" I BOW DOEN TO THIS SONG"

Its release in the aftermath of 9/11 seemed incongrous, but Andrew W.K.’s brilliant upbeat party anthem lifted spirits.

30 PARTY HARD Andrew W.K. From: I Get Wet, 2001

It’s October 2001. One month has passed since the 9/11 terror attacks on New York. Grief and fury mix like a Molotov cocktail on the streets of America. George W Bush’s war machine rolls into Afghanistan to extract Osama Bin Laden, while back home popular culture is defanged to soothe a raw nation, with a list of 160 ‘lyrically inappropriate songs’ allegedly delivered to US radio stations. The party is over.

Andrew W.K. just wasn’t made for those times. His debut single, Party Hard, was ostensibly everything that post-9/11 society could not tolerate, particularly if viewed in tandem with its video: dressed in grubby whites like some anti-Messiah, in the mirror of a sinister, strip-lit bathroom, he inspects deep facial cuts; a robot voice gabbles: “When-it’s-time-to-party-wewill-party-hard.” Then begins an adrenalin shot of pop-metal, its chant of ‘Let’s get a party going!’ seeming deeply out of place amid the debris and body bags.

The consensus was split: W.K. was either a beer-chugging rock pig, or an irony-monger deconstructing the clichés of the rock lifestyle. In fact he was neither, revealing himself in the press as Andrew Wilkes-Krier, a soft-spoken former piano prodigy from Michigan. Similarly, while most listeners inferred (wrongly) that Party Hard was about alcohol, it’s never mentioned in the lyrics.

“In 1998 I’d just moved to New York,” Andrew recalls. “I had never been drunk, I didn’t do any drugs and I didn’t have any friends. I never was a very social person. I had always felt awkward at parties; social interaction was tricky for me. But I loved the atmosphere of being at a party, the way it felt in the air, so creating music that encouraged partying was a no-brainer.

“I didn’t want anyone to feel they had to act a certain way to ‘party’,” he says of Party Hard’s lyric. “I’d had many life experiences that told me something about me was wrong, or I couldn’t be part of this club… all that crap. I hated being at a party and someone coming up and saying: ‘Why aren’t you drinking?’ ‘Why aren’t you dancing?’ So I thought: ‘I’m gonna make a song telling people to party, but party however they want.’ I never dictated what people should do.”

The lyrics of Party Hard were settled, but musically “I wanted it to start with a riff that was one note,” he says. “I had a vision of being on stage and the sound is just: ‘duh! duh! duh!’ No chord changes, everyone playing just one note with as much intensity as they could. I wanted it to be this… heartbeat.

“I was clear this was going to be ‘my song’,” he says. “I had a strong feeling it would make other people go crazy and run around the room. It’s got a giddy kind of energy, that feeling of breaking through all the bullshit and confusion that tells us that it’s not amazing to be alive.”

But that was before 9/11. After the twin towers fell, voices higher up the record company food chain questioned whether America wanted to ‘get the party going’.

Andrew saw it another way: “At that moment, celebrating what you had was never more important. To be grateful for the life we have and this incredible city… it’s all just hanging by a thread. Is singing about having fun just a big waste of time, and a disgrace? Or is putting people in touch with the parts within them that make them feel good in fact a very worthwhile pursuit? The feelings of joy and power that come from music, that’s what allows humanity to rise up and be at its best.”

Party Hard got its release, and the musician’s instincts were vindicated by the response it received, with the song storming the US and UK charts. Refreshingly, Andrew is neither jaded by its ubiquity nor tired of playing it live: “Drop it? Oh God, no. I love it more every day. It’s given me so much, brought me so many opportunities and happiness, and I hope into the lives of other people. I bow down to this song. I don’t feel like it’s mine, it’s just a song I got to play. I could never imagine a day not playing it. I’ll die playing that song – and that would be a great privilege.”