Gary SteelWay back in 1986, GARY STEEL chatted with Shriekback main man Barry Andrews prior to the group’s NZ tour. Here’s that interview.
Barry Andrews is a tiger for punishment. He has just spent an entire day answering question after tiresome question. And he’s begging for more.
Andrews is vocalist and keyboardist for English rock group Shriekback, and he just loves being interviewed. “I think it’s one of the best ways you can spend your time. You get to talk about yourself all the time.”
There’s certainly plenty to talk about, what with his penchant for verbosity and intellectual curiosity.
The man has an interesting background, too. He was a crucial member of the early XTC and has played with and on albums by both rock maniac Iggy Pop and guitar innovator Robert Fripp.
But it’s not the past Andrews is focusing on right now. His group Shriekback – which also includes former Gang Of Four bassist Dave Allen – is on an Australasian tour which will stop off in Wellington within mere days. And he wants an audience.
Andrews says that those familiar with the recorded output – which spans five years – will be surprised and amazed by the live beast. He says that performance is where Shriekback is really at.
Although the band had an early reputation for a certain art school speciousness and a somewhat distilled English funk base with weird leanings, Andrews reckons that could not be further from the truth.
“We always did intend to make music that moved the body before anything else,” he says. “I can’t think of a better name than ‘rock’ for what we do, except perhaps ‘dance’, with all its cheap connotations.”
Andrews is “fed up with playing to a closed shop” and people who listen to a certain band just because it is seen as the thing to do. His ideal would be the acceptance of music based on its inherent ability to communicate to its audience.
“I make music as a human being, and I don’t see why it can’t appeal to other people on that basis.”
Andrews is obviously a willful and persistent force within the band. “I tend to be like a bulldog worrying this one thing… There are just so many things to do within the musical form we are establishing.”
He describes that musical form as representative of the culture from whence Shriekback emanates.
“Shriekback celebrate what’s happening in England at the moment,” which he describes as “a big Victorian palace which is falling apart, a place with a colonialist past in which the different cultures are becoming indivisible.”
Hence, Shriekback are as influenced by the sounds of West India and the rhythms of Africa as their own Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Andrews himself admits he was never much of a rock and roll or a classical fan. “I don’t like straight rock and roll,” he says. “An average African band has more rhythmic sophistication than a good rock and roll group.
“My background isn’t rock and roll at all. It always surprised me people wrote songs about ‘my baby’ and motorbikes. Why not essay-style lyrics? Stories? Poems? English verse?”
Most of all, he says his lyrical excitement comes from “the sounds of words… a physical response to the battering of vowel on consonant.”
His family were not, he says, particularly musical, and his own early pleasures included everything from light classical to pub songs to Edwardian music hall. The first encounter with a piano was through an uncle who taught him a one-fingered rendition of ‘Old Man River’. Later, his grandmother died, and her piano was shipped to his home in Swindon.
“I would come home from school and thrash around on the thing, making movies for the brain. It was then that I developed this obsession which hounds me to the present day.”
Not surprisingly, much of Shriekback’s concert will feature material from their new album, Big Night Music. That record, which marks a more forthright and varied approach than previous Shriekback recordings, will be reflected in a “circus-like concert” which features the trio of Andrews, Allen and drummer Martyn Barker, together with live extras on keyboards, percussion, guitar and backup vocals (two, female).
Andrews has forsaken his keyboards for the concert stage and will concentrate on his vocal duties: “I still like doing it, but there’s no way I can be a lead singer and work behind a stuffy set of keyboards as well.”
Shriekback play Victoria University next Tuesday.
+ This story was originally published in the Evening Post in October 1986. Check out my review of the show here along with many other reviews from the 1980s here.
