Hi Andy! I’m glad I found you. There are a lot of Andrew Butlers on Skype.
Yeah, for sure. I have a very scary profile picture. It might be a bit misleading – you’re maybe like: ‘Woah! Who’s that person?’
Wait! I don’t see any picture.
OK. Perfect. I think I removed it in a cringing moment.
Now I want to know what it was!
I think I was just making a screaming face, looking a little bit like a demented metal-head. My hair was a bit longer – I was in one of my silly splatter-head metal moments.
Have you ever been a metalhead?
Yes I was – I got really into alternative extreme metal when I was young. After I was listening to industrial music I got into the more brutal stuff, like Napalm Death and Godflesh. I still listen to that stuff, and I’m still digging and learning about it. My brother is the singer for an extreme metal band. So I’m still once a week having a moment where I’m like: ‘Let’s learn something I didn’t know about early thrash, or early metal, or early death, or whatever’.
Are you ever going make any metal?
[sotto voce] I’ve already started …
But I really don’t talk about it because it was sort of an experiment – I went to the studio with my younger brother. We were playing music together as kids, then I got into DJing at 15, and of course he followed suit and started sneaking into my room and playing my records – and he got a DJ residency as a teenager before I ever did, then returned to his roots in hardcore metal.
So I collaborated with him and this amazing female guitar player and one of the fellows I’d been working with in Hercules who used to be in Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto. We just decided to do something like an industrial, doomy, death, grind project. It’s really cool sounding but it hasn’t seen the light of day yet. It’s because, during my waking hours I’m doing uplifting dance numbers, so it’s hard for me to put as much energy into it. I just asked my brother again if we’re going to do something with it – I think we will, but probably in some weird understated anti-pop way. It’s sort of like Godflesh, because I’m super influenced by them, but it’s a bit more metal, and a bit slow techno.
I wasn’t expecting the conversation to go this way …
Now you know way too much about my dark musical influences.
Has it been easy to compartmentalise what you do as Hercules and Love Affair, and what you do as the solo artist Andy Butler?
There’s not too much of a break. It’s still blurry. Hercules albums have taken me a long time – they can be quite involved, finding the right people, the constellation of participants. I would say that the Andy Butler thing is an opportunity for me to go directly for the dancefloor. I can be more club-oriented – if I want to make a really rough techno track, that might not fit on a Hercules track I can. It’s a chance for me to still put out content without it being such a considered and involved product as Hercules. That shouldn’t comment on the quality of the music!
I like the fact that right now I’m kind of creating this time limit thing. I go into the studio and spend four hours on a track in production mode. I’ll spend another 4 hours on this track, and that will be it. I just want to get a room going crazy with this track, and that’s it. I have a lot of different sides which I’d like to contribute to the world, and they don’t all fit nicely together, you know?
Were you trying to get the immediacy of those early Chicago and Detroit records that were knocked up in half a day?
That’s exactly what I’m after – the immediacy you can hear in those tracks, and the vibrancy and the life. And the roughness – allowing the machines not to be in sync perfectly, all of things that have a charm, a magic even, which technology has increasingly eliminated. So I’m taking a step back.
So why did you move to Brussels?
I moved here in May of last year for a number of reasons – the primary one being that I found my partner here. I decided to make my base here. But also it made sense in being in close proximity to my current singers, and to London and to Paris. So all the rational reasons were there, and all the irrational, sentimental reasons.
Do you miss being in America?
Parts of America I totally miss. There’s a certain way that the people have in terms of approachability and levelling with each other. There’s not so much decorum that one has to get through – you can kind of cut to the chase, which I miss sometimes. I think I’m adapting more and more to being in Europe. It’s exciting being on a continent that has so many cultures in such a small space. I love that in an hour I’m around a totally different language, different demographics – it’s just a different kind of diversity that you don’t get in the States. I’ve also got a little more politically inclined since leaving America, although that might just be an to do with my age.
Politically inclined? How?
I think there was a certain apathy I walked round with in the States that I don’t carry anymore. I’m engaged in what’s going on in the world now, outside of my bubble. I mean, it’s so lame, but there was a moment as a kid growing up when I was like, ‘I don’t need to go round the world – I can go to the Epcot centre and visit seven countries in one day’. That’s as far as my brain got, and it doesn’t feel that way any more.
There are stereotypical American characteristics that I can raise my hand and say, yeah, I had those. I think it’s a late-stage capitalist thing – I don’t think it’s necessarily just an American thing. I’m not just disparaging – I’m just getting more acclimated to living in Europe [in a stage whisper] I also have to say that because my boyfriend’s in the other room.
Andy’s You Can Shine EP is out now on mr.intl
