Additional Information
They’re from the Netherlands and come from the 1980s anarcho-punk scene. There are four of them: three guys on guitar—Terrie, Andy, and Arnold—and one girl, Katherine, on drums. No bass. Their music is as wild as it is explosive, and their shows are epic. They’re friends of the festival, but it’s been a while since they’ve been here. So this is the perfect opportunity to come out and dance, let loose, and have a blast—a particularly beneficial outlet in these vile times we’re going through, as Andy reminds us.
He was kind enough to sit down for an interview and answer questions from PAN M 360.
PAN M 360 : Hi Andy, how was your day? (it was then 8 PM in Holland)
Andy Moor : It was good, I had a good day. I was busy actually, I have a project with Kaja Draksler who’s a Slovenian pianist. We’re releasing a record and we had to do some editing. So we were editing the record a bit over the phone.
She’s in Slovenia, I’m in Amsterdam but we’re making decisions and editing.
PAN M 360 : Will it be on Unsounds [the label he co-founded] or another label?
Andy Moor : No, it’s on a Hungarian label. It’s called Budapest Music or something [Budapest Music Center Records]. It’s a nice label and they give a lot of support. And it’s with the daughter of Terrie, she is singing in it.
PAN M 360 : Oh, it’s sort of a family project.
Andy Moor : So I feel like I’ve been in The Ex long enough that I’m now playing with the other guitar player’s daughter.
PAN M 360 : You joined the band in 1990, can you tell us how it happened?
Andy Moor : It’s because I was in a band before that called Dog Faced Hermans and we were playing music mostly in Scotland and England.
We were based in Scotland and we knew about The Ex and we’d heard about them. And actually what happened is the singer of Chumbawamba at that time had a job doing driving bands. So he drove us around on a tour and he asked us: « Have you ever seen The Ex? » And we said: « No, we’ve never seen them live. We’ve heard their records. » And he said: « Well, you have a very similar energy and way of playing music. »
So when we saw The Ex for the first time, it was really like, wow! It’s true! It felt really like our brothers or sisters across the ocean. Well, not ocean, more like across the channel, and it was great because then we did some tours together and then Marion, the singer of Dog Faced Hermans, wanted to take a year off to work in Poland. So I came over to Holland to play with The Ex for one year thinking it was a temporary thing. And it wasn’t. It became a permanent thing.
And Dog Faced Hermans also relocated in Amsterdam. So I was playing in both bands for a few years, which nearly killed me.
PAN M 360 : It nearly killed you?
Andy Moor : Well, it was a lot. Both bands wanted to play a lot and they were both very intense. So it was kind of double. But I was young enough to be able to deal with it. But I remember thinking I was playing like 250 concerts a year. I was really not resting at all.
So I got a bit fried. And then at some point Dog Faced Hermans stopped in 94 and then I continued with The Ex.
PAN M 360 : What is it with the Dutch that makes you so, I mean, because you didn’t go back to England, you stayed, you’ve been there for like 35 years. What is it with the Netherlands or the Dutch that you feel so at home?
Andy Moor : Well, it was because I was playing.
I came over. Terry lived in the countryside in a really big villa that they’d squatted and he offered a place for me to stay there. So I had a place to stay. I had a band to play in, my favourite band. I couldn’t really complain, could I? And that just continued.
I stayed in that house for about nine years and played with The Ex there. And then I moved in to Amsterdam. And then for me, it was, you know, the music, I guess you follow where the music goes.
Some people follow the money. Some people follow their art. Some people follow someone that they’re in love with. But I was really following the music. And the life I had here, it was just better than what I was living in Scotland, for sure. Financially, it was the same thing.
We live very simply. We don’t have lots of money or anything, but more to do with, there was a very practical sort of hardworking approach here. And it worked. It was really working. We were playing a lot.
PAN M 360 : And what was the sort of ambiance, the atmosphere in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands in the early 90s? How was it?
Andy Moor : It was kind of post, the back end of the squat scene.The squat scene was really wild in the 80s. By the time I moved here, there was still a lot of squats, but it had settled down and there were many all over the country. And so if you were involved in that scene, you know, there was a network of places you could go to eat, to drink and to live.
There were also a lot of young people who wanted to play music and didn’t have much money. And there were enough squats around that people could live really low rent or rent free. That’s really not the case now.
The city’s a very different thing now. As you might have guessed, with a lot of cities, especially European cities, it’s incredibly expensive to live here now. So for young people just starting out, it’s really tough.
But at that time, there was really a network and I still live in a building that comes from that, from that squat scene from the mid 80s. And it became legalised. So that atmosphere was still there when I first came, and slowly, it was eaten away by sort of progressive governments being more and more right wing and less tolerant of this kind of thing, to the point where it’s a very small sort of number of squats still in the city and a very small underground scene here.
But it’s still alive and people are still doing great things. And people, you know, a lot of people are involved in it. So we’re still part of it in a way.
So that’s great.
PAN M 360 : Going back to your early days, what were the first musical epiphanies you experienced when you were a kid or in your teens, that sort of got you on the road to music?
Andy Moor : My mom was an opera singer. She used to sing in London. She trained with the London Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Bernstein. She used to go two or three times a week into town and come back. And she was always really full of energy and very happy when she came back from these rehearsals.
And I always really noticed that, that I thought this is what she really, really wants to do. She loved it. So that was probably one of the first things. So she was always singing in the house, practising and playing the piano. And there was always music in my house. So I think that was really one of the first things that I, that was a very normal thing, a normal environmental thing in my house.
And then, what happened next? There was a piano in the house. So I was always playing the piano. I wasn’t just hitting it. I couldn’t read music. I never bothered to learn to read music. And then when I got older, she was playing guitar as well. And she decided to become an acupuncturist. And you have to have very, very sensitive fingers when you do acupuncture. So she had to stop because you have to read people’s pulses. So she gave it to me. And then I just started for about two years. I just played the guitar sitting on the end of my bed, just strumming chords and you know, every day just strumming along to Led Zeppelin records. And then from that, yeah, it just grew.
I just realised that that’s what I wanted. But I went to university still to study. But as soon as I went to university, I was looking for a band to play with. So it was clear that was the direction. So I didn’t really even finish university. I stopped after a couple of years and started playing with the band Dog Faced Hermans, which that was a big epiphany because the musicians in that band, I learned a lot from them. They turned me on to lots of African music, and jazz and free jazz also. A lot of stuff.
PAN M 360 : Do you remember the first concert you attended?
Andy Moor : Attended to see or to play?
PAN M 360 : Attended to see, not as a performer.
Andy Moor : I think it was Thin Lizzy (he laughs). Yeah. I don’t remember exactly when, but I remember seeing Thin Lizzy.
PAN M 360 : Anything else worth mentioning?
Andy Moor : Well, there was a period where there was a venue in Edinburgh called The Queen’s Hall. And a lot of jazz musicians from all over the world would play in this venue. It’s quite a small place and quite low key.
But I saw Don Cherry in there. I saw the Art Ensemble of Chicago in there. I saw amazing free jazz from that period. It was like the 80s, early 80s. And it was stuff that I really didn’t know. And at first, I really wondered, what the hell is this? But I really felt that it had something to it. And it was more my problem that I didn’t really understand. And the more I listened to it, the more I got into it. And then I also was listening to a lot of guitar bands that would come, but more kind of not so much punk, more post-punk-like stuff influenced by the Gang of Four and Captain Beefheart.
There were a lot of young bands coming out of England that were playing in all the pubs in Edinburgh, because I was living in Edinburgh. So I saw this whole scene of bands from Manchester, but really unknown ones, not the kind of really spiky, angular guitar music. There was a band called Big Flame and another band called Bog-Shed.
And these bands really had an impact on me and the rest of the band. We were really influenced by them.
And then we saw The Ex that also had a big, for me, that was quite an epiphany, seeing The Ex for the first time, before I knew them as people, because I really loved their commitment. I could see that they weren’t trying to play perfect virtuoso in music, but they did it with such a commitment and such an energy that it came across, and it was just rhythmically fantastic.
And Sonic Youth. I think Sonic Youth and The Ex had a very big impact on me the first time I saw them.
PAN M 360 : So how did you fit in the band in the very first few months? Did it take a while or it was very natural?
Andy Moor : It felt very natural because the way The Ex rehearsed was really the same as the way Dog Faced Hermans used to rehearse.
We would go into the rehearsal space, nobody wrote anything down. We would play together, improvise quite a lot, bounce off each other’s ideas and record things on a cassette machine. And then it became a mini disc.
And then we would just listen back and keep the good bits and throw out the bad bits. Very simple way of making music, but it worked. And The Ex did the same thing. So I felt really comfortable in that sense when I started rehearsing.
PAN M 360 : So I imagine that modus operandi hasn’t changed much over the years, that you’re still doing the same thing.
Andy Moor : Yeah, we’re doing exactly the same thing.
Nobody really knows what’s going to come out.
PAN M 360 : Since Terry and you have a very unconventional way of approaching the guitar, how do you sort of build your songs?
Andy Moor : Exactly how I just explained it. It usually comes from either a rhythm or one guitar idea, and then we just bounce off each other.
And sometimes you don’t really figure out exactly what you’re doing until you’re playing live. And then you can really change things because you realise what you chose to do doesn’t really work. And so it’s really important that after you’ve rehearsed, we rehearse for like two or three months, and then we go out and we play for a bit.
And then we go back in the rehearsal room and we adjust things. And that second period of rehearsal is really important because it’s really the moment where we’re really learning how to play the songs. And we’re also getting rid of the fat and also understanding how the dynamic works.
And we also remember how the audience reacted to things that really affects it as well. So we build it up and then we usually adjust it maybe two or three times. And then we have a set and then we play it for a year or so, and then we record it. So we always record afterwards.
PAN M 360 : So you did that for the record that you put out last year? You mean that you live with a song for a whole year before recording it?
Andy Moore : At least.
So that record’s a year old, but actually the music’s two years and a bit old. So we’re almost ready to make a new set because we’ve been playing that for a while now. So the audience always kind of hears things that they haven’t heard before.
They’re a bit behind us, but we like it that way. So it’s quite a challenge for them as well. Because we’re not going to play the songs that they know.
We tend to play new material. And I think we have to do that because if we record the songs first, we can’t play them yet. So they don’t sound good.
I think you have to really, it’s not only to do with the technical aspect of how you play, but it’s the sound. It takes a while for all the sounds to lock, where you choose where you leave space and where you add dynamic. And that takes time.
You can only do that after you play live. It’s like the live is really the big learning curve, where we understand what’s really happening.
PAN M 360 : It’s the ultimate reality check.
Andy Moore : Yes.
PAN M 360 : What kind of schedule has the band these days? Is it like you play mostly in the summertime for festivals and stuff and you have a little more time on your hands in the winter, how does it work?
Andy Moore : No, actually, with the exception of these Canadian gigs [Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, June 24, 25 and 26], we don’t play so much in the summer and we don’t play festivals so much in the summer. We’re not really a summer festival band. We tend to play more in the autumn and the spring and the winter and we play a lot. We play about 35 gigs a year now. We used to play 70 or 80, sometimes 90, but now some of us have children and we’re getting a bit older, so we reduced it to 30 to 35 a year.
It’s mostly in Europe and sometimes we used to go to the States quite a bit, but I don’t think we’re going to do that for the foreseeable future, but we definitely like to come to Canada. We love this festival in Montreal. We’ve been to it a few times before, also with different projects.
We came also with our Ethiopian project with Getachew Mekuria. It was fantastic. It’s a great festival. I really love it.
PAN M 360 : Yeah, you’ve been here a few times already for that festival.
Andy Moore : Yeah, and it’s so nice. It’s all in the same street, so you just go back and forth between the two venues. Getachew Mekuria, who was like 80 at the time, he was so happy because he found an armchair in the Casa del Popolo and he just stayed in that armchair for five days. We just went back and forth between the two venues and he just sat there kind of holding court. It was really nice.
PAN M 360 : You’ve also become more adept at doing photographs. For the past few years, we’ve seen more and more of your pictures adorning various record sleeves, even sleeves that are not from Unsounds. So, are you spending more and more time doing photography these days?
Andy Moore : I was up until about two, three years ago. Then I’ve had a dry period. I think I’m just really busy because my boys – I have an eight-year-old son and a 12-year-old son – I’m just busy with them. I play music, I rehearse, and I spend the rest of the time with the boys. I just haven’t got time to really focus on the photography, but it’s there and I love it.
I also had a solo set where I had photos that I would project while I was playing the solo set. I have those, so I can do that from time to time, but I need to get back into it. The last three or four years, the boys are really at this age where I just want to spend as much time as I can with them because I know they’re going to, quite soon, one of them is going to be a teenager. He’s already almost a teenager. The other one’s eight, so it’s a really crucial period. I have to choose to put something to the side and I put the photography to the side. But maybe later when my ears are completely fried, I can go back to the photography.
PAN M 360 : You really have a keen eye, so it would be good for us to see more of it.
By way of conclusion, do you have any message for the fans that are going to be attending the concert next week?
Andy Moore : Well, I hope they dance. Because what we play is basically dance music. It’s loud, but it’s very rhythmic and it’s very danceable. So I hope people feel like dancing, especially in these really, really tough times at the moment, probably less in Canada than in America. And we can’t go to the States at the moment. It just doesn’t work.
And we want to because we have an audience there and I feel like we should go there and play for them because I think more than ever they need to get this kind of cathartic energy out because the situation is so vile there. And so I’m really happy when people…
Recently we played in a festival in England called Acid Horse and the audience was dancing like mad. It was a really special evening and they really made it themselves. It wasn’t like we pushed them or anything. They were there to sort of just get their energy out and they did and it was fantastic. And I’m really happy when when the audience does that.
It just has a chance to really… And I feel like they’re more connected to us when they do that and we can play the songs a bit longer or they dance like that because we also get energy from that when they’re moving. It’s quite strange if you play with our energy and the audience is sitting in chairs watching you. That doesn’t really…
PAN M 360 : Well, it’s pretty hard to stay still when you’re at a concert of The Ex. I remember the whole Sala Rossa erupting the last few times. It was just so amazing. I mean you had the impression that the roof was going to blow off.
So let’s hope you will be in the same sort of spirit next week.
Andy Moore : For sure.
And we love that place the Sala Rossa. Also the Spanish
restaurant. I don’t know if it’s still going but we love it.
PAN M 360 : The one on the floor below? It’s still there.
Andy Moore : And it is going to be great to hang out with Kiva again. She’s fantastic. She’s been really helping us with every kind of… It’s been quite a complicated thing also because of the World Cup football with flights and accommodation and everything.But she’s been unbelievably helpful. It’s really fantastic. She’s really there.
She’s really present for us. So that’s great.
PAN M 360 : Well, we’re really looking forward to seeing you again with The Ex and also with Yannis Kyriakides and the Bozzini Quartet the day before. So we’ll get to see and hear you twice.
Andy Moore : Yeah. That’s going to be great with the Bozzinis.
They’re also fantastic, the Bozzini Quartet. The level of their playing is just remarkable. I always feel a little bit like I’m out of my league when I play with them. But we just come from such different… we’re approaching the music from such different points that it works. It’s like I do the thing that I do and they do the thing that they do. And somehow Yannis kind of glues it together. And it works so well. It’s really a pleasure to play with them.
PAN M 360 : It converges. That’s fine.
Andy Moore : Yes, converges. That’s a good word for it.
PAN M 360 : Well, on that word, thank you very much, Andy, for taking the time to speak with us and see you next week. Bye-bye and have a nice evening.
