Andy Connolly (Naive Ted): Music, for me, it's not a separate thing to my life
As Limerick-based DJ/producer/vessel Naive Ted gets ready to hang up his mask, his host body Andy Connolly tells us why and discusses the art of scratching, DJing and the Limerick scene
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Today is an interview with Limerick-based Andy Connolly, the host body of Naive Ted, who is hanging up his mask after a last run of shows culminating at Haunted Dancehall at the NCH and Sugar Club in Dublin next Saturday, November 4. You can listen to the chat on this week’s episode of the TPOE podcast, episode 282.
I would call it the Naive Ted project, what would you refer to Naive Ted as?
I used to call him a character, but then my missus pointed out that he's actually more like me than I am. He's a way of being myself on stage, which I was finding a bit more difficult when I started that project. That was one of the reasons [it started] - with ageing and things, I was finding it harder to cut loose on stage. And there's nothing like a mask to help you do that. I used to be quite animated when I was younger back on stages. And then I dunno, I was getting older, and maybe a bit more conscious of being a real person (laughs). I was definitely reining myself in a little bit when I was performing in public, which I didn't want to do but was happening naturally. And Ted had been a silent partner in the Deviant and Naive Ted stuff. He was there as a 'get out of jail free' code for when I was doing quite weird stuff. I had a Deviant persona, which was more hip hop. But then when I was making weird hip hop, that's when Ted got added to the mix, in name only kind of character, there was no idea for him to ever play live or anything. And then it just emerged. So like, I'm reluctant to call him a character now. But I also refer to him as a person, so I'm not really sure what he is. But it's definitely a vessel for me to do things I guess I couldn't otherwise do. Well I could, but I feel like I can't.
Why do you want to cut loose on stage? Or why did you want to cut loose on stage? And what was inhibiting it? Was it just the idea of like, 'people are watching me'? Is it just like a head thing?
Probably yeah. I remember chatting to John Lillis (Mynameisjohn) about this years back as well. One of the things that always struck me - me and John used to play together quite a bit - and one thing that he said years ago is, 'always trying to play and behave like I do in my bedroom when I'm practising', because he was like, be whooping and hollering and dancing around your bedroom when you're doing it, yet, when you get onto a stage, it's a little bit more refined, or whatever. That was something that definitely stuck in my head around the same time. I was literally having the same feelings. And I was like, that's a good way to put it: play like you do when there's no one watching. But I was just finding that hard. Timeline (wise), I'm not exactly sure how it works out, but I think it was also what I was starting working as a teacher that maybe I was just more conscious of playing this raucous music and jumping around like a lunatic, with your real face and your real clothes on, which connects you to real life. I think I needed that distance from it that I'm like, Look, I'm actually just a normal person who walks around and is very normal and vanilla in normal life, but there's this other thing I do that I get out all my frustrations and mad bits of me that you just can't be walking down the street acting like Naive Ted.
And so why is the Naive Ted character/project coming to an end? You've got a couple of shows lined up in the next few weeks.
It's time. I always knew it was gonna be a finite project, time-limited. He's kind of all-encompassing, it's very difficult for me to do other things when I'm doing that. I take it very seriously. But one of the things with the Ted stuff is that I stopped rehearsing years ago. So I only practice. I don't plan a show, I'll just practice doing things all the time. There's never really a plan, which makes the shows quite dynamic and fun for people, but also requires a lot of effort on my part to be sharp enough to do that all the time. Now I've got a cluster of gigs but usually I'd be doing gigs here and there and not necessarily in a row - a lot of them with tours and stuff. So every time then you've got to go back into performance mode for four or five weeks to be sharp. I've got a kid, I've got a family. I've got a job. I've got other music stuff to be doing as well. And time is of the essence and if I can't do it properly, I just don't want to do it at all. That's it really. There's lots of smaller little reasons too, but that's really it. The commitment it takes out of my life is just a bit much.
Was it a hard decision to reach or was it maybe an inevitable decision? I guess coming to that conclusion is the hard part, isn't it?
I work on serendipity a lot. And it just so happened that I got a couple of bookings in around the same time as I was thinking of wrapping it up. And I was like, OK, let's just do a tour of this so. It wasn't hard in that sense. I think it'll be harder maybe afterwards, when I've actually put him to bed and think I'm not going to do that anymore. But so far, it feels normal, it feels natural, it feels like this is the right time to do it. I just didn't want it to peter out and get shit, which can happen, too, because - I don't wanna do that one Christmas gig every year or whatever. I just wanted to avoid it falling into that. Because again, I do take it very seriously and his place in my life is quite an important place and I value what he's given to me as well. Yeah, I didn't want it to become something that either was an albatross or was maybe stopping me doing other things.
I guess I'm talking to you on the wrong side of the gigs. Tomorrow, you're playing your final Limerick shows you're actually in rehearsals for them now. So this is something that you wouldn't have done before?
No, the rehearsal one is just because we're doing the band show up at Haunted Dancehall, so the lads just happened to be around this weekend, so we just decided to rehearse that. And even rehearsing is a strong word for it. I don't like to have too much plans. Even with the band stuff, we've got a framework for what we're doing as opposed to a show. There's semi-improv, I would call it, sorta like DJing too because when I'm playing solo, because I'm a DJ, it's not like I have to worry about every second of every bit because the songs play themselves, too. Even though you could say that Ted is improv, it's always semi-improv because there's always gonna be stuff happening regardless of - even if I walk away from the decks, music will play. So there's a safety there too. But yeah, I don't like when I see bands and they play the record exactly, I don't like things feeling over-choreographed. I think once I start choreographing anything, then you have to go the whole hog. So I just don't choreograph anything anymore. And hopefully, it'll all work out. Or else it'll fail spectacularly. And I'm fine with that, too.
Has it ever failed spectacularly?
Maybe not spectacularly. But there's been a few down ones, yeah, where stuff just hasn't actually come off or you've made the wrong turn, when you should have turned right, you went left or whatever. But you only look at that in hindsight. I've been performing long enough that I think, even on my worst night, I can get a pass. I'm always aiming for an A, obviously, but I think even if I'm terrible, I'm probably still pretty good. I've really tried to put the entertainment aspect to the fore - not in a theatrical sense, but I've got a very clearly defined job in my head: my job is to make sure that everyone in the room is having a good time and not worrying about their bills, or what's going to happen tomorrow or whatever. I am trying to entertain you enough that everything else slips away, and that we're all together. And that wasn't something that was maybe true at the start. I think Ted started as a bit of a howl at the moon thing and quite a lot of anger or frustration in it. And was, I guess, quite a bit of a middle finger to the scratching scene and DJs in general. I was purposefully against what most people were doing there. And that's changed over time. At the start, people were so receptive to me kinda telling everyone to fuck off that I was quite surprised. People took to it straight away for some reason. On a small scale, obviously, but the shows went well from the start, even though they were meant to be a bit of a yeah, go fuck yourselves, I'm gonna do this now.
Is that tongue in cheek though as well?
At the start, I don't think it was, it was quite sincere. I had massive frustrations with music in general, DJing, scratching. I hold scratching very dear, that's my entry into music and how I learned everything is through scratching. But the promise it gave when I was 16 or 17, or even up until my early 20s, It didn't really follow through as a culture. And it's a really gimmicky, silly kind of - on the one side you've got what I would never consider choreographed dance routines that are called DJ routines. But once digital stuff came along, it was so easy to pre-program everything to make it easy for you to do it, which kills a lot of what I enjoyed about it; you're removing the tightrope and now your walk on the pavement is normal, you know? Whereas with vinyl and stuff, everything was skipping, and it was a difficult thing to do. And when digital came along, it removed a lot of that stuff, which was my interest in it maybe. And then on the other side of scratching, you've got the really nerdy, hyper-technical side of it too, which again, I'm not particularly interested in. And they're the two dominant forms: You've got the hyper, super-technical freestyle scratch part of it and then you've got the silly choreographed DJ battles side as well. And they're the two dominant outputs. And that really pissed me off really. And I just wanted to be like, 'We're actually making music' as opposed to 'We're not playing a video game'; 'we're not doing stunts'. That's where I wanted to be anyway. I wanted to make music and to perform like a normal musician would, in a way, just using turntables.
I was listening to an interview that you did with Ray Wingnut a couple of years ago, and you were talking passionately about scratching during that chat. Do you think it's more recently even that you've been looking more cynically at it? You sound different talking about scratching now than you did on that interview.
That was one of the reasons we set up Community Skratch Games in Galway. It was to just be like, 'Look, there's another way to do this. It doesn't have to be competitive. And it doesn't have to be cheesy, kinda clickbait either'. I guess my stance has changed over the years, and I spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone I was a musician. And I think now, I don't think I'm a musician. I'm a DJ. I make music and I do concerts, but I do it via the medium of DJing really. Even when I'm producing music, I'm still just using the same concepts I do as a DJ. I can't play any instruments, even though I do - I kinda play keyboards on all my tracks, but I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just doing it. It's like there's a word missing for it. We call them producers now, but producers used to mean something different; now it's a blurred word. But I definitely feel separate from musicians. And also a little bit separate from the majority of DJs as well. I guess I'm just obstinate as well, though. That's actually a character flaw, probably, as much as anything else. But I really hold scratching very, very dearly. That's why maybe I feel strongly about it. And the missed opportunities that people had resonate with me still. But it's very, very difficult as well. The reason people don't do full-on scratch music is because it takes bloody forever, and it's really hard and really prone to going wrong. So I understand that as well. I just presumed there'd always be a pocket of people doing what I was into, but that's fallen away.
Are you still involved with the Skratch Games? They're still going on in the Bierhaus up in Galway, aren't they?
Yeah, less so than I was because I live in Limerick now. I help on the weekend more than anything else. I help with the bookings and with arranging and finding lost DJs and putting cables where they need to be, that kind of stuff. It's really lofi. Jimmy Penguin runs it mostly now. It's me and him and whoever we can rope in to helping on the weekend. Super low budget. Which was the whole point. The reason it's called Community Skratch Games is it's part of the community. We didn't want it to be expensive for people, we want it to be free. We've had opportunities for sponsorship over the years, we turned most of them down. We had an opportunity to expand it, we turned that down. It is what it is... Why do we always need to expand? This works and it's good. So let's keep it that way. Next year is the 18th year of it and I don't think we could have done it like that if we had made it bigger or more professional. It's very grassroots and again, it's in danger of falling apart at any moment, which I think I get a weird kick out of,
Is scratching in the Bierhaus where you started? Was it in Galway where you started figuring things out?
A bit after I'd started... I moved to Galway when I was 18 or 19. And then in classic, small Irish music scene thing, I got known quite quickly, because I was the only one. So I ended up getting loads of gigs.
In Galway? Was there lots going on?
There wasn't, no, it was kinda just me scratching… Back when I started, there was definitely a lot more venues. It was also Celtic tiger era, so there was loads of budgets around as well. So I ended up hooking up with the 091 crew, which is electronic music; so house, techno, electro, jungle, and I took care of the hip hop. And we used to run the GPO every two weeks. And we did that for three years. I think that was 02 to 04. And that was great to have a residency like that. I was maybe 20, 21 at the time. And getting a budget off a nightclub to run your night is what dreams are made of now. We used to run every two weeks. And it was actually 110th Street, Cian O Ciobhain's night, was on the other Saturdays. And we ran that for three odd years. Having a residency as young guy like that was really formative experience. Even around Ireland, there wasn't really many DJs regularly out there playing underground rap music. So because they had the faith in me, I was able to, I guess, build a little scene there because it was the same crowd every week and they get to know the tunes. I could play some Company Flow b-side and everyone'd be like 'Yeah!!' to a full dancefloor. That gave me optimism moving forward and made me realise that you didn't - I think people dumb it down for audiences unnecessarily. An audience can handle really mad shit if you present it to them in the right way. It was a great place to be 20 as well, you know, loads of craic, the arts festival, the art college, loads of young people around. I'm not there as much anymore so I can't comment on what it's like at the moment really, but certainly then it seemed like the ideal place to become a man maybe. Lots to do and lots of opportunities for someone like me that was maybe more fringe. I'd say from 01 to 05, I was probably playing every week, which was a great benefit to me,
And it was always underground hip hop and rap that you were playing? Was it all American as well?
There was a lot of UK stuff around them too. But yeah probably 70% or 80% American. That was around the same time that Creative Control would've started up as well, Messiah J and the Expert they became later. So that was one of the few 12 inches you could get of an Irish act. There was a few Irish acts around, but no one was really pressing records or anything. And that became a big record. Arrived at the right time. People were ready for underground rap but just no one was presenting it to them. And so from Galway that's how I spread out around the country then. . I would have a big connection with Cork as well around the same time. So back in the day, pre-Cuttin' Heads Era, you had these nights up in the Agora and then you had the Hobo Convention down in the Pav as well. So got a lot of connections with Cork and a bit in Limerick too, before I even moved here. Not so much in Dublin - Dublin was always harder to get gigs in actually, for that kind of thing anyway. You'd get live rap alright, but rap DJs were always a bit more sidelined, maybe. Whereas Cork, Limerick, Galway, you could actually do a club night of underground rap and people would actually go. I'm not really sure what it is actually, that just popped into my head. It's the joy of having a small country too, you can get out there quite quickly.
And that was all under the Deviant name, was it?
That was Deviant, yeah.
That was DJing, hip hop...
Fairly strict as well, pretty strict on the hip hop, front; left-of-centre hip hop, for sure. But I have a clear idea of what hip hop means and what the rules are. Not that you can't go outside it, but once you go outside it, it's something else. You're playing hip hop and rap music, there's a certain set of criteria. And maybe that's something that I do a lot. I like rules in my art. It's useful. I think middle-era Ted maybe started not following the rules he was set. And maybe I'm not as satisfied with that output as the earlier and the later stuff. If you're familiar with Send in the Hounds, that record I did which was like a trad/scratch music album, all those - so there was like another five records before that as well - but they were all made with really strict criteria that everything had to be scratched. There was no digital effects, no editing, no anything, which made it really, really difficult. But it certainly made it easier to make something because you knew what you were doing. And I think when I switched over to using digital stuff, there was a period of time when it was too wide what I was doing. When Ted upped the BPMs and clearly went towards dance music, that was really useful as well. It was like, 'I've got my parameters narrowed again, I know what I'm here for. I don't really care what else happens as long as people dance.' And that was a good narrowing of the canvas in front of me.
Can you pinpoint the first appearance of Naive Ted?
We used to do a little bit in the Flying Buttresses rap show where I would pop up as Ted for one tune then go back to normal again after that. I can't remember what tune it was, but it was one of our madder songs. That was the first little cameo. First proper show was at Community Skratch Games nine years ago or something like that, 2014 or 2015?
And what are the Flying Buttresses for those of us with bad memories? I feel like I should know this.
Flying Buttresses was me and Sebi C. We released an album called Orson Welles in 2012, I think it was. We were a live act first, we'd been playing live together for years. We did that record and it got kind of well regarded for a certain Irish rap fan. I think that's held in high esteem as a thing. I guess then, that was the time of I wasn't really sure about hip hop. I was starting to move away from that. And that's quite a weird record as well. Maybe a casual rap fan wouldn't even call it hip hop at all. But to me, it was still a very hip hop record. But I guess I was just moving away from that around the same time, probably. So we didn't get to follow up and do much else after that. We probably had 100 gigs under our belt by that point, mainly around the west. And I quite like having things that maybe aren't recorded. Things that happen in the moment and are now in our memories and that's fine. It's nice to have little snippets and stuff, but sometimes they're better off left in your head too.
This sounds like it was a pretty creative time for you. You're playing with Flying Buttresses and suddenly Naive Ted comes into things. Was there other music that you were doing as well?
I'm always doing it. I always have since I'd be around 15 and 16. I just do it every day. I have maybe patches that are better or make better music or do better gigs, but my output is pretty consistent as far as - I haven't been releasing much stuff in the last couple of years; again, that's more family-related and time related, but I mean, I'm in the studio every day and practising every day. I just love this thing. I just love making tunes. I love performing. I can't stop now anyway. I'm 42 now, there's no going back. This is all I know how to do. But it's definitely like a real habit that I can't imagine not doing.
Just that kind of thrill?
And it's a daily thrill. Even just having a practice gives me a thrill. And I teach music as well, that's my main job. One thing that I always struggle with is when people say they have writer's block. I'm like, just just carry on, move your hands around, or whatever, and stuff will come out. I've never had that. I struggle to make good stuff sometimes but making stuff has never been an issue. You just go to where you do your thing, and you do it and it comes out. If it's crap, well, the next one will be better; that one's crap, next one'll be better. Music, for me, it's not a separate thing to my life. As in even if I'm a dad and a teacher, the music is involved in all that, as in when I'm being a dad, I'm still this music-making guy. And I'm not too precious about it, I guess. Maybe I used to be at times, maybe, but I'm happy to fail, which I think is maybe possibly a good thing for the art, maybe a bad thing for your career. I can definitely stand over everything I've done, in my own head anyway, even if some of those choices or decisions maybe closed certain doors to me. I still think that it was the right thing to put the art first rather than the career. Not that I would've had grand designs on being famous or anything anyway, but we've touched off the sky now and again and quickly retreated.
Tell me about the work that you do with Music Generation in Limerick.
I'm a music tutor there. That's my bread and butter job. I go to schools, I go to youth clubs, done some work in Limerick Prison. I do one-on-one lessons with teenagers, we do mentoring work. Actually the mentoring stuff is maybe what I gravitate to the most. We run this project called Limerick Voices, which happens every Saturday. And we have a building in the city that's got eight rooms in it and we just turn it over to teenagers for four hours. We're just there with them. It's not like we're teaching them anything. It's like, 'You guys want to be punk band, well here's a room with some guitars and amps and you guys be a punk band. And when you need some help, give us a shout.' And I think maybe that's the most rewarding part of it for me because I'm getting to be a musician as well, as opposed to a teacher maybe? There's something quite nice about [it] because they're all peers, even if I'm in my 40s and they're 15, they're still making tunes, and they're still trying to do the same thing I'm doing. And it's nice to have faith in young people to just run themselves. They get told enough what to do by adults all the time. And that's been one thing that I always try and get across to them: whatever I say, you can ignore as well. This is just my opinion. But if you think that's stupid, that's fine. You do your thing. So it's very rewarding. And it pays my mortgage too, more so than Naive Ted does. But it's been great to follow into this kind of work, to be able to make a living.
When did you move to Limerick from Galway?
I came down here in 09 and actually started doing youth work, youth stuff up there. I started teaching the odd classes, but I didn't have any degree or anything. So it was hard to get paid properly for it. I did a lot of voluntary work first to get to know how to do it. That's maybe a bit of advice I would give to anyone who's looking to get into that stuff: Just go down to your local youth centre and just say that you're around and that you've got these skills and if they can use them, please do. Offer your time for free and stuff will come back to you eventually, too. That was it. I done that for a couple of years and I realised that I liked doing it and I was definitely not bad at it anyway, I was getting results with young people. So I just needed a degree to actually make that path a bit more obvious for me. So I came here to do the music, media, and performance technology course out in UL as a mature student, so I think I was 28 starting, which was not without its challenges, being a 28-year-old starting college. I found that difficult. Plus I was already making music and releasing albums and stuff and have my own notions about how music was, and then someone trying to teach me, I'd say I wasn't the easiest person to have in the classroom now, to be honest. But we got there and I enjoyed it in the end. But the first couple of years were definitely a big struggle. I guess I don't like being told what to do. I never really did, I can do it but if you tell me to do it, I'm actually less likely to do it. Again, it's the character flaw thing. The education thing, it's never sat well with me, which is weird that I'm a teacher then as well. It's hard. Don't get me wrong. It's really difficult to be a teacher or lecturer; mass education is difficult when you've got 30 people in a room. It's hard to cater for everyone. I was definitely the guy who was really enthusiastic, but not the easiest to be presenting lessons to. And so through that then, that's how I got my job with Music Generation - right place, right time. They were starting up as I was finishing my course. They needed a hip hop person straight away. I had done some work with the Learning Hub in Limerick here during my college course. And they were like 'D'you wanna job?' 'Yes! I'm massively in debt after four years in college.' So yeah, that was great. Again, lucky, but also had the right skills to do it. So it actually was the plan all along, it just thankfully worked. So I was surprised. And I'm still here - it was 10 years ago when I started working here.
[Limerick seems like such a melting pot for music…]
As soon as I arrived here, I really felt at home. There's something quite welcoming. And it's something in the air here, for sure, and it's gotten better every year since I've been here. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I guess there's multiple factors. One thing is actually people are staying around now. Certainly when I arrived first, there was a bit of a paucity of people between 25 and 35 - your core audience for an underground music scene, who have a bit of disposable income. They weren't around. As soon as you finish college, you go to Dublin, or you go to Cork or you emigrate, but there's people sticking around now. And then that has a cyclical effect that the next people stick around as well. So there's now enough people here to sustain itself. And then you have two quite important venues as well. You've got Pharmacia and you've got the Commercial, which are run by people that like music and want to support music and are easy to deal with. And they're not - obviously they gotta make money but they're not profit driven, capitalist pigs. They're some nice guys who just want to put on some music, and they see the value in underground music. So I think, even though that's just two spaces, that's super important for the city and the scene. Because it's a small city, everyone just knows each other anyway by default. Galway's quite similar too. You go to the punk gig, you'd see all the hip hop heads, I see a few rap heads there because it's a night out and there's not gigs all the time, so you end up seeing a bit of everything. It's probably true of all or Ireland except for Dublin, maybe. Each scene by itself is almost nothing in a way because they're so small. But when the whole music scene acts as one, it has a bit more force. And I think you saw that with Feile na Greine festival the last couple years. Their music policy was just underground music, it wasn't necessarily any particular strain of it. It was just, 'this is the good shit from the underground'. And that was the policy.
Back to Naive Ted. You released the Inevitable Heel Turn back in 2015. I feel like that's your first proper full-length, long-form release: nine or 10 tracks and a couple of remixes. Do you see that as the high point of Ted?
It was a great calling card. Presenting it as an actual album was something I kind of always resisted before that - maybe even since. But I think having a clear-cut thing that people could actually put in the Irish Times or whatever, it was useful. I'm happy with some of that music, I think a lot of it's dated. Some of it I am still quite happy with. That was me learning how to use a digital means for the first time as well. So there's some decisions in that that I wouldn't do now. One of the issues then was, trying to present that music live was so difficult. I had to reverse-engineer everything for it to work. As I progressed on, I was making tunes with an eye for playing them live, as opposed to just studio creations or being useful DJ tools that I could actually easily manipulate. So the run of shows I did off the back of Heel Turn, I did quite a lot of shows for the year or two after that, but they were kind of inferior versions of the tracks, when I was playing them live. I think there was about 200 cues in the average set. It was like, I'd miss a cue and then it would fuck things up. Maybe no one would notice it, but I'd notice it and then that would affect my performance. And even then, even if I got it completely right, it'd still be better off listening to the album in a way, it sounded better. So that was a good learning curve there. This is the problem that maybe all electronic musicians have. If not just recording jams or whatever, if you're making highly edited music, it's just unperformable without serious sacrifices in the audio fidelity of it. Or you're just doing playback, which, I mean, that's fine for Calvin Harris or whatever, but that's not what we want to do. So I think since then, pretty much everything has had an eye on the live experience. More so now. Like I think even on the last couple of releases, I put like, 'this isn't actually for listening, this is just a way of you to give me some money if you want it. This should be played at a nightclub, or in a venue. It's not going to have the same effect on a Tuesday morning in your sitting room.' And if you're analysing it in headphones, it's not really for that, it's to move your body and it's to experience it with other people in a dark room at a very loud volume.
It seems like you got into collaborations as well, maybe post-Inevitable Heel Turn. You've played with Post Punk Podge, you remixed Windings as well. I saw you supporting them in De Barras a few years ago. So is that the rules changing again, you're excited by all of these acts that you're playing with and you're testing out what actually works?
Ironically, I wouldn't even call those collaborations. Whenever I approached anyone to do any of those things, I always said, 'I want to use you.' I don't really like collaborating with people, to be honest. It has been fun a few times, but in general, I've always found it better off being part of a dictatorship, where someone just calls the shots and you do that. So in all those instances, I said, 'I want to use you for this track. I have an idea in my head of what you can do. I can't do it. So can you do it for me, please?' To be fair to everyone, most people were up for it too. I gave them a veto as well - if they don't like the thing, I won't release it. But no one's ever used the veto yet anyway. Which is nice. Maybe they're just too polite... The last true collaboration I would have done was probably Flying Buttresses. We had a 50-50 say. But that made it quite difficult because then you've got to be compromising all the time too. Which makes things take longer.
So you have these final couple of Naive Ted shows coming up. Are you sitting on lots of music that you're planning on releasing?
I'm sitting on loads of music, like hundreds of tracks. Don't know what I'm gonna do with it. Maybe none of it will ever come out. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. There will be some kind of release of some music probably before the end of the year, because quite a lot of it is finished. Just again, there's so much time needed to get these things together. Just been focusing on other things. But the music is made and there's lots of it. It's hard drives full of it. Again some more successful than others. Maybe that ties back into that thing about I've put less onus on the music that I'm making because you don't need to hear it in your house. I'm still wondering why am I bothering releasing this to streaming services if I don't even want you to play it on a streaming service really. But then I also like giving people the opportunity to hear it. I'm torn between those things. I still prefer if you never listen to the music at home and you only saw me live . Even recordings of it - there's been a couple of OK ones but it's never like it is. The show is what it is. With Ted anyway, it's just about the shows and that's why I think it was good to organise this little run of shows just cos that's where I put all my energy the last couple years.
So you're calling time on the live performances but you, Andy, aren't going to be stopping making music anytime soon?
No, me, Andy's definitely picking music. I'm straight into soundtracking some contemporary dance performances for Angie Smalis and Colin Gee. They're doing, it's called All the Relations. That will be in November. Me and Dan Walsh are also working on a duo project, live dance music kind of things. That should be ready for public consumption sometime next year as well. Yeah, there's lots of other fun to be had anyway, here. You couldn't stop me making music if you tried. Even if no one listens, I'll still make it.