Andy Falkous interview: Mclusky guitarist/singer on Pittsburgh, touring, reunion and new album

Andy Falkous, the singer/guitarist for Welsh post-hardcore group Mclusky, will be paying his first visit to Pittsburgh later this month — “unless I got really drunk in 2003 and we played a show somewhere that I just don’t recall.”

Aside from the Pittsburgh Steelers, he admitted to not knowing much about the city, but he’s looking forward to the show in the band’s first East Coast tour in almost 20 years.

“What do I know about Pittsburgh? This is embarrassing,” he said last week in one of many self-deprecating comments in a call from England. “I know quite a lot about Romania, will that do?”

Being informed of the city’s highlights — a former steel city looking to move into the future, with cultural highlights like Andy Warhol and Fred Rogers — sparked a memory.

“Ah, Mister Rogers, I’m aware of that deeply worrying character. To somebody from the UK, without the necessary warm feelings of nostalgia and necessary cultural context, when you see a clip of Mister Rogers, it just looks deeply disturbing,” he said with a laugh.

As potentially disturbing for Falkous would be the financial risks involved in this tour for this small but cherished band. There is potential to make money, mostly on merchandise, but it’s no lock.

“It’s not guaranteed, no, and it’s a real shame when you have to go on a tour and start to see dollar signs everywhere, but as a band in our position, if we didn’t do that, we simply wouldn’t get to tour,” he said. “So there has to be some kind of coming together with reality. But it is a shame.”

Mclusky released three critically admired albums in the early 2000s — “My Pain and Sadness is More Sad and Painful Than Yours” in 2000, “Mclusky Do Dallas” in 2002 and “The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire” in 2004 — but broke up in 2005. Falkous forged ahead with Mclusky drummer Jack Egglestone in Future of the Left as well as a solo project, Christian Fitness.

“At the end of the day, Mclusky and Future of the Left, they make some money, but they weren’t conceived as money-making schemes,” Falkous said. “And if they were conceived as money-making schemes, somebody definitely (messed) up quite badly.”

The band originally planned to hit most of the United States in 2022, but a diagnosis of tinnitus and hyperacusis led to the tour’s abrupt cancellation after a few West Coast dates. That was a massive financial blow to Falkous, who tried to pay everyone involved at least a small bit of money. To make matters worse, on the same day he was making the arrangements to cancel the tour, he found out his refrigerator at home died, with a replacement cost of $1,200.

“It’s one of those moments where you’ve got to stand there, you’ve got to laugh, you gotta say this is gonna be a really good story someday,” he said. “Otherwise it would have just been the question of just sitting down on the floor and just crying, and you can’t do that.”

His hearing issues have been addressed with a Perspex shield around the drums, plus in-ear monitors under ear defenders, which created fleeting moments of self-doubt over the headwear he’d be sporting.

“I feel I’m not a self -conscious person on stage. … But I’m quite a self-conscious person physically, like, taken away from that environment, you know? I am not a person who checks myself out in the mirror all the time and goes, ‘Hey, you got it going on,’” he said. “It’s not really one of the tenets of my personality. So I thought maybe I’d feel pretty insecure going on stage with it. And the first couple of shows were weird because I was finding an element to the way I’ve been doing something for 20-odd years. So it felt strange, but you know what, now it’s fine. It’s absolutely fine. Anybody there to see my pretty ears are going to be disappointed.”

The tour was originally slated to be a 20th anniversary celebration of “Mclusky Do Dallas,” but there are certain songs that won’t be played “because they’re not that good live,” Falkous said: “No New Wave No Fun” has been scrapped because it’s “mush” live, while “Clique Application Form” has been axed because it “isn’t as much a song as an invitation to have a headache.”

There’s plenty of other songs to play from their three albums, plus four new songs released last year. No matter what they’re playing, Falkous has one thing he wouldn’t mind not seeing.

“By the way, if you just mentioned that I would say crowd surfing isn’t my cup of tea, but what are you gonna do? Stage diving, if you could just (expletive) not, that would be great, you know, because somebody always ends up getting hurt and it’s not usually the stage diver,” he said. “Especially feet first, (expletive) dives off the stage. We’re not used to that so when it does happen, we don’t really have a policy for it, you know? Like, hey, could you stop assaulting people at the front? You know, some people are just trying to watch the show and they’re getting a boot in the face.”

For the band now, hitting the road may be a gamble, but Falkous is finding the joy in it — “touring is like a holiday for us because we don’t get to do it very often” — as the reformed group has only played around 40 shows. Getting married (to Future of the Left bassist Julia Ruzicka) and having a 6-year-old daughter (Ella) hasn’t really changed his perspective on playing, other than living more in the moment.

“Having a small child … the joy they get from absolutely (expletive) nothing reminds you to also take joy in absolutely (expletive) nothing at times but then to take joy in the really profound or fun or exciting or shiny things as well,” he said. “Ella’s been to a few of the shows and, oh, it’s incredible.”

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A series of charity shows starting in 2014 stoked the embers of a reunion, although at the beginning, “it was more Future of the Left does Mclusky songs,” Falkous said.

“So much time as a musician at a lower level, you spend jealously guarding any money you make, but when you don’t have to do that and you can be generous, it’s really good and you just feel great about yourself,” Falkous said. “I think for different charities we raised some money in the region of 30,000 pounds all together which just felt amazing. More than a yearly income until Jack turned around to me one day and said, ‘Can we do a fundraising show for ourselves one day?’ And I went, ‘yeah.’ To that stage I kind of got addicted to the feeling of making nice gestures and making people happy. But, sadly, because of capitalism, I’m also addicted to the idea of paying for goods and services and not going to prison.”

Falkous partially cited a writer for The Quietus, who joking described Mclusky as a dollar-store Shellac (the Chicago noise rock band that features noted producer Steve Albini), as a reason for the band’s rebirth. Two rehearsals totaling four hours in February — “which makes it our record-breaking rehearsal month” — led to four new songs, with a new album slated for next year.

“If we had time and money, we’d either be dangerous and generate seven albums a year,” Falkous said, “or it would go very, very wrong in a way.”

With half of the album recorded and the second half just about written, “The World Is Still Here and So Are We” should come out early in 2025. And Falkous is already thinking ahead to the next album after that, hoping to record it in Chicago.

“That just hasn’t been practical for this one and also we haven’t had the money, but that would just be great and not just in terms of the band’s career — you can underline that or put that in quotes or italics or whatever you like — but just for the sheer hell of actually doing it and having the story and having the memory of it,” he said. “I think (the new album will) come out to — it’s not early on in the band’s career where you’re trying to change people’s minds or people will resist into it — people want it, that’s the impression I get. And that feeling, even though it doesn’t in and of itself inspire the art, it’s wonderful to feel people drawing you towards themselves, so I’m very excited to get it finished and put it out.”