I would feel too content to wallow in what it is and not look for anything else. And I’ve done it all my life, frantic uprooting, and there’s a lot of horrible stuff that comes out of that, but a lot of interesting things as well, ripping yourself out and starting something all over again. It stops you kind of feeling too tired.
Gary – I guess it would be good for the emotional content of the songs, to put yourself through pain!
Finn – You really have to work just to get yourself back up… you’re hoping it will bring something out.
+ Finn Andrews was just 22 when we had this chat. He’s released only his first album with The Veils at the time. Now he’s up to number seven, plus one solo album. He has appeared performing in the 2017 David Lynch Twin Peaks, and on albums by the likes of Brian Eno. The most recent album by The Veils is Asphodels, which was recorded at Roundhead Studios in NZ.
