Andy, since your album 'The Colour Of My Dreams' is largely concerned with childhood, can we ask what your first childhood band was called and who were your influences?

The Buzzgroves! And we were influenced by The Beatles, specifically 'When I'm Sixty-Four'. My older brother, who was the keyboard player for The Buzzgroves, had this Casio keyboard that had this feature on the left hand side of the keys, the bass notes, if you press them and turn on the drum beat they go "dum, duh-dum, duh-dum, duh-dum". So our main song was 'When I'm Sixty-Four'. My brother used to love Jean Michelle Jarre, and he used to wear just one glove which was very funny. The lead singer liked Michael Jackson and I thought I was a surfer - I was only 10! I thought I was a surfing drummer; I'd never been to the beach.

So what did you sound like?

Dreadful, absolutely appalling. Oh, I remember what glove he wore. He wore my BMX glove! The singer was Jonathan Cosgrove - you see what we've done there with the name. We were ahead of our time.
My best friend, Russell Blackman, who's still my best friend now, when we were eight we had our first band. And his dad said to us, "Why don't you just call yourselves 2 Ply? Because if one of you leaves then you can be called 1 Ply and if someone else joins then you can be called 3 Ply." We thought that was incredible. 2 Ply was another pretty important band.

If we have our Burrows history right, the next significant group would be The Shoos? Nice spelling, by the way.

Yeah, we were off the wall. That was the first serious band for me, I was 12 and they were all 14/15. I remember the guitarist was phenomenal. I just thought I was in Queen. I mean, we were appalling but he was brilliant.
And we were based in a little village called Broughton in Hampshire. And the most amazing thing about The Shoos, Chris Thomas, who produced the second Razorlight album and also worked with The Beatles, lived in Broughton and it was so weird, 12 years later, to be in the studio with Chris Thomas. He took me back to
the pub he now owns which is next door to the place we used to play
in.
I was in The Shoes for about four years. It was cover versions although, in the last couple of years, once the singer hit sixth form
college, we did original songs. I remember 'Your Complex'
and 'Design For Living'.

And all this time were you dreaming of being an actual proper rock star?

Oh God yeah. It's pretty sad to admit but as long as I can remember I was obsessed with being a pop star. At seven years old I used to watch brass bands, I remember just staring at this guy drumming and thinking, 'that's just incredible'. Then I just got hooked on Michael Jackson for eight years. I had an absolute obsession with drums and pop stardom ever since.

Has the reality lived up to the dream in any way?

In a lot of ways it's superseded it, it's incredibly amazing and
in some ways, like everything in life, it involves a lot of shit things. But yeah, it's amazing, amazing, amazing.
I spent a lot of time getting there though. There was a six year gap between leaving college and getting an actual job, which was Razorlight.
It was quite nice always being known as a drummer, though. I just got a text fromm this boy called Duncan Burgess, who was really cool at school. He just sent me a text because he wants to come to the gig and it's nice to be in touch with people from school and you've always been known as that guy who got up on stage at assembly and played the drums.

The album 'The Colour Of My Dreams' is a charity record, is that so nasty journalists like us can't slag it off?

Well, no. I think if I was worried about journalists being horrible I
would have gone to a proper studio and spent more time making this album sound proper, so I don't think that's why I'm doing it for charity, but I see your point.
Obviously I'd prefer it if people were nice but I wouldn't really change anything if people were nasty about it. It is far too short! I do regret that about it. But I've always been a fan of short albums... not perhaps this short.

We wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't ask you a Razorlight question. You're currently making the 'difficult' third album. Is it going to be full of ten-minute, self-indulgent, experimental jams?

No, all the songs so far are three minutes and mighty epic, so no difficulty yet. There's plenty of songs of Johnny's on there and a few songs that we wrote together, so I think that's a nice healthy balance. At the end of the day it's Johnny who has to get up there and sing from the heart. I certainly didn't come into the band with the intention of writing songs, but it's just the way it's gone and me and him have struck up a very healthy song writing partnership, so it's continued onto this record and it's extremely exciting.

It is indeed. Thank you Andy Burrows.


Find out more about the Jacksplace Appeal