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Recommended Listening - Introducing Andy Lewis

When did you first start playing music?

When I was a small boy there was a lot of music going on in our house. My dad played a bit of guitar and piano and my mum played the violin and piano and was a singer.

I had piano lessons but didn’t really get on with it as I was a bit clumsy – I had big hands – but at my junior school I found a cello in the cupboard and the music teacher there suggested I try that. I found it easier to play and there was only one line of music to read compared with two for the piano!

Then when I went to secondary school, life seemed more interesting; friends had older brothers with things like electric guitars and cellos weren’t really cool. It was Watford Boys Grammar school – which sounds really posh, and indeed it thought it was, but it was basically a common school that had a really good music department.

When I was aged 11, in around 1981, a few of us decided we were going to form a band and as I played the cello and still had big hands I decided on the bass guitar. I asked for one for Christmas, got one, taught myself the bass solo from My Generation and I was off!

What was the music scene like there?

Name: Andy Lewis Instrument: Bass guitar Current job: Solo artist, bassist in The Red Inspectors and with Paul Weller, and DJ.

Martin Rossiter of Gene was in my year at school, and the guitarist in James, Lee Baker. I met Pete Twyman, the guitarist in Pimlico and The Red Inspectors, in Hammonds music shop in Watford. I was looking at an advert he’d put up looking for a bass with influences from Style Council, The Jam, The Who, that sort of thing. I was ‘taking the afternoon off school’ and he was ‘taking the afternoon off work’, and we’ve been playing in bands together now since around 1986. Pete is probably one of the most accomplished musicians I’ve met.

What happened after school?

I went to university in Wales in a little place between Swansea and Aberystwyth and anyone who played an instrument was seized upon to be in a band. I ended up playing guitar in a Welsh mod revival band that we named Dim Disco Heno, which means ‘no disco tonight’. We weren’t Welsh at all and couldn’t really speak the language, but it was a great laugh!

When did you start DJ-ing?

When I was at university. I had everything from 1960s pop, stuff like The Creation, The Eyes, John’s Children and also lots of soul that I’d bought back in Watford market over the years. By then Northern Soul and the mod revival were really unfashionable and people dumped their records, so I was like a vulture and picked through all this second-hand stuff. I also had new stuff like The Milkshakes, The Prisoners, James Taylor Quartet, Boys Wonder, The Godfathers, The Wonderstuff’s first album, loads of really good stuff that was being released around 1987.

How did you get involved with Blow Up in London?

I used to go to Wendy May’s Locomotion as a punter and it was a great club, a great night out and you got in cheap if you were a nurse, student or unemployed. I was an unemployed student.

I used to ask Wendy about obscure old soul stuff that she’d never heard of so I gave her tapes of stuff I had and one day she asked me if I’d like to bring some records along and do the first hour. So I started doing that, then I was filling in for her if she couldn’t do it for some reason, and that’s how I got to do Blow Up.

I was hanging out in Camden, buying records, and I met a guy called Paul Tunkin at Out On The Floor Records in Inverness Street. He was putting a night on, it wasn’t called Blow Up yet, and invited me to play because he knew I had some interesting records and could bring a few people along. That was where it started really. We had a vote what to call the club night and Blow Up got the biggest cheer!

We were in the Laurel Tree in Camden from 1993 when it started to about 95 or 96, then we moved to the Wag in the West End. I left in about 2001 but Paul is still doing Blow Up today...

www.soundcloud.com/the-red-inspectors

• Read the whole interview in Scootering magazine - February 2012