Home lifts Veils' lead

The new line-up, from left, Sophia Burn, Finn Andrews and Liam Gerard.

If Finn Andrews isn't writing songs he goes a little crazy. And it's in New Zealand - on Auckland's North Shore to be exact - where the Veils' frontman comes up with his best work.

The 22-year-old was born in London and is still based there, but he spent his formative years on the Shore, where he attended Belmont Intermediate and Takapuna Grammar. He even sang at the Devonport Folk Club.

As a 16-year-old he wrote The Runaway Found, the Veils' debut album, released in 2004. But constant touring and commitments to that album meant he didn't write songs for a long time, and he suffered.

"Looking back, the reason I was feeling so out of line with the universe at that time is that I really need songwriting as a way of getting through things.

"I had been on tour for ages and was starting to lose a grip on a lot of things and hadn't written in that whole time. When I can't do that, I don't end up a very balanced individual," he laughs.

There were other problems too: his band was not working out and they split up soon after The Runaway Found was released.

"I'd written that album in New Zealand, came to London when I was 16, and found those guys within a month. It came about quite quickly, and we tried our best to make it work but it never felt like a band at all.

"Plus," he says, "my songwriting was changing rapidly, and I had all these ideas of what else I wanted to do, but I was tied to these things I'd written between 14 and 16, and it drove me up the wall."

Last year he headed "back home" to New Zealand in the hope it would inspire him to write new material. "Within a few weeks of being back there was a flood of songs," he says. "That's what is so great about New Zealand because you can detach from all that pressure. I just sank back into how I wrote the first one which was writing for myself."

So, armed with a new band (more on them later), he recorded Nux Vomica, a moving, turbulent and sometimes stroppy album that packs more punch than the debut.

One song, Jesus for the Jugular, is a raging Nick Cave-type tirade inspired by Christian influences at school when he was a teen.

"They didn't push it in your face, exactly, but it's always a subtext to everything in the West.

"I suppose I felt there was more at stake with Nux Vomica and I had something to prove, which I think means it comes across as being slightly violent and more hungry.

"With the first one I felt so out of my depth, trying to make sense of what it was all about, but with this one I feel a sense of control about what we are doing and I actually had an idea of what I wanted."

Andrews is softly spoken and it's not hard to imagine him being somewhat of a recluse, yet Nux Vomica, which came out this week, oozes confidence.

With lines like "From the hands of Christ to the head of the Daily Mail, I'll see you all and I'll raise you", from the title track, he sounds more self-assured and cocky this time round.

"There's that adolescent thing on the early one where the songs are a bit two dimensional. Then you get a little older and you stop taking yourself quite so seriously - and a little more serious in some areas too - but you get a lot harsher in the dissection of how you see yourself."

Andrews comes from a strong musical pedigree - his father, Barry Andrews, was the keyboardist in the original line-up of XTC and the frontman of 80s art-funk oddballs, Shriekback. However, he didn't force music on his son.

Instead, says Andrews, music was something that was always around the house. One of the first instruments he learned to play was the didgeridoo in his dad's Celtic storytelling band.

"But I expressed very little interest in music until I came to New Zealand, when music became something I could run away into at high school."

When he was at high school he made friends with Liam Gerard and Sophia Burn. During his latest stint back in Devonport he hooked up with the pair again and they now make up the Veils, with Gerard on organ/piano and Burn playing bass.

"They were among my closest friends throughout high school so coming back to New Zealand and playing with people I had a history with, and a real love for, was the way to go, and you can hear it in the music," he says.

"I get the same feeling now as when I was working on stuff with them at school. No matter how many people we're playing in front of, it still kind of feels like a school assembly or something."