Search - Brooks :: Red Tape

A brief flash back to 2002? Andy Brooks is sipping cheap lager and eating crisps (that?s potato chips to you Americans!) in the run-down snug of a dilapidated North Manchester boozer. It is the eve of the release of his debut album, You, Me & Us, for East Midlands deep house imprint Mantis. Red Tape is a personal journey for Brooks. His inspiration couldn?t be further from the techno giants that loomed large over his debut. The Weimar cabaret effect; Lord Byron?s dirty escapades in a villa with narcotics; the dark-room, skinhead sex of modern Berlin?s rapturous night-time culture; Nazi suppression of the arts and the sound of concentration camp walls; the howling winds of graveyards in Edinburgh at 3AM; the music of industrial machinery; the flummoxing notion that nothing new or riveting had happened in a gay environment in Britain for as long as he had known it. If his first outing was a last stand in honor of the party, this one is an all out, glorious, twisted, sinful menace. There is talk of Brooks assuming a transvestite persona; becoming an imaginary female tape op for Brian Eno in the 70s. He?s got her all worked out -haircut and everything. But that?s another matter entirely!