DbR speaks to Mr Andy Abbott about life, art and the DIY music scene – If you like your rock geezers with their fingers in many pies – tuck in!
1: Hey Andy, introduce yourself… a little history maybe ?
Hi Rob, I’m Andy, I’m a 28 year-old man; I like to eat hot meals in the evening but can handle something straight out of the fridge or at room temperature for lunch. I play guitar in the rock duo That Fucking Tank, am a member of the art collective Black Dogs, study a PhD in socially engaged art practice at the University of Leeds, do a bit of teaching at Leeds College of Art, and live in Saltaire, West Yorkshire with my girlfriend Yvonne. That’s my life.
I was born in the Highlands of Scotland to a young mother and older dad where some of our meals during Winter months were poached off of the local moors. As a youngster I was particularly interested in field sports; air rifle target-shooting, archery, training kestrels and other birds of prey, ferreting and baseball. Around 8-10 years old I got addicted to ZX spectrum and NES games. Upon starting secondary school in Matlock, Derbyshire I got into alternative rock music, learning how to play guitar and bass by ‘borrowing’ other student’s instruments at break-times with my friend James.
I moved to Leeds at 18 to do music ‘properly’ with my post-grunge band Viagra but ended up working in warehouses and call-centres that drained me of any juice necessary to play music. After a year I decided to take an easier option and attended art-college where I met some inspirational chaps from differing backgrounds including Giles Bailey with whom I formed the band Real Fucky Fucky. Around this time I really got into the DIY music scene in Leeds – seeing it as a natural continuation from the gigs I’d been organising in Village Halls and Youth Clubs in Matlock – and started putting on gigs as a guaranteed way of making sure Real Fucky Fucky got to play live. One of the first gigs we put on with our art school collective of friends was for J*R and a band from Stoke called Truckdriver.
Following this life-changing experience I carried on playing in bands with more vim and vigour, including the very Shellac-y Kill Yourself, and decided to carry on studying art because it was much easier than working. Since then I’ve pretty much studied art and played music in equal measure, somehow scraping an existence out of both. Life is sweet.
2: Quite a history… onto music… That Fucking Tank seem to be going from strength to strength, a new album, UK tour etc – what next?
That Fucking Tank came about initially as a joke band – we formed it in 2004 because Giles from Kill Yourself was living in Glasgow and we needed another band to play a gig of only two-piece bands we were organising in Leeds, so James and I wrote some tracks as a duo. The fact that it has ‘progressed’ in anyway from this pointless beginning is purely down to chance.
Tank seems to go down well with people because, I believe, it has a degree of sincerity to it. We never intended to achieve anything with the band other than write some music that would keep us entertained whilst playing it, and I think this translates into an enjoyable spectacle. We have certainly done much more with the band than I ever anticipated. That could be down to the fashionable element of noisy rock duos or our ‘outrageous’ name but I like to think it’s because people like to see two people that have known each other for a very long time go at it hard on their respective instruments. As far as I’m concerned that’s all (punk) rock music has to offer in social terms – some outright honesty.
Did you ever snare a vocalist?
A year or two ago we invited Giles to come and do some singing with us to spice up the tracks a little as he had finished Uni and we saw it as a way of getting us three lads back together. We’ve had some very fun gigs playing as a trio. Giles, however, is an incredibly busy man with some very exciting pots on the boil at all times, so it has only ever been an informal arrangement, coming together when the stars align.
As it turns out there are a lot of practical benefits to being an instrumental duo – you never have to bother the sound engineer, you can travel in a transit van without doing anything illegal, you only ever have to ask promoters for a double bed and a hot meal for two, rounds are easily held in two hands and so on. We recorded our most recent album, Tanknology, without vocals due to time constraints and the logistics in getting three people in a room together. We do have plans to perhaps release the version with singing at some point though, although this might end up in the same swamp as the ‘lost’ Kill Yourself album.
Tank continue to operate on the same principles we started the band with; we do what we feel like. This has meant we’ve done some pretty unexpected things, like playing at Leeds and Reading festivals last year on the same day as Metallica as well as the more self-organised activities like touring Europe regularly. At the moment f writing we are trying to book ourselves a tour along the West Coast of America and get a gig with our heroes Therapy?. Reef still haven’t responded to our requests for a support tour.
3: Any planned releases for OBA label ?
Obscene Baby Auction is something we’ve not felt the need to do for a while. At the start of this decade (that’s the way to phrase it to make you feel ancient) it felt like someone really needed to document the excellent music that was coming out of Leeds’ DIY music community. We loved buying records and we also really wanted to be on one so we started a record label that released music by our bands and others that we liked (including J*R, Bilge Pump, Humanfly and the like).
The landscape in Leeds has changed drastically since then. There are loads more bedroom record labels like OBA – surprising, given the decline in people actually buying physical-format releases – and it felt to us like the ‘scene’ was getting documented without our needing to do so. So really we just slowed down. I think other people offering to release our records, like Jealous and Gringo, contributed to our declining motivation too.
I’m now really interested in revisiting the vinyl format just because of the perversity of it. It’s so hard to sell records at the moment because music is freely available – which I see as a good thing – that the whole idea of selling a physical object that contains music really has to be rethought. I think it can still be relevant and worthwhile. With Black Dogs we’re currently working on an ‘audio almanac’ which is meant to be like an exhibition on a record. Each track will correspond to a page in the accompanying booklet and audio and visuals should be experienced simultaneously. I’m not sure what submissions we’re going to get for it (we tend to do a call out for contributions from artists and friends) but I think it’ll include some spoken word, music, field recordings, comedy sketches and the like. Its going to be on gatefold vinyl so you can have that immersive experience you used to get with the War of the Worlds vinyl as a child.
As for OBA, I’d really like to document the current European DIY network that we tour on. There are some incredible bands from Italy (like GI Joe and Nervous Kid), France (Sincabeza and Pneu) and elsewhere that, as far as I’m concerned, play much more interesting music and go about things in a much more interesting way than their American counterparts. There’s a stigma attached to European bands that stops people checking them out in the same way they might a band with (USA) after their name on a flyer. I don’t know if releasing a record that compiles those bands would make any difference to that but it would certainly ‘immortalise’ something that is very important to me; I guess that’s the best way to approach releasing a record at the moment – at least I want it even if no-one else does.
4: To most people reading this you will be known for your work with TFT and previously Kill Yourself – how/when did the transition to art come about or is it something you always had in you?
Well. I kind of explained how I ‘got into’ art earlier. It was really just because I used to be good at drawing so got a reasonable A-level which meant I was accepted to do a foundation course at LCAD when I applied after being scared shitless by the thought of having to work for a living. I never had an interest in art properly – never went to any galleries or paid attention to the art scene – but I enjoyed drawing.
At art college I had my eyes opened to forms of artistic practice that I had been naïve of previously – things like Arte Povera or the time-sensitive sculptures of Anya Gallacio – and ended up doing a lot more object or performance based work that referenced my time working in warehouses and call centres. I still didn’t think much to the ‘Art World’ though – just seeing it as a big commercial industry that feeds off people’s creativity and operates on rules of fashion and styles (which it is!).
I much preferred the DIY music-scene which seemed to offer a genuine alternative to market-based mechanisms and was much easier to participate in. The idea of becoming a famous artist and having work in galleries was never an ambition of mine. Nevertheless I decided to continue studying art at the University of Leeds as a way to defer the world of work and to allow me more time to concentrate on the bands I was in and the gigs we were organising.
The course was really disappointing and I felt very frustrated, but mostly despondent, towards it. It contained a large theory element (which I liked because I enjoy writing) but I didn’t really come across anything that I felt an affinity with historically or in the contemporary art world. That was until I came across the Situationist International (a French radical political group of the 50s and 60s) and a lot of the stuff I’d been doing within the DIY music scene and some of the more labour-critical art works I’d been making at Uni started to fit together.
Around the same time a group of us that were in the same year group of the course decided that, as the Uni wasn’t providing us with the space, resources and critical feedback we felt we needed, that we’d start working autonomously outside of the Uni. That was how Black Dogs started. We began having meetings in the pub just between the six of us (there were only six original members) to talk about each other’s work and plan an exhibition that would happen somewhere in Leeds.
This was a really massive step for us because it was, for me at least, very much informed by the DIY ethos learned from the music scene. We realised that we didn’t need to wait around for some gallery owner or agent to pick us up after we graduated in order to have an exhibition. Instead we could just find an empty space in Leeds and between the six of us we had all the necessary skills and energy to make a good job of organising our own. The first few things we did outside the Uni (whilst still students) created quite a buzz in the, very small, art scene in Leeds and we got a lot of support.
Over time we realised that the way we were doing art was probably more interesting than the actual objects we were making and our practice become much more process-based and allowed room for the audience to participate in it. Over time I started to realise that the history of art was in fact much more radical and interesting than I had previously imagined – that underneath the whole art-as-commodity and museums-and-galleries-for-the-bourgeois-cattle there was in fact an incredibly subversive current that makes the DIY music scene look conservative and inward-looking by comparison.
I got much more into art as public interventions and working with ‘communities’ (for want of a better word), or socially-engaged practice as it is commonly referred to. The good thing about art is that it can be anything so the parameters are much less fixed than they are with music. You can just keep following a thread or an idea into a form that is most appropriate to it. My PhD research, which is practice-led, is about ‘facilitating self-organisation’, which is art-speak for encouraging or allowing space for DIY activity; for people to learn how to do things their own way, to create their own paths and to challenge the established order of things. So really, I think my art practice has been completely born out of my experience in music but has allowed me to explore what I found interesting about it in much more detail and breadth.
Links:
AndyAbbott.co.uk
Black Dogs Art Projects
That Fucking Tank on myspace