Andy Falkous is how rock stars (although he'd blanch at the term) should be – fiercely intelligent, articulate, endearingly misanthropic and dead funny, but also pleasant, humble and engaging. And, almost uniquely among musicians, he’s as good at listening and engaging in conversation as he is dropping casually vitriolic and hilarious one-liners about everything from Michael Jackson to a new system for being able to un-buy acts out of the charts – taking in modern masculinity, Sky News and levels of dickishness in fans en route. He spoke to Tom Hawking.

How you doing?

I’m doing OK. I’m a bit sore. I’ve been moving house for the last few days, which is obviously stressful, both psychologically and physically. And I’ve just played football in what, for us, is really fucking hot weather.

How hot is it?

It’s 32 degrees.

Fuck – that is hot for England.

It is. But anyway, the new house is nice, the cat hasn’t been sick too many times in protest, so I’m OK. I’m about an eight out of ten.

Well, I won’t keep you too long. I wanted to ask you a few things about the new record.

Sure.

It strikes me that a lot of lyrics are about England, or maybe just about the West in general. Is that something you set out to look at with the album?

No, not really. There’s never an explicit aim, either musically or lyrically...what happens, happens, you know? There’s a degree of editing, but there’s definitely no plan or manifesto. The songs, for the most part...I mean, I’d struggle to explain what ‘Arming Eritrea’ is about, even though it means something to my brain and heart. Articulating exactly what that is is a big fucking waste of time. And ‘Yin/Post Yin’, even though it’s imbued to a degree with profundity, it does contain a lot of shit about dinosaurs. A lot of the other songs are, if I may be so basic, about things, but I can’t say there’s a particular theme that even occurs to me now about England. There’s definitely a recurring theme about masculinity, say – about the way it’s perceived. It’s interesting to me, because being a man now means a totally different thing to what it meant in the mid-’80s.

I agree. That’s something that popular culture doesn’t look at so much – there’s been a lot said about the changing role of women in society, but far less about the changing role of men.

Yeah. I think it’s because...not trying to look at it in too much of a defeatist sense, but... Maybe there’s a lot of analysis of men coming from the perspective of women, but even with subjects you talk about with your friends, nobody’s going to admit to being confused about where they fit in with the whole deal, because it’s just tantamount to saying you fancy Bobby Brown, isn’t it?

[giggles]

It’s difficult to have a serious discussion without instantly emasculating yourself. What I like to do before any serious discussion is just to punch someone directly in the face and establish my primacy as a male, and then we can get onto talking about any important shit.

[more giggles]

But you know, exactly what is the role of a modern man is something that interests me. The way that certain women I’ve known in my life, they expect men to be on one hand a protective bear that can take on a room full of people with a snooker cue when required, then at the next moment cry at the end of Karate Kid 2. The news is that that person doesn’t fucking exist, unless someone is deliberately kowtowing to what they think their role should be. That interests me.

[stitching sides up and continuing gamely] I was listening to your record when I first heard the news about Michael Jackson, and the first thing I thought of was your song ‘Lapsed Catholics’, which discussed the rumours of Morgan Freeman’s death that circulated a few years back. It’s funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same – news circulates so quickly you never know what’s true and what isn’t.

[laughs] It’s more of a viral conceit than an actual dissemination of information. It’s pretty fucking bizarre. You’ve gotta remember that Sky News, in particular...on September 11 they reported that the entire eastern seaboard of America was under attack. I remember in particular something that struck me – I was in a gym a few years ago, just boringly working my way around the cross trainer, and there was a plane that was circling Dallas airport, and it had run out of fuel, and it was gonna crash. Obviously Sky News were taking their feed from Fox in the States, but they were doing their little bit – we’re this channel, we should at least try to come up with some fucking facts in order to justify our existence. The status of Dallas airport kept changing every five minutes. The first time they mentioned it, it was the biggest airport in the United States, then it was the biggest commuter hub in the United States, then it was the biggest airport for connecting flights in the United States, and it ended up as the biggest airport in Texas. They can’t even do - and then verify - a Google search or contact the airport. What kind of news is this?

I guess it’s the nature of 24-hour news channels – you have to have something to report, whether there’s anything to report or not.

Well, precisely, which makes something like what happened the other day... for me, I’m a voracious consumer of news in all its format, as opposed to just watching BBC News 24 like a fucking drug-fed moron. Something like Michael Jackson dying is at once such a massive and such a totally uninteresting story, and you know it’s just gonna consume the news for the next few days, and as a result I was at something of a loose end – I didn’t have anything to do! I couldn’t watch or listen to the news as I knew it was going to be full of cloying platitudes from people who didn’t even know the fucking guy.

Or who had been running the “Wacko Jacko” stories a day earlier.

Yeah, or even BBC News, who condescendingly sneered at camera crews parked outside the Neverland ranch from their own camera crew who were parked outside the Neverland ranch. You could not make it up. But there were two things that occurred to me about the Michael Jackson thing. Firstly, how quickly can someone go from being a monster to a saint? I mean, was it just me or was he generally viewed as being some kind of weird paedo monster? That wasn’t just me?

No.

Because it seems like everyone else has forgotten that. Second, my big fear is that when Margaret Thatcher dies, the same thing is going to happen.

Ugh. You’re right, and it will.

Yeah. But at least we can say with Margaret Thatcher, that none of her records will ever sell 300,000 copies. But what I wanna know is, who the fuck is buying Michael Jackson records? Thriller – who hasn’t heard it?

All the record stores had sold out of Michael Jackson records within hours of that news breaking. It was crazy.

My flatmate works in a record store, and they had their first email concerning Michael Jackson memorabilia nine-and-a-half hours after he died. And people say that Western civilisation has reached the point of no return. It’s a good job that they don’t have any evidence of that.


Future of the Left - 'The Hope That House Built'

I wanted to ask you about the last time you played in Melbourne. I don’t know if you remember, but it was a really, really terrible crowd – loads of pissed-up macho dickheads heckling...

It wasn’t even good heckling, was it? Lots of drunk guys shouting out sports statistics. There’s not a lot we can do with that.

Does it disconcert you that people like that almost hijack your music? They obviously respond to the anger in it, but also miss the point. It reminded me of right-wing skinheads picked up on the anger in punk and adopted it while completely missing what the point of that music was in the first place.

It does and it doesn’t, really. Once you reach more that say 50 people, most of whom are unknown to you and your close friends, you can’t control who your music resonates with. The shows I went to when I was a kid – those shows were, generally speaking, bigger bands, because I had less fucking taste – most of the crowd were dicks. You’ve just gotta hope that the worst the dick is going to be is to be a little bit ostentatious and maybe wear a stupid hat. That’s a level of dickishness where, even though I don’t seek out its company, it’s almost allowable dickishness. The people who watch our shows. There is a certain energy that we like to have in a room, and aggression is the wrong word. There’s a vitality to the whole proceedings, but people who confuse it with aggression and bring real aggression to our shows, they’re not really invited.

Sure.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’ve missed the point, because that would be very precious of me as the singer in a loud rock band, that’s always going to happen – it’s always part of the show, the volume, the rush of it, jumping around – but I would say that those people are missing out if they try to consume it in that way. And please don’t try to talk to me after the show if that’s the case.

I guess that ties into the idea that once you make music you lose control of it. Similarly, there was the fact that your album leaked, which you were obviously very upset about [Falkous posted an angry blog lambasting people who had downloaded the album illegally].

Yeah, I was upset, but it was inevitable. Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s important to reiterate exactly why I wrote that blog. It was just to give a different perspective, more than anything. It wasn’t to say, ‘Listen guys, this is how it is up here on the moral high ground, so everybody better get in line or the shit will come raining down.’ It was to describe the reality of the situation from where we’re at, and to say that if you are going to effectively steal it, then please don’t come back at us with some moral justifications, and certainly not about how most people end up buying records, because I will debate this with people until the cows come home – it just doesn’t bear out. Anecdotal evidence about this guy you know who buys t-shirts at every show he goes to does not support the statistics, which say that it’s not the case. I’m not saying that it’s a good or bad thing, I’m just saying how it is. And for a band like us, it does affect us fundamentally, especially when it was leaked so early – something like ten weeks before the release of the record. All that initial buzz [pauses] – as much as I hate that word ‘buzz’, and I apologise – almost completely dissipated by the time the record came out, and it had to gain momentum again, which...I wouldn’t say it singularly failed to do that, but I’m not speaking to you from a helicopter circling the Thames estuary.

As always, it’s the little people who get fucked over. It doesn’t really matter if a million people download the new Black Eyed Peas song, because they’re still going to be rich.

If only there was a way of un-downloading a Black Eyed Peas song. I’ve always thought that chart positions rely far too much on the music people like. I’d be more than prepared to go into a record shop and un-buy four Razorlight songs. You see, I’d pay them money and it’d take off four chart positions. The money could go to a benevolent body that looked after musicians, or ill horses, or something. I’d be prepared to do that. I reckon right-thinking people could take Razorlight all the way from #1 to... well, literally to uncharted waters. Below even us. We could manage it. All we’ve gotta do is stay and pray together.

On that note, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. And I should say that hopefully we'll be out there at the end of the year for the Falls Festival and some other shows.

Tom Hawking