Why He's Still Committed To Rock-Soul

It’s going on 24 years since an untried 17-year-old Irish singer was thrust onto the international stage courtesy a film about a fictitious Irish soul band called The Commitments. Andrew Strong had been cast by the film’s director Alan Parker the year before to play the band’s ebullient frontman Deco Cuffe, whose voice sounded much older than his years, and he carried it off perfectly.

In the intervening years, Strong has released three albums as an artist in his own right, scoring a #1 hit in Denmark, where he lived for a decade with his girlfriend, with a version of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, as well as forming a band, The Bone Yard Boys. After this latest Australian tour, he’ll be heading back into the studio to cut another album. This visit however recognises that, for Andrew Strongall he’s achieved in those years between, it’s the hits from The Commitments for which Australian fans will forever remember him. Fair enough – the soundtrack album sold 12 million copies worldwide after all. As it happens, most of the film band reunited in March 2011 for a 20th anniversary four-date reunion tour of Ireland.  

"You were just a bunch of kids who made a movie and, boom, it was successful and 21 years later you’re playing together."

“It was pretty bizarre,” Strong admits, “because that was the first time we were kind of together since we made the movie and, um, it’s just weird. You were just a bunch of kids who made a movie and, boom, it was successful and 21 years later you’re playing together. And a lot of people don’t realise that the guys who you see on the screen, they’re not even on the record. The only people from the cast who are actually on the record are me and the girls.

“But it was great in terms of just seeing the fans and having people come up saying how much they appreciated seeing us all together and they loved the movie, they loved the record. I think we could have gone out and toured a little more with it but everybody has their own thing going, so to put us all together was a pretty mammoth task, just to do those shows.”

Strong wrote his first song when he was 13, and like most kids in the early ‘90s, he was heavily into grunge. His original post-Commitments deal pushed for more soul stuff, so it’s been a bit of a struggle to reconcile his maturing style and the expectations of the film’s fans. “When you come to an Andrew Strong show, you’re gonna get 85% of what I’ve recorded on my own records and maybe the other ten, 15, you’ll get a couple of Commitment songs. But with this show I’m doing the full Monty, you know? I’m putting the suit on. I’d describe it as rock-soul, not soul-rock. I play a lot of heavy guitar on the songs – so it’s a pretty full-on show. Instead of playing Mustang Sally through a clean amp, let’s play it through a couple of Marshalls!”