Solo flight for Finn Andrews

By CATHRIN SCHAER

Tradition dictates that the average New Zealand lad celebrate his 21st birthday with a big raucous party, far too much beer, alcohol-induced illness and then possibly a bucket and an awful hangover.

Clearly Finn Andrews is not your average New Zealand lad.

"Drinking a bottle of tequila and watching Edward Scissorhands," he replies sardonically when asked how he would be celebrating his 21st birthday, to take place the day after this interview.

But maybe this is hardly surprising. Listening to the Veils, of which Andrews is the vocalist and chief songwriter, he comes across as a pretty uncommon sort of guy.

On The Runaway Found, their glorious debut album, you will hear wintry landscapes painted in sepia, poets in anguish, the beat of broken hearts and art students in vintage suits, black lace and cool old men's shoes. The sweeping strings, occasionally jaunty guitars and emotionally manic vocals bring to mind such acts as Jeff Buckley, Nick Cave and Echo and The Bunnymen as well as other assorted pre-90s headliners.

Andrews comes across as far more mature on the album than his years would suggest. When reviewers weren't comparing his vocals to a cross between Eartha Kitt and a vacuum cleaner they were guessing he must be at least 44. Then they went on about the music a bit.

And though the Veils have been becoming bigger in Britain for the past few months, no one here has really noticed Andrews because "we haven't really played here yet." Anyway as he says, he's happy for people to discover his music at their own pace.

This quiet story of musical success begins halfway up Mt Victoria, Devonport, in a folk music club held every Monday night in one of the old bunkers.

Andrews, who is the son of New Zealander Vivienne Kent and musician Barry Andrews, keyboard player in XTC and founder of 80s post-punk, art-funk group Shriekback, was born in London.

However after some rather Bohemian to-ing and fro-ing between New Zealand and Britain, he eventually spent much of his adolescence with his mother on the North Shore.

Originally Andrews had wanted to be an artist - but somewhere between London and Devonport (and back again) music took over.

"I don't know if you're born with it." Andrews ponders whether his overwhelming urge to start writing music at the age of 15 would have come if he'd been born into a different family. "Maybe you're just more disposed to it. But it is kind of wonderful to have a father who's gone through some of the same things and who's kept his integrity."

Drawn to the mildly eccentric folk music club that's been held on Mt Victoria for more than 30 years, he eventually started playing his own instruments, firstly in a folk group, and then later, as a solo act.

"I'd been brought up on 80s electronica really," he told a British interviewer, "And when I went out to New Zealand, suddenly there was this whole other thing that I'd never really heard, like one guy up there with a guitar. Or even three guys with a drum kit doing noisy energetic stuff, and it got to me a lot more than the drum machines and synthesisers.

Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan were major influences. As were the Devonport old-timers. "We were coached by second-generation folkies passing on their advice about harmony and arrangement. So that kind of music became a regular feature in my life."

At the tender age of 18, armed with his own compositions, Andrews returned to London again, formed the Veils and got a recording contract. The next couple of years were spent making an album, then negotiating with the music industry in order to get it released. After swapping labels and a fair deal of legal wrangling, the Veils' album, produced by Suede's former guitarist Bernard Butler, was finally released early this year to almost unanimous critical acclaim.

Though the international reviewers tried to classify them (80s revivalists, Britpop, the next Coldplay? - all descriptions that Andrews despises) the Veils themselves went on tour with the likes of Suede, the Raveonettes, Beth Orton and the Cooper Temple Clause.

After which, Andrews decided he needed to return to New Zealand. He even broke up with his band.

"I don't really feel like I've left the band. I feel like I'm carrying on," explains Andrews, who is eventually hoping to assemble another band under the same moniker. "More than anything right now, I'm trying to write [music]. I'm just trying to get my head clear."

As you might imagine, writing choleric, emotional songs like those on The Runaway Found, songs like Lavinia can't always come easily.

"It usually comes when I'm thinking of nothing else, when it feels like the only thing I am able to do at that moment.

It's almost, he says, as though his music is the receptacle for an overflow of emotions. "[I write] when something's burning [me] up and I have to put it into something else. I don't really have much time for music that doesn't have that kind of blood and fire in it."

For Andrews, the re-routed artist, music is all about art.

"It's been fun hearing stories from people at gigs," he says, when asked what it feels like to have distributed your very personal and teenage tales of love and lust to the rest of the world.

"After shows they'll come up and say 'I first heard your music when I was doing this' or 'Our first child was conceived to that song'. It's a slightly spurious sort of business, to sell little bits of yourself, isn't it?" he laughs.

And this, apparently, is only the beginning. "Will I keep going? Yes, forever. And ever," he says, then stops, amused. "How confident of me!"

"No," he muses, "Maybe I'll just keep going until there are other things that interest me." But actually, the soon-to-be 21 year old concludes seriously, and with unseasonable maturity, "I think this might be my thing."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Finn Andrews, North Shore-raised singer-songwriter

BORN: London, 1983

ALBUM: The Veils: Runaway Found (Rough Trade), out now