The New Cue #582 April 10: Andrew Perry, Nightmares on Wax & Adrian Sherwood, Aldous Harding, Wu Lyf, Wendy Eisenberg, Juni Habel, Zoh Amba, Jack White, Truthpaste, Lambrini Girls, She's Green
"Andy Perry was an antidote to cynicism..."
Good morning,
Today’s edition is dedicated to the great music writer Andrew Perry, who sadly passed away on April 3.
Andy was an effervescent presence down the front of the domestic music scene since the late ‘80s, the best, most enthusiastic ambassador British music journalists could wish to represent us both home and abroad. Bands, the music business and, most importantly, the readers of Select, Mojo, Q and The Daily Telegraph, amongst others, adored his unbridled love of music and life, as well as his well-honed word craft.
Niall and I both commissioned AP throughout our time at Q, which means I spent nearly two decades hungrily chasing his copy and being regaled down the line by his fabulously shaggy tales for why he just needed another couple of days. The wait was always worth it. He could spin a written yarn like few others.
And yet, reading the avalanche of online love for the man over the last few days, it feels like we barely knew him well enough. His line of work is often understandably characterised by cynicism, but Andy Perry was its antidote. He was a burning enthusiast, there at every first gig by those that he loved, as well as their last when other fair-weather fans had long deserted them, and he wrote about music because he had to put his passion for its spiritual power somewhere.
The first time I met him was in the spring of 1991 when, in a time before email, I went nervously to deliver my monthly album reviews to the office of Select magazine, directly into the hands of the world’s greatest writer, deputy editor David Cavanagh.
When I arrived at the appointed time, David was, according to the lanky dude draped in skintight black denim and leathers, sporting a bowl-cut and flicking a magazine, his Chelsea boots resting on Cav’s desk, “out.” “Who are you?” he asked, suspiciously. I told him my name, which usually appeared at that time twice in very small print hidden among Select’s many review pages. Andy leapt to his feet and thrust a hand out in introduction: he remembered a positive 100-word review of some long-forgotten techno album I’d delivered previously and proceeded to regale me with tales of joyful misadventure with its makers at a rave near his ancestral Devon home. Music and its magic electrified him.
This meeting set the tone. No matter what early gig you may imagine you’d exclusively seen a group at, Andy was also at that gig – and he had seen the previous date too. He couldn’t miss a night out if music he loved was involved, a fact I became keenly aware of when I was hosting an album-release Q&A with Baxter Dury at Banquet in Kingston-upon-Thames last September. Andy was recovering from recent brain surgery and was seriously unwell, but still insisted he be added to the guest list as he felt he couldn’t miss a favourite artist talking about music so close to his home.
Unfortunately, we can’t find any of his best pieces online to link to, but we can point you towards a lovely tribute from Robin Turner, who was a PR for many of the bands AP championed in the 90s such as Primal Scream and The Charlatans, as well as a far more comprehensive and professional obituary in Music Week from Paul Stokes, who sat next to Andy at Select for a time.
We hope you’ll join us now in raising a cup of your morning brew to Andrew Perry, sending much love to his family and many friends.
Shine on AP…
Andrew Perry pictured by James Sherry on manoeuvres in Richmond Park sometime during the pandemic…
Enjoy the rest of the edition, here’s this week’s playlist:
And here for Apple Music subscribers.
Ted and Niall
Recommender
Ted Kessler
Andy Perry had a vast reggae collection, with a love particularly of dub, and he would’ve been all over In A Space Outta Dub, Adrian Sherwood’s reinterpretation of Nightmares on Wax’s sublime oasis of inner calm In A Space Outta Sound, which came out last week to mark the original’s 20th anniversary. It’s a textbook piece of Sherwood work as his overdubs and signature FX-sounds send the listener straight back to the original afterwards without any sense of disturbing deja vu. The perfect accompanying piece for the original.
Have we previously mentioned how much we love the entire Aldous Harding-sphere? I believe we may have. Do we love her as much as Huw Evans, aka the multi-talented Welsh musician and songwriter H Hawkline? I don’t know. They’re very close. He’s in her life and her band. He’s also co-starring in the video for Venus In The Zinnea, the second single to be released from Harding’s magnificent forthcoming new album Train On The Island. There he is on FaceTime with her, playing a guitar, doing DIY, laughing and smoking for her from Europe, telling her “I was thinking about ya” as she floats on her back in a pool or over her lawn down under, explaining how she got her hair cut and nobody likes it, but that she digs what he’s wearing, that “your love is my life”. It’s hard not to hear it as anything other than the sweetest, purest love letter wired from a place of pained absence. Everyone should prepare themselves for Train On The Island’s release on May 8. You’ll be listening to nothing else for weeks.
