Andrew Fagan

Andrew Fagan was the lead singer/showoff in the Wellington punk rock band ‘The Ambitious Vegetables’ circa 1978. He formed ‘The Mockers’ in Wellington 1980 whilst completing a BA in Politics. The Mockers played a lot of gigs and got well known.

NZ Vocalist of the year 1985 and five albums later The Mockers fled to the UK to try again. Trapped in a flat with everyone fucking each other’s girlfriends it all ended fairly predictably, how do you spell ‘animosity’?.

Eventually back in Auckland in the early nineties, a solo album ‘Blisters’ followed; but Bloke New Zealand (BNZ) didn’t really respond. Three poetry books further cemented his distance from rugby league audiences.

Back to the UK in 1995 and LIG was formed to carry his songwriting torch.

One critic likened Fagan’s band LIG to “a single-minded musical crusade with take a flyer myopic vision, slashing a path through the undergrowth with their machetes, heading for the high ground with no map to speak of, forever upwards, almost making it to the clearing at the top with a large audience, but not quite. Music anthropologists in time will find their bones and see how close they deserved to get."

Back again in NZ Harper Collins released ‘Swirly World, the solo voyages’ (2002) a sailing narrative that tells his story quite poignantly.

You can see Fagan and his band LIG at a gig somewhere in NZ. Adults only.

His poems here are from a new collection ‘Overnight Downpour’

BEATING TO WINDWARD

It was late

And there was still a long way left to go

We had long since stopped speaking

Although often we had touched before

In the dark

You saw a shooting star

Heard me snoring

We’d had an early morning

With no relief

We could not see where we were going

Over our collective horizon

Beating to windward

Mere moments of memory

Yet wishing them away

Relentlessly squinting at the horizon

And sometimes at each other

Beating to windward

As often we seem to do

FINGERNAIL