COMING ON STRONG

At just twenty years of age (and looking at least ten years older!) Andrew Strong has done well to survive as mentally intact as he appears to be. Thrust into the limelight at a time when most adolescent males are wondering what they’re going to do with their lives and coming to terms with their identities, he’s had to do most of his growing-up in public. His remarkable performance in The Commitments and its subsequent spectacular success made him an overnight star and brought instant fame and recognition. Greater rewards followed with a record deal, concert tours and of course the financial benefits success brings.

He’s already lived for short spells in LA and New York and is now based more or less permanently in London. Barely out of his teens, he now enters a crucial period in his life, where he consolidates his own solo career and attempts to emerge from the shadow of the movie role which typecast him as a precocious teenage soul-man leading a bunch of no-hopers. He reflects candidly on The Commitments experience with the benefit of a couple of years’ distance from the hype and euphoria surrounding the film’s release.

“At the start when we did the movie we were very naive,” he says. “I mean, I was just out of school, I had nothing else to go to and here I was being offered the chance to make a movie with a big-time director. For a sixteen-year-old kid to get that opportunity and that sort of money was just unthinkable – I thought I was a fucking millionaire! We were getting something like sixteen hundred pounds a week each during the shooting.

“But I can tell you, man,” he continues. “I soon discovered that making a film is a very hard thing to do. You’re up from seven in the morning ’till about six or seven that evening. That’s about eleven or twelve hours a day - working under sweltering hot 65K lights most of the time. It was pretty intense and we didn’t get much time to spend all that money.”

But there have been consistent rumours about the possibility of a sequel to The Commitments being made and reports that Strong had demanded megabucks for appearing in any kind of follow-up. He dismisses this as pure speculation.

“Some of the tabloids have been saying I wouldn’t do it for less than two million,” he says, “but that’s just something that’s been put about. The others have been saying they would do it, and they probably think they can name their price and get it, but I don’t know. Look at somebody like Michelle Pfeiffer. She gets a million for a film so what the fuck are they gonna get? But I don’t really blame the others for trying to cash-in on The Commitments,” he continues. “You can’t really blame them. At the end of the day if you’re involved with something that’s really good, you’re going to try to make the best of it while you can.

Strong is philosophical about the impact the movie has had on his own life. “When The Commitments came out it was like a big bomb landed and left a big fucking hole in the ground. Everybody’s going ’wow look at the size of that hole’, because it was so fucking successful. And where was I man? I was right at the bottom of that hole. While everybody was still crawling around the bottom of that hole I was climbing out.

“I’m still climbing and I’m not out of that hole yet,” he states bluntly. “If I was to do a Commitments 2 I might as well fucking bury myself in that hole again, it’s as simple as that. If I didn’t have another career, fine I’d probably go ahead and do it. But even then, nothing is guaranteed, if a film comes out in LA, you’re forgotten about in two weeks time, and sequels have a nasty habit of disappearing without trace.”

While it’s undoubtedly true that he wouldn’t be in the position he’s in now were it not for The Commitments, he does possess a brilliant voice and an instinct for black music and rhythm and blues normally associated with someone twice his age. The soul classics he sang in The Commitments have become the definitive cover versions of those songs, so it’s pretty likely that sooner or later his talents would have brought him some sort of recognition however long it took.

Still, Strong has taken his time with his own eponymous debut, which has now been released to generally positive, if slightly mixed reaction. He openly acknowledges that trying to establish a solo career in the immediate aftermath of the movie’s astonishing success would have been crazy.

“How could I have competed with something that’s sold 4.5 million albums worldwide?” he says. “The Commitments had 14 million pounds of budget and promotion behind it and has now grossed something like 75 million dollars. You just can’t compete with that. People didn’t want to hear Andrew Strong’s solo album. They wanted to hear ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘The Midnight Hour’ and all of that stuff from the soundtrack. So I waited for all the hype to die down.”

While Strong’s solo album features a couple of brassy soul numbers and some of the chops he picked up in The Commitments, there are also some hints of a move towards a more rock-based direction. The album was produced by Danny Kortchmar, known in the past as a session guitar-player who played on Carole King’s Tapestry and many of James Taylor’s early albums. Was Strong under any pressure from the record company to follow the movie soundtrack’s successful formula and do a straight soul album?

“There was an element of pressure from the company,” he says, “but as far as I’m concerned it’s my voice, it’s my selection of music and it’s my taste that ultimately puts money into their pockets. So I think I should be entitled to make the album the way I wish. But obviously I am open to criticism and willing to take advice.

“When I did The Commitments, I had a guide in Alan Parker,” he continues. “He was kind of like my advisor and mentor. After the film, I met probably every producer in the fucking world, man. But I was on my own by then. And when you’re sixteen years of age, sitting in a room full of record company executives in Los Angeles, telling you what way your album should be and stuff like that, it all gets a bit overwhelming. You’re going like ’yeah I’ll do this and I’ll do that’, but I was just very naive and didn’t know what I was doing half the time.

“But then I met Danny Kortchmar and his vibe was like `fuck the whole lot of them, Fuck them. Let’s go and shut the doors and make our own album’. And I really liked that attitude. I just didn’t want to be pushed around.”

Strong is pleased with the reaction to the album so far. It’s gone top 40 in most places in Europe and he has just been told today that it’s gone to number 29 in Denmark. ‘Ain’t Nothing You Can Do’ has been out already as a single but the next one will be ‘Same Old Me’, a ballad in the classic Rod Stewart style which has been picking up the most airplay since the album came out and which has potential as a hit single given the right push.

“It’s a good album I think,” he concludes. “Everybody makes a great album and this is not Andrew Strong’s great album, but it’s a good album.”

What about criticisms that Strong is merely a Joe Cocker soundalike and that he doesn’t really have an original approach?

“Yeah, people make the Joe Cocker comparison all the time,” he says, “and I did listen to Joe Cocker a lot, but the comparison is becoming a bit tedious by now. To me it’s a compliment when people say I sound like him but I think as I go on I’m starting to develop my own sound anyway.

Inevitably, Andrew Strong has met more than his fair share of rock ’n’ roll personalities. Has meeting former heroes ever proved disappointing?

“Most of the people I’ve met have been doing it for twenty years or so,” he says, “and they’ve gone through the stages of being pretentious and being an asshole. It’s all so predictable in Rock and Roll,” he continues. “I mean, you go through your ‘I’ve lost the plot’ stage, you go through your ‘psychedelic’ stage and you finally come down to earth. It’s like Clapton, I mean he did all his drugs and booze and now he’s just doing his own thing, making music. Most of the people I’ve met have been like that. But then again I’ve come across people who’ve got this vibe pinned on to them and I’m not really into people like that.”

Was he ever tempted to sample some of the more exotic stimulants that might have come his way?

“No not really,” he says. “You’ve just gotta be careful out there these days, you can’t afford to over-bubble too much. I mean I don’t live that extravagantly anyway. I still have the same mates. When I go out I don’t go out with a wallet full of fifties or even twenties. I just bring what I need. I buy a lot of guitars and amps and that sort of stuff, but I don’t spend that much money on luxuries.”

What about sex? Surely there are endless opportunities for him to meet women in the business he’s in?

“Well I’ve seen some really beautiful girls in my travels,” he admits, “and I’ve had some things going down with some of them along the way. I’m only human and you’ve got to get your jolly sometimes,” he laughs. “But I’m definitely not into groupies. Around the time of the whole Commitments thing there was a lot of that going down and it got a little crazy.”

Was he tempted?

“Yeah, I mean, everybody goes through that at some stage don’t they?” he says, “unless you’re married or something, but I’m not into that now. I don’t want to have a steady girlfriend at the moment because I’m on the road a lot of the time - it just wouldn’t work out.”

Andrew’s father Rob is a legend in his own right on the Irish music scene. Was it easier for him having a family background in the business?

“Oh yeah,” he says. “In fact I’ve worked with a lot of people who used to work with my dad and it’s great because they’ve known me virtually all my life. James Delaney my keyboard player used to babysit me when I was about five years of age so that’s how close it gets.

“The great thing about my family,” he continues, “is if I have a problem with a guitar or something I just talk to my dad, or if I have a business problem I can talk to my mum - she’s real business oriented. And of course there’s always been a great record collection in the house,” he adds. “There’s stuff there, man, that I’ve never even heard of! Lots of vinyl long-playing records that I must get to listen to some day.”

He’s toured incessantly over the past year and is confident that his current live show is more Andrew Strong than The Commitments.

“People still want ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘Midnight Hour’ and I still do those numbers,” he continues. “But having said that, I played in Germany to a hundred and twenty thousand people recently and I didn’t do one Commitments number and my own album went down a storm there. But the way I look at it is, The Commitments’ songs are not shitty songs, they’re good fucking songs. It’s not as if I have to sing something like Gary Glitter’s ‘Do You Wanna Be In My Gang’ every night.

“But The Commitments thing will eventually fade away and hopefully by then I’ll become more known and appreciated for my own stuff.”