Andy Lewis is one of the coolest cats and Bass players around. So with great pleasure I bring to you, our chat we had recently. We talk, Mod, music, clothes, style and of course Weller!
DP: How did you get into playing the Bass and music in general?
AL: I was lucky to have parents who played instruments and enjoyed singing. There was always music in the house. Classical, folk, jazz, not much pop though because my folks weren't that into it. But there were lots of instruments around, and they encouraged me to thrash away tunelessly on them until they decided that they'd had enough of that and I needed a bit of structure to make their lives quieter. I had piano lessons which I didn't really enjoy, but because I've always had big hands the music teacher suggested I have a go at the cello which I really got on with. From there it was a short hop to double bass, then bass guitar. By then I was at secondary school and getting into The Jam's last year together, along with The Specials, Dexys Midnight Runners and a stack of old records I'd found at a jumble sale- mostly Beatles singles but also other 60s pop stuff like The Searchers, Manfred Mann, the Stones, things like that. My dad had lots of weird and wonderful recording equipment- he helped with a Talking Newspaper for blind people so there were lots of tape recorders and microphones around the house. He showed me how it all worked and I used to love messing around with it. I used to help him with the recordings too, sometimes. Whenever he got something new, he'd give me the old machine. I've still got some of his old tape decks and microphones, they add a bit of colour to what I do with my own music.
DP: You currently play Bass for Mr Paul Weller, what's that like?
AL: When you're in a band with musicians as good as the ones that Paul Weller has around him, it's never anything but a joy to go to work. One day the real bass player will turn up. I'm just keeping their seat warm 'til it happens!
DP: You've got a great image, do you feel image is important when you're a musician?
AL: I think image is important when you're a human being, never mind if you're a musician. If you're in a band though, you have a duty to look good. When I was younger I used to look at the musicians I admired and be in awe of how they looked. I used to dream of owning the corduroy Crombie that Paul Weller was wearing on the cover of "Snap", or the three piece suit James Brown was wearing on "Ready Steady Go!". I used to go and see bands in the mid-to-late Eighties and be utterly blown away by their image. The Style Council, Boys Wonder, The Godfathers, The James Taylor Quartet. Very different bands but all incredible looking in their own ways. What annoys me about a lot of musicians and bands today is that they're just so ordinary looking. Too dressed-down. All that leisurewear and uniform blandness. For example, I think that if I had even a fraction of Chris Martin from Coldplay's money I'd make more of a bloody effort. Did you see him on "Later..." the other night? He looked like the bloke behind the counter at our local coffee shop.
Getting changed to do a show is a huge part of my gigging ritual. Putting on the clobber I've decided I'm going to wear that night is a way of telling myself it's time to go to work. To stop messing about being all nervous. To fix up and look sharp.
DP: What new bands and sounds are you currently digging?
AL: Eight Rounds Rapid, Rotifer, Syd Arthur, Gizelle Smith, Damon Albarn's solo album, The Focus Group, Aziza Brahim, "At The Festival" by The Oxbow Lake Band, Quitty & The Don'ts, Papernut Cambridge, Thee Faction, The Julie Ruin, "Stand Clear Of My Mind" by The Turning, New Street Adventure, "Man On Fire" by Mammal Hum, "My Grandad Jim" by The Len Price 3, Cristobal Tapia de Veer's soundtrack to "Utopia"... lots really.
DP: What's your opinion on the current state of British music and the likes of the X-Factor?
AL: There's never been a better time to be a musician. My 13 year old nephew just got this amazing guitar. It's so much better than anything I had at 13. Better made, better looking, better sounding. And it was much cheaper comparatively speaking than the bass I had as a young teenager. Every computer is potentially a studio more flexible than anything available in the last forty years. The Internet lets you collaborate with people all over the world, and buy equipment at prices that seem too good to be true. You don't need a radio plugger or the ear at someone at the BBC, or even a record label. There's Soundcloud, YouTube, Bandcamp, AWAL, etc. Social media allows you to get a worldwide audience for your music as soon as you've created it and instant feedback from people who like it. Almost every song that's ever been recorded is only a click away. There's over 50 years of rock'n'roll's past to plunder for ideas and re-shape in new and interesting ways.
There's never been a worse time to be a musician. The competitive spirit that used to fire pop culture has been replaced by that uniform blandness I mentioned earlier. A race to the bottom in a desperate attempt to corner a shrinking market. A world where you'll hardly ever hear anything you don't want to hear- so you'll never have the chance to get inspired by something you'd never heard before and didn't know you liked. A time when young kids are making music for their parents generation and not their own, because in the words of the song "it's the old man who's got all the money, and a young man ain't got nothing in the world these days". Where there's an ocean full of plastic crap clogging up the cultural ecosystem and choking anything that dares to try and rise above it. Where amazing venues with quality sound systems put on endless gigs by tribute acts. Where your local pub that used to run a band night twice a week closes down because it's worth more redeveloped as flats than as a pub. A world where the pursuit of rampant individuality hasn't led to a proliferation of new and interesting ideas but everyone choosing to do the same thing. Where nobody uses words like "rampant" and "proliferation" any more and where it's unlikely there'll never be a line as great as "two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude" written ever again because too many people are forming bands influenced by someone who doesn't read novels.
Somewhere between these two statements lies the current state of the British pop music.
DP: Do you prefer small intimate venues, or huge arenas?
AL: Intimate arenas.
DP: What clothing brands are you into at the moment and is there any that have been constants in your wardrobe?
AL: You can buy a wardrobeful of stuff from Fred Perry, Pretty Green, Art Gallery, Ben Sherman or wherever, but it won't make you a Mod. It's not as easy as that. It's about what it looks like, not who makes it. What it looks like on YOU, not on the hanger. I do own a few pieces from all of the above, but none that wear their brand identity on their sleeve- or splashed across their front. I got into wearing 60s inspired clothes as a reaction AGAINST the emerging cult of the Label in the 1980s. All those casuals spending stupid money on Fila track suits and Adidas trainers that everyone else was wearing anyway. All those yuppies with their Hugo Boss and Armarni. No, that wasn't for me. I was also a skinny thing in those days and looked damn good in slim-cut suits and trousers with fifteen inch bottoms and side vents. Nowadays I still get vents put in my trousers, but can't get away with such slim-cut narrowness as over the last thirty years I've, er, grown a bit! The Mod look was never supposed to be worn by forty year old men with boobs. I take inspiration from those times, but have adopted, adapted, evolved, improved... the four pillars of Mod, if you will. Or at least I hope I have.
I got some great advice from an old Mod when I was a teenager. When you buy clothes off the peg, buy things that are bit too big all round then take them to your local tailor and get them altered to fit you properly. The expense is worth it for how you'll look afterwards. Also, you will learn a lot about clothes from talking with your local tailor. They will be glad of the business, and you will treasure their advice for ever.
My personal manifesto for Mod can be summed up as follows- Look beyond the obvious, look for inspiration everywhere and look in the mirror before you go out!
DP: What would you say the 'Mod' scene is like in 2014 and do you enjoy it as much as times gone by?
AL: What's brilliant about the Mod scene today is that there are still scores of new people every year who fall in love with that music, with that way of looking, with the aspiration and ambition that goes with it all, and with the camaraderie of knowing that you're part of something that allows you to have friends all over the world you haven't met yet.
What's horrible about Mod the scene today is that it's become too much like a re-enactment society than an ever-changing, ever-challenging journey of sartorial, musical, aesthetic and intellectual improvement. Those ideas of "adopt, adapt, evolve, improve" I mentioned earlier are often forgotten. There's a sense that we're no longer able to be confident of the future so we retreat into a mashup of mid-century myths. All vintage furniture and "early sounds". I've just read Paul Anderson's book "Mods-The New Religion" and it's great, but it's also in danger of becoming a tablet of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments of How To Do Mod Properly. I know Paul and he'd be horrified if that happened, but I hope he won't mind me saying that in spite of all the eyewitness testimony from people who were around at the time in the 50s and 60s, what's missing from his book is any sense that those times were essentially a blank canvas where there were NO rules about "how to do Mod properly" because nobody had done it before. That's why fifty years on those looks and those sounds are still so dynamic, so exciting, so enticing.
There are also a lot of people who think that all you have to do to be a Mod is to get the uniform. As I said earlier, though it might make you a loyal customer of several businesses, it doesn't make you a Mod. These people are squandering the legacy of a desperate fight to establish a more interesting and colourful world by dressing the same, looking the same, thinking the same.
A scene that's become too rigidly defined by dogma that it loses its sense of fun, that stifles creativity to the extent that what was once flash becomes drab, well, it has a past but it probably has no future. What we in the 21st century have to do is imagine that our cultural world is as much of a blank canvas as it was back in the 60s. It's hard to do, but it's not impossible. It has been done before. The Mod revival in '79 evolved into all kinds of things during the 1980s, all of which had similar roots but took very different routes- rare groove, the garage rock revival, indie, new pop, acid jazz, the whole Madchester thing. The Nineties gave us Oasis, sure- but it also gave us Psychedelia Smith, Cornershop, Monorail, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Skinny, Corduroy, Comet Gain, My Life Story, The Unconscious Collective, Fatboy Slim, Teenage Fanclub- all of whom took the heritage of the past and went all over the place with it. A lot of those acts looked great in their own different ways too. Not many footie-lout casuals in the My Life Story lineup, that's for sure!
I still hear records I fall in love with that I've never heard before each time I go to a Mod night. All the while that's still happening, as far as I'm concerned I'm still enjoying it as much as I ever did.
DP: Who are your musical inspirations?
AL: There are literally hundreds, and they are constantly shifting, constantly expanding.
On the bass; Herbie Flowers, Duck Dunn, James Jamerson, Martin Gordon, John Deacon, Bruce Foxton and The Ox. As a songwriter; John Carter, Andy Partridge, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Scott Walker, Cathy Dennis, Giorgio Moroder. As a singer, Eddie Piller at Acid Jazz who said I shouldn't so I tend not to unless absolutely necessary. As a producer/arranger; Keith Mansfield, John Schroeder, Shel Talmy, Mr Wiggles, Geoff Emerick, Jerry Dammers, Simon Thornton and finally Charles Rees at Black Barn studios. As a DJ, Wendy May, Ady Croasdell, James & Martin Karminsky. As sources of perplexing and bewildering new ways of looking at notes, rhythms, tonality etc... Benjamin Britten, Delia Derbyshire, Tom Dissvelt, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ghost Box records.
DP: And finally, could you sum Paul Weller up in one sentence for us? I’d go for, A musical genius who has changed music, style and British culture forever.
AL: I'd say he's best boss I've ever had, and the only boss I've ever had who's been better dressed than me.
