Lifting the veil on solitude of music
As The Veils’ frontman Finn Andrews returns home for the band’s NZ tour, he reflects on life and loneliness. By Glenn McConnell.
What’s one sentence to best describe Finn Andrews’ life? ‘‘It’s constantly moving,’’ he says.
Now 33, Andrews has spent half his life dedicated to music.
He left school at 17, wrote his debut album by 20 and took over a church in Amsterdam for The Veils’ first major solo gig a year later.
Most his life has been split between ‘‘homes’’, in the UK and Auckland. Born in London, Andrews moved to New Zealand with his mother where he met some of the band at high school.
His indie-rock band bases itself in London. From there, they’ve released five full albums across 16 years. Their latest, Total Depravity, came out in August to impressive reviews; it secured four stars from Rolling Stone after one of the album’s singles premiered on Apple’s Beats 1 with Zane Lowe.
For about two months, Andrews is settling down in New Zealand as The Veils’ embark on a fairly comprehensive Kiwi road trip.
Being home, however, isn’t a comforting feeling for the constant traveller.
‘‘I come back to mum’s house, sort of walk around. It sort of feels like being home. But I’m not really sure what you’re supposed to do about it. It feels like the past here.’’
As Andrews looks back at his career he talks about being ‘‘the foreigner’’.
‘‘I’ve always enjoyed being someone on the outside looking in,’’ Andrews says.
While most people take a break to relax, Andrews says the downtime is hardest.
‘‘I think I’m kind of lonely by design,’’ he says.
When he isn’t travelling with the band, Andrews tends to be writing. Many of the band’s five albums were written in New Zealand, he says, during breaks with his mother’s family.
Making music is his go to preventer of loneliness.
‘‘Perhaps the band itself, it is this kind of great preventer of loneliness – you’re travelling with this family. But certainly the periods when we’re not on the road, very much – that’s my sort of default, this sort of loneliness.’’
When he first started, at 17, he moved into a completely different life. His friends studied. He travelled and wrote.
‘‘There was this lonely time around that, really. I jumped into it as soon as I possibly could... Your group of friends back home were all having a fun time and I was torturing myself.’’
That dark allusion is carried through in many of The Veils’ tracks. Airy synths and levered vocals feature prominently in the latest album, alongside the topics of apocalypse and corrupt love.
Andrews hasn’t stopped since he started his musical career as a teenager and he doesn’t plan to.
In London, he still lives in the same flat he first got as a teen. Only very recently did he actually buy some real cutlery for it, he says. ‘‘There’s just so much I still want to do.’’
Being on tour for The Veils’ latest album has reasserted his love for travelling and performing, but more importantly, Andrews says, it’s given him the right to perform.
‘‘It took me awhile to feel like I had any right to do what I was doing,’’ he admits.
In Istanbul, they played a month after a military coup failed to overthrow the Turkish government.
‘‘There’d been tanks in the streets. So that was the first time people had come out.’’
He toured Europe after a spate of attacks and then played during riots on the night following the US election: ‘‘You could hear the sirens from the stage.
‘‘There’s a sense that people want to take their minds of these things,’’ he says.
The Veils play Leigh (Saturday), Napier (Tuesday), Wellington (Wednesday), Christchurch (February 2-3), Dunedin (February 4), Queenstown (February 5).