Private, prickly and insular, maybe, but what a talent
He was a slight, hunched, bespectacled and intense presence, always off to one side from the band, throwing sweet bursts of melody and pure pop all over the squalling engine of gorgeous noise that were the Straitjacket Fits in their pomp.
His name was Andrew Brough. I tried to talk to him once, after a gig at Wellington’s Bar Bodega.
My opening gambit would have been some beery drivel about how Down in Splendour was one of the greatest pop songs ever crafted in Aotearoa, and how great the show had been.
Brough shut me down immediately with what I’m guessing was his attempt at a withering glare, but which came off like an anxiety attack waiting to happen.
I didn’t say anything more, just returned to my table and enjoyed the oddly life-affirming sensation of my ears ringing, as another thousand or so cells in my cochlea died on the altar of loud music in small bars, which has been my adult life’s unsinkable joy.
And what a musician Brough was. His classically-inspired melodies and arrangements were an odd fit with everything else the Fits brought to the stage. But Brough and his dream-pop sensibilities helped make the band – briefly – genuine contenders for world domination.
With the heart-stoppingly beautiful, outrageously talented and charismatic Shayne Carter out front, John Collie and David Wood putting down a bombproof foundation of rhythm behind, and Brough’s swirling and unpredictable guitar spreading the magic dust over every chorus and verse he chose to interact with, the Straitjacket Fits of 1988 to 1990 were almost unarguably one of the most interesting and respected-bythose-who-knew-them rock acts in the world.
Even a couple of the leading British and US music press were saying so which, in those days, was pretty much gospel.
It couldn’t last, of course. The lazy, but apparently useful cliche is that Brough was McCartney to Carter’s Lennon, with the former’s genius for a pop-hook producing a glorious hybrid when it coupled with Carter’s more strident and direct writing and playing.
I’d say a George Harrison to Brough is nearly as apt a comparison. The Beatles may have been able to replace Harrison, had he left. But they would have had a fatally plainer and less unique sound without him.
And so it was with the Fits. When Brough departed in 1990, after a successful but apparently acrimonious tour of the States, Carter and the rest of the band remained together, knocking out another album and an EP, before disbanding for good in 1994.
For a glimpse of the band’s dynamic, take a look at a few music videos. There’s a decent handful online. She Speeds probably remains the band’s best known song. And it reeks of exactly that unrepeatable cocktail of ecstasy and malevolence that a great Fits’ song could bring.
The video for the track fetishises Carter’s features, of course – despite him sporting one of the most god-awful hair cuts to ever grace a rock god’s head – while Brough is mostly relegated to being another blackclad figure in the band. Next to Carter, sure. But never even close to being the star.
Now listen again, with your
eyes closed. Despite what the film-makers might have you believe, it is Brough’s jangle and the edgy and innocuous moments of near surf-pop he layers on that give the song its power.
And as the song builds to its rousing, closing bars, it is Brough’s voice that soars out of the rough rock confines and defines the song, making something beautiful out of a track that had been threatening to settle for being merely powerful.
I was reminded of this late in 2018, watching Carter’s reformed Fits – without Brough – work through a punishing and completely admirable rendition of She Speeds in Wellington’s Meow bar. It was brilliant, of course. But the ecstasy had gone.
After leaving the Fits, Brough founded Bike, releasing an EP and an album in 1996 and 97. I own them both – and still rate Circus Kids as one of my favourite local pop songs, ever. But the grit and menace that underpinned Brough’s years with the Fits is sorely missed.
So goodbye Andrew Brough. Maybe you were just as private, prickly and insular as the legends say. Although I doubt it. I’ve yet to know anyone – famous or not – who was truly much like their public persona. And I doubt many people truly knew you at all.
But you were one of four young men who melded to create some of the best songs we had ever heard. Thank you.