Fagan It

Rip It Up, Issue 171, 1 October 1991, Page 6

Fagan It

Andrew Fagan is clowning —as usual. "Thank-you very much, and now we'll all show our appreciation in the usual way. .." he gabbles for no particular reason. That's the fourth time he's said it in ten minutes and the interview hasn't even started yet. "Seeya Phillip!" he calls as his record company person leaves the Warner boardroom. The record company person's name is Jeremy and this is Andrew's idea of a high old time.

Sorry, did I say Andrew? His mum can call him that, but we'll all have to call him "Fagan" from now on. Not only is he not calling himself the Mockers, he's dropped his Christian name too.

"Well, it was like an abbreviation that everyone uses anyway, 50..." Actually, mate, we used to call you "Fag-end" but that's another story. Anyway, Fagan's back and gearing up to go national with a tour that crams in 32 centres between Kaitaia and Invercargill. He'll be singing, playing guitar, doing poems from his new book Serious Latitudes—and clowning it up. "I've got my guitar and a little amp with lots of natural distortion to play through. I'll just be keeping it quite loose and reading my poems to break up it. I'm sure it'll fall into a natural pace once we get out there and check out people's attention spans, see what we're dealing with, Planet Earth 19911 Humans!" The fact that he'll be able to take on those tricky small-town crowds is due in no small part to the remarkable success he found as singer-centrepiece of the Mockers throughout the 1980 s. Hit singles, gold albums and a Top Male Vocalist Award — they were big down home. But pop bands tend to mutate into pub rock bands just to stay on the rails and in 1988 he saw the "No Exit" sign and headed for Britain. His sparky new single, 'I Still Want You' was actually played by the final version of the Mockers at their handful of gigs in London, but it was

hammered to death. Imagine 'Forever Tuesday Morning' as \- performed by Cold Chisel. "Yeah, we evolved into a real R.O.C.K. band. Live it was all very energetic, but it just wasn't where I thought the song should be. So it's- - quite a long and involved process getting to this point, but we're here, which I'm really pleased about." 'I Still Want You', produced by Paul Moss and Malcolm Smith of the Fan Club, sounds like it should — Fagan's quirkiness to the fore over a clippety ' dance-pop beat. But it doesn't necessarily indicate the nature of the solo album pencilled in if . ; everyone's pleased with the way the single does. "I've got a big backlog of songs and really firm ideas about how to colour them. Each song's got to : come out in the way that suits it. ; They're all different melodically and they'll lend themselves to their own interpretation. It's certainly not going to be all the one style."

Fagan assembled most of his backlbg of songs while he and his partner Karyn Hay lived on a boat on the Thames, drifting along by the stately surrounds of Hampton Court Palace. Geography didn't stop him writing some of them with longtime collaborator and original Mocker Gary Curtis, who works in a 16-track studio in Wellington, creating jingles and music beds for ads. Most, however, he wrote himself. "I've really been working on the songwriting. Getting into the isolation, socially and physically, gave me time to apply myself more to that. We did a lot of live playing with the band and that in itself takes up so much energy." Those songs very, very nearly landed Fagan a solo deal with a German label which was even going to freight his yacht over from New Zealand so he could sail round the UK as a publicity stunt. A political wrangle within the company saw the people who had negotiated the deal stepped on //re day before the contract was due to be signed. It's not something he's desperately keen to talk about, but perhaps it all worked out for the best. Back here, he and Karyn are working on a final draft of a film musical script called The Statue Service ("it's a dry, surreal black comedy... at least I hope it's a comedy!") and he's inclined to look forward rather than back at a fairly long career in the music biz. "It's just writing songs, and in this case, poems, just doing your self-expression. That goes on and everyone has their own personal gradient of absorbing experience. It's all such an individual thing. If you're still getting fired up from coming up with an idea or putting a song together and doing that for your own pleasure, then that's a piecemeal, ongoing thing. I don't think it's of any real benefit to step back and look at your history in some sort of capsule — it's got to be an incremental thing." Anything else? "Yeah. Thank you very much and now we'll all show our appreciation in the usual way."

RUSSELL BROWN