Turning over a new leaf
The musicial memoirs of a life on the road that have been turned into a one-man stage show
NOT for nothing is Tony Wright known as a bit of a renaissance man. The singer/ writer/author/producer/ would-be actor has certainly hit a creative purple patch. He’s just completed a stint as Artist in Residence at the MAC in Belfast, and he
has certainly put his time there to good use.
There’s a small acting role in Trautman, a biopic about footballer Bert Trautmann, as well as his own movie screenplay in the works, not to mention overseeing his comedy web series The Also Rans, based loosely on his own experiences as a musician. He has also recently released his hilarious, occasionally outlandish, memoir Chapter & Verse (Chorus Verse).
The book has also been turned into a oneman show, and recently enjoyed a string of live dates in the North.
To top off a bumper 2018, Wright also released his solo album Outro, and an additional album with his ‘swamp blues’ side-project, The Tragedy Of Doctor Hannigan. Add in yet another project — a collaboration with David Lyttle, called Say And Do — and Wright might well be the creative powerhouse you’ve never heard of.
It’s enough to make the head spin, but it soon becomes clear that Wright — a founding member of acclaimed instrumentalists And So I Watch You From Afar — is not a man for downtime.
‘I just get bored very easily,’ he explains. ‘If I sit on my thumbs, I think the world is ending. The one thing that gives me a kick up the arse is seeing other people smile and knowing I had something to do with that. Aside from that, I gave up drinking and smoking a year ago. I needed something to keep myself busy. And with plenty going on, it’s been better than any drink or smoke.’
It wasn’t that long ago that Wright was contemplating ‘packing it all in and getting a ‘real job’.
Famously, Wright left the band he co-founded and helped to bring to lofty critical heights in 2011. It was an acrimonious departure, and not one that Wright is overly comfortable discussing.
What he is willing to say is that despite having created a cohesive sound and a tight live unit, And So I Watch You From Afar were anything but a band of merry brothers.
‘Being within the band wasn’t as smooth as it might have appeared from the outside,’ he says. ‘Things started going awry for the band and just… personalities began to clash.’
It’s no secret that Wright was pushed, almost as if by accident, to the ‘front’ of the band. It being a largely instrumental band, no one was all that willing to helm the microphone, yet Wright had been in other bands before, and was happy enough to lob the odd few words out to the audience during SIWYFA’s blistering live shows. He became, for better or worse, their frontman.
‘I think one of the big draws of the band was that, for an instrumental band, we had so much to say, but I was expected to perform songs with titles like A Little Bit Of Solidarity Goes A Long way, when I didn’t feel there was much solidarity around,’ he admits.
‘It was hellish — imagine being in any workspace when you’re feeling miserable, and then try having that in a (tour) van.’
The band were riding a critical and commercial apex, but things soon came to a head. ASIWYFA were on tour in Vienna, and after wowing crowds at an Austrian festival, Wright decided to go out and have a few drinks with people he’d met at the festival. On the way back to his digs, he was brutally set upon and assaulted by strangers.
‘I got the s*** kicked out of me and was left for dead in a doorway,’ he recalls. A day later, he played with the band at Electric Picnic. Owing to the fact that Wright was sitting down for the performance with two broken ribs, it was perhaps a shade less incendiary than ASIWYFA’s normal on-stage fare.
In any case, the moment hammered home to Wright that he no longer wanted to be in the band, and he departed the fold in 2011.
After much soul searching, he embarked on a solo career, and his musical output — recorded under the name Verse Chorus Verse — was decidedly stripped back and intimate.
Or at least it was, compared to the bombastic experimental energy of his erstwhile outfit. His first album was a ‘folky pop’ record, completely removed from what fans might have been used to. ‘I think because things were kept quiet about the reason for my departure (from the band) that people thought I’d left because I felt I could strike out as a solo artist,’ he reflects. ‘I was doing something different musically but I started to find that journalists who were once eager to pick up the phone before weren’t interested anymore. I wasn’t in a cool band anymore.’
Still, things were looking up: one of his albums, Say & Do, charted at No.18 in the UK album charts and No.1 on the Amazon Blues Chart without much promotional effort.
‘It was amazing, especially when I thought of the amount of work and press I had to do (with other projects) as well,’ he notes.
Still, what followed was something of an existential crisis: ‘I had been solo for about five years, and had been almost 15 years in the industry. I was like, “What have I been doing the last 20 years?” I felt like I was in the wilderness all over again’.
A sense of rejection has been a familiar feeling for Wright, which probably goes some way to explaining his dogged determination.
At school, the then eight-year-old tried out for the orchestra, only to fluff his key test on stage in front of classmates due to nerves.
‘The music teacher said, “You haven’t a musical note in your body — stick to sports”, which was hilarious because I was clearly the smallest kid in the school and not into sports,’ he recalls. ‘My mum picked me up from school and saw how upset I was. She was aghast that
someone would discourage a little kid like that, so she brought me home, dusted off her old guitar, and showed me how to play songs by John Denver and Bob Dylan.’
It was a fateful moment that would reap payback only a few short years later. When Wright was 15, his band Pepper-book came to the attention of London’s music industry.
Back in the late 90s, it wasn’t unusual for big labels to schmooze and dine potential prospects with big budgets.
At one point, a big publishing company came very close to signing the band. It was a sustained moment of flattery that Wright admits went straight to his head.
‘I mean, it was nuts,’ recalls Wright. ‘We were nerds and outsiders at school, and then there was this major label interest and suddenly we were the cool kids. I was doing GCSEs at the time and didn’t pay attention to those as I thought, “I’ve got this sewn up here”. We were back and forth to London but it was soon over as quickly as it started.
‘It taught me not to take anything for granted, no matter how sewn up it can seem. Don’t pay the ferryman until you get to the other side,’ he smiles.
Five years into his solo career, he decided to do a soul-searching trip to the US. He had already made many pathways there as a member of ASIWYFA, but now it was time to test his mettle and go it alone.
The hair-raising experiences from those few months make up much of the Chapter &VerseChorusVerse book. He had been invited to support gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello in California, and was also lured to New York by Jesse Malin. In between are low moments in Nashville, unlikely encounters with 60s outfit The Zombies and, as would befit any book set in the US music industry, a smattering of celebrity cameos, among them Green Day, Foo Fighters and Metallica.
‘I spilled a drink over Taylor Hawkins’ wife, which she wasn’t too happy about,’ he recalls. ‘In my defence, she backed into me! But it was kind of mad being in the same room as these people, especially after you grew up listening to these guys.’
This year looks to be even more hectic for Wright, starting with an appearance at the First Fortnight festival in Dublin tomorrow.
He remains based in Belfast, and is excited at the new energy coursing through the city, due in part to its wave of new, younger artists. ‘It’s definitely gotten to the point where I’m more like the elder statesman,’ he laughs. ‘I’m happy to see them coming through and kicking our asses.
‘That’s what they’re supposed to do, and that’s what we did ten years ago.
‘They remind me of what it’s like to be 15 or 16 and have the big labels sniffing around.
‘One thing we’ve been good at up here (in the North) is making a bit of a ruckus. Long may it continue.’
The album Outro is out now, and Tony’s book Chapter &VerseChorusVerse is available in good bookstores nationwide. He appears at the Culture Vultures event at the First Fortnight Festival tomorrow. See first fort night. ie for details.