Andy Rourke, best known as the bassist for The Smiths, is playing a DJ set on May 24. Here are 10 things you need to know about the guy whose gig has everyone madly excited!
READ: The Smiths’ Andy Rourke is intrigued about Manila’s clubbing scene
1. He’s fiddy. Would you believe Rourke is 50? Neither can we. He turned fiddy on Jan 17, making him a Capricorn. Just thought to throw in that tiny detail, just in case.
2. He is not a DJ. While he will be behind the decks at Black Market, he told Rockerzine that he is “certainly not a DJ. I’m a musician.” He was only 7 years old when his parents gave him an acoustic guitar. DJing was an accident.
3. To the tune of an F sharp. According to smithsonguitar, “Andy tuned his basses up to F# in the early days of the Smiths.”
4. Drama-rama. Did you know that Morrissey fired Rourke from The Smiths by leaving a postcard on his care? “My ex-wife has it. Because I left in a hurry, she has a lot of my stuff,” he explains over at Dailybeast.
5. Houdini. In the same Dailybeast interview, Rourke compared himself to Harry Houdini, when it came to hiding his heroin habit. “That’s not a drug that you can hide” says Michael Moynihan, to which Rourke replied “I was very good at it. I was like Houdini.” He was actually arrested for possession in his dealers’ house, after coming home from an American tour.
6. He’s a highschool dropout. He was 15 when he f*cked it with school and called it a day.
7. Don’t ask him the time. When Coconuts Manila asked Rourke which question he hopes people would stop asking already, the first-time Manila visitor gave us two: “What time is it?” and “When are The Smiths reforming?”
8. He can sloth it out. He moved from England to New York because he got lazy. “Four years pass by and I was like, ‘oh shit.’”
9. Smiths in his set. Give Rourke a two-hour set and he’ll pepper that with a few Smiths songs. “I’m proud of it, of what we did, and luckily the music has aged well. It’s timeless, I think.”
10. He’s been around. After the famous split, Rourke has played with a whole of them musicians, among them: The Pretenders, Badly Drawn Boy, and Ian Brown.
Andy Rourke is playing on May 24. 9pm. Blackmarket, Warehouse 5, La Fuerza Compound 2, Sabio St., Makati. Pre-selling PHP800. Coconuts Manila is the digital partner.
