Terry Taylor caught up with Andrew Knightley of AK & The Red Kites to discuss his new EP, his escape to the country and his thoughts on being a creative in an increasingly digital world
Speaking with Andrew Knightley, former guitarist/vocalist with Trident Waters, there’s no doubt he’s very happy with how his latest project, AK & The Red Kites, has turned out. “I wanted to try something different… something a little more dynamic… something that I could scale up and down and do some more acoustic things as well… just experiment a bit.”
Having escaped to the Chiltern Hills during the pandemic, Andrew found the location and the change of lifestyle a source of inspiration. “I’d lived in London for nearly 20 years and I just wanted to get away from the crowds, buy a house… enjoy the countryside and sit outside in my garden with an acoustic guitar and write songs.” Living in a smaller rural town, with its strong sense of community, gave him a different perspective on people, relationships and the environment. Being able to look out of his window at the trees and see the red kites (which he references directly in the band name) circling overhead unlocked something within him and allowed him to write more honestly about his thoughts and feelings which, in his view, wouldn’t have been possible had he remained in London.
According to Andrew, Proverbial Storm, the 6-track EP he released at the end of June this year, illustrates his growth as a songwriter and musician. “Each song can stand in its own right but they [also] work together strongly. They’re part of a bigger pool of… maybe 23 or 24 songs, which are all good songs and there’s a lot more stuff that’s been recorded as well that might come later… but they are some of the last ones to be written. The idea is that [the EP] takes you on a journey, and hopefully we’ve got it right.” The first track is the previously released single, Devil’s Stomp, which Andrew acknowledges is not the most obvious song to lead with but its heartbeat-like rhythm and its dark, almost brooding intensity provides a platform for the other songs to build on and contrast with. “We played our first gig a few weeks back at a little micro-festival in Buckinghamshire and [the new songs] were all fun to play, especially Wolf Moon and Stronger, with its big anthemic chorus… the set went so fast to be honest and that’s a sign that you’re enjoying your music… I think maybe because I did sit down and write them and think about how’s this going to feel to play live and how is it going to go down. That’s just songwriting maturity really.”
Describing the band’s sound as a “rootsy, classic, southern blues-rock infusion” it is reflective of the artists and musical styles Andrew cites as influences. These range from AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, to The Beatles and Small Faces, to John Lee Hooker, Joe Bonamassa and Chris Stapleton with a little bit of Mozart and ‘70s funk and disco thrown in for good measure. As he jokingly put it, “It’s really just a massive melting pot!”
Asked why he’d chosen to put out an EP when he had so many songs already in the bank, Andrew explained that it had been a pretty easy decision. “With AK & The Red Kites being a new project, you obviously want to try and [develop] something… if you put an album out and no-one knows who you are and they haven’t really had time to get into [the music] then that whole album has gone. It’s better to lead with an EP, go out there and play some shows and work on it and then release something that’s a lot more substantial a bit further down the line.”
Whilst this latest venture is primarily song driven, when Andrew first started out, it was all about the guitar. “I started playing when I was about 11 years old and I was obsessed. I just wanted to rock a guitar … I think my family thought I’d give up within a year … but that never happened!” It was much later that he began singing as well as playing and, as he explained, it happened more by accident than design: “It was when I wanted to put a blues rock power trio together… I couldn’t really find singers who were coming my way so I [thought] I might just sing myself!”
Andrew has never had any professional tuition but developed his style through singing in covers bands and playing a lot of pub gigs. “It was quite scary at first but I kind of just grew into it… I learnt first of all how to hold a pub audience, which is difficult because they’re just there to get pissed and they don’t really care about the covers band in the corner, so you sort of learn how to draw them in, how to talk to them… and, over time, you start to smooth those edges out and understand it better. He admits to being very self-critical: “I’m always analysing my guitar playing, song singing, everything I’ve written and how the band sounds,” adding, “I always want it to be a little bit better than yesterday.”
Andrew is passionate about making and writing music, despite the fact that it is often a difficult process. “Sometimes ideas come literally just as you’re waking up and you’re almost in a dream. Other times I just sit there and think I’m never going to write another song; I’ve got no more lyrics in me, no more ideas; that’s it, it’s over. And then, just at that darkest moment, you get a breakthrough and it all floods out and a couple of days later you write about four songs, just like that! “It can be a struggle. The track, Proverbial Storm, is a little bit about that. [It] was one of those moments where it comes out of nowhere; it just happens… usually, inspiration comes from the way I’m feeling [and] it is melody that comes before lyrics… it has to have some sort of form already to fit the words into.”
Asked whether he’d ever been tempted to use AI to help with his songwriting, he laughed and said he had given it a go. “I tried it once and it gave me some really bad lyrics. I was at one of those points when I was really struggling and I thought, ‘I wonder what it does’ and it [gave me] the most horrible rhyming nonsense! But I know that in time it’s going to get better… it’s terrifying really because where do you draw the line? I mean, at some point it’s going to make everyone and everything redundant. It’s like some kind of dystopian future that we’re heading towards!”
For Andrew, facing and overcoming difficulty comes with the territory and it’s what adds value to the creative process. “I really like the struggle and I want to know that I did it… I mean, it’s like cheating in your exams: okay, you’re going to get the result but you still don’t know the maths or whatever yourself. It’s like with any art. You can paint a picture or you can say to AI, ‘you paint it for me’ but then you haven’t done it; you’re not an artist!”
Andrew has equally strong views about the impact of streaming services and social media and the frustrations faced by creatives when, in this digital age, music can be reduced to being described as “content”. “First of all, I’m a songwriter and I write and release songs. It’s not content! It’s that kind of mindset we’re battling with… I really wish we still lived in a world where there was no Spotify and people bought physical copies, or at least paid for downloads and that was it… but it’s so challenging to keep people interested today… if you’re not in the game people will just forget about you so you’ve got to keep chipping away.”
“I know it’s got its uses but on a personal level I’m not a real social media person. I sort of do it for the music and the reach it gives you but it’s a struggle to keep motivated.” But motivated he is and it’s clear that Andrew loves being a musician and performing for people. “[It’s] the way you can channel feelings, emotions, the sense of achievement and enjoyment… and the sense of community that it brings, like being at live events…you can’t replace that with AI, and if you can, we all might as well pack up!”
There’s no sign of AK & The Red Kites packing up just yet though. The band is supporting US blues rock band, The Cold Stares, on 30th August at The Carlisle in Hastings; holding a belated EP launch event at The Black Heart in London on 17th September; and releasing Stronger (a song that made it onto Slash’s personally curated Modern Blues Rock playlist on Spotify) as a single and video around the same time as the album launch. They are also looking to add a few shows to the calendar later this year and get onto some festival line ups in 2025. And, reading between the lines, there may even be some new music on the horizon. We’ll just have to wait and see…
Band Members
Andrew Knightley – Guitar and Vocals
Rob Hoey – Bass
Ash Sims – Drums
