Finn Andrews - Solo!

Songwriter Finn Andrews is back in the country with a new album and a national tour. William Dart investigates how he put aside his work with The Veils to produce a homegrown solo turn.

There was no ignoring The Veils' 2004 debut album. And although its title, The Runaway Found, hinted at hope on the horizon, an elegiac closing track seemed less sure.

I thought it was brave of the group’s songwriter, erstwhile Takapuna Grammar boy Finn Andrews, to skirt so closely here to the title of the Beatles song "Nowhere Man". This time around, it’s "The Nowhere Man" although the definite article doesn’t quite achieve the dispassionate third-person voice of John Lennon.

The focus now is definitely on the personal and the heart is bared for all to sympathise with, underpinned by a crucial shift from major to minor in the song’s chorus.

But where did all this transformation come from, turning a Takapuna teenager into what fulsome press releases hail as an international trailblazer?

Back in 2004, while Andrews was alerting us to connections between "The Nowhere Man" and a C.S. Lewis Narnia novel, others were more interested in style-tracking, pointing out the influences coming through from earlier bands such as The Verve and Suede.

Little surprise then to find Suede’s Bernard Butler taking on production duties for four of the Veils' songs, including this shadowy trip into the valleys of New Orleans.

Two years later, with The Veils’ second album Nux Vomica, it was the sonic bristle of a track like "Jesus for the Jugular" that hooked my ear. And maybe it did the same with those folks who found a place for it on the soundtrack of the TV series Outrageous Fortune.

Finn Andrews does dark very, very nicely, here concocting the sort of ambience that could well prepare us for Nick Cave slinking onstage for a doomy drop of Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht.

And when Andrews makes his entrance, we’re not exactly in the presence of Little Maxie Sunshine.

This is the same Finn Andrews who would go on to pick up a role in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series, and perhaps songs like "Jesus for the Jugular" and "In the Nightfall" do cement just why he was so much the man for the part.

Piecing together a portrait of Finn Andrews has been rather fun, and the songwriter did reveal a few significances six years ago on the release of the Veils’ fourth album Time Stays, We Go.

With three releases behind us, most of us had gathered that this man’s songs were far from casually thrown-together, but rather, coherently shaped and fitted into an overall loose narrative — the influence, he confessed back then, of early boyhood days at the Devonport Folk Club surrendering to storytelling on open mic nights.

In 2013 he made much of songs being able to meld what might be diametrically opposed moods. He cited the Beach Boys as a perfect example of bringing together the happy and the sad and, in the case of "God Only Knows", the melancholic and the summery.

This blend was only too apparent on Time Stays, We Go. There was a sunny splash of ukulele on the track "Turn from the Rain" and all the accoutrements of classic pop turned up for "Another Night on Earth", right down to descending bass lines and jangling piano.

But the song’s message wasn’t exactly a rosy one and the piano wasn’t quite so jaunty and carefree when overshadowed by the boom of drum.

The Veil’s Total Depravity album is the band’s last release to date, coming out in August 2016.

But Finn Andrews has not been silent since then. When he spoke with the Independent in 2017, much of the talk was related to his on-screen work, with thoughts about just how cinematic The Veils had always been. One gathered the impression that Total Depravity had been a bit of a grind to get together and Andrews was looking more and more in the direction of solo work.

"Ploughing through songs", as he put it,  in various stages of completion ... or disrepair.

It’s ten of these songs presumably that have made it to his first solo outing, titled One Piece at a Time, recorded in Auckland’s The Lab, with a local band of bass player Cass Basil, guitarist Tom Healy, drummer Alex Freer with Reb Fountain and Nina Siegler on backing vocals — all set against Andrews’ perfectly poised piano.

The song "Stairs to the Roof" shares its title with a very early Tennessee Williams play, about a harassed office worker escaping into a wild fantasy world only to return and climb those stairs leading back to his workday cage.

Andrews’ situation was a little different, remembering a London friend’s flat that was a den of iniquity with stairs to the roof that seemed to lead up to nothing but a grey, dark and heavily symbolic London city.

One feels Finn Andrews taking on his own self-set dares in this new solo album, one of which being to find multiple ways of charting the break-up of a love affair.

One of the most characterful is "Love, what can I do" which opens in a rather spur of the moment manner, with Andrews in pleading mode, à la Rufus Wainwright. 

And if that’s the outer coating, then it’s well wrapped around a good, firm, pop-fuelled centre, with Victoria Kelly’s strings adding to the punch.

For those of you who found that first song above by The Veils somewhat challenging to decipher, then Finn Andrews’ vocalising on the new solo album has crispness and clarity galore. Which is perfect for what is essentially the list song of "One by the Venom".

Strung over a four-bar chord sequence, Finn Andrews investigates, one by one as it were, 55 ways to die.

Complete with eccentric clapping on the side, the challenge here for Victoria Kelly is to put aside the standard soul trimmings of other numbers such as "Shot through the heart".

Instead she paints it big-screen vivid, as we’ve heard her do so many times in our cinemas. Finn Andrews gives her the nightmare scenario that turns out to be an arranger’s dream.

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'The Nowhere Man' (Andrews) – The Veils
The Runaway Found
(Rough Trade)

'The Valleys of New Orleans' (Andrews) – The Veils
The Runaway Found
(Rough Trade)

'Jesus for the Jugular' (Andrews) – The Veils
Nux Vomica
(Rough Trade)

'God Only Knows' (Wilson) – The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds
(Capitol)

'Another Night on Earth' (Andrews) – The Veils
Time Stays We Go
(Rough Trade)

'In the Blood' (Andrews) – The Veils
Total Depravity
(Nettwerk)

'Stairs to the Roof' (Andrews) – Finn Andrews
One Piece at a Time
(Nettwerk)

'Love, what can I do' (Andrews) – Finn Andrews
One Piece at a Time
(Nettwerk)

'Al Pacino/Rise and Fall' (Andrews) – Finn Andrews
One Piece at a Time
(Nettwerk)

'One' (Nilsson) – Harry Nilsson
Aerial Ballet
(BMG)

'One by the Venom' (Andrews) – Finn Andrews
One Piece at a Time
(Nettwerk)