I M JUST looking at a picture of the guy from Kula Shaker on the wall here, sniggers Finley Quaye. He looks stoned and mashed up. Actually, they all look quite ill. The morning after the night before. Crispian, fucking hell, the state of him. He looks a bit like a young Mark Knopfler.
Finley is sitting in Sony s London offices eating Japanese crackers (of which more anon), discussing his soon-to-be-released debut longplayer, Maverick A Strike. It s a record which you will be shortly hearing a lot more of, and which will make him a global superstar if the aforementioned Sony Corporation have anything to do with it.
The recent single Sunday Shining , although excellent, is unrepresentative of the album as a whole; it ranges from subterranean dub-reggae ( The Way Of The Explosive , Ultra Stimulation ) to calypso country-rock ( Your Love Gets Sweeter ). It s a cracking record, and I say this as someone who generally finds reggae totally unlistenable.
But Finley himself has a far more succinct and concise description of Maverick A Strike. It s dynamite, he says happily.
How would you convey it in three words to someone who hadn t heard it?
Good and beneficial, he replies instantly. Beneficial communication. Instead of something that you don t want to hear, that ll do you no good whatsoever. It is very warm. Arms open, not fists up. It s a strong record, though.

RIGHT VIBES

Finley Quaye s first record deal was with Polydor, which fizzled out in a damp squib of frustrating inactivity. Following a fantastic collaboration with drum n bass maestro A Guy Called Gerald, on a superb track which was titled Finley s Rainbow , he inked a deal with Sony: By the time I left Polydor, people had heard about me and Sony got in touch as a result. Took it from there, really.
Are you at all nervous about the weight of media and record company expectations? You ve been talked up a lot more than most new artists. Sony seem to be putting their full promotional weight behind your album; there s a sense that they ve got a lot riding on it.
Am I feeling nervous? he asks rhetorically. No, man. I m excited, y know? Motivated. Looking forward to everything. I am quite confident. Quite forward. I wasn t always like this; I was always quite confident within myself, but I didn t display that confidence, so . . .
While slaving away in the studio,Finley developed what you might call a hate/hate relationship with the technological gadgets that surround him there.
Listen, he explains, I ve got three pieces of technology with me today I ve got a Sony DATman, a Sony Walkman and a Canon video recorder. They re all going straight to the repair shop. I only got the DAT machine a month ago and the video recorder two weeks ago. Whenever I buy any technological gadgets, I have to use the warranty within a couple of months. That applies to every piece of equipment I own walkmans, videos, the lot. I ve had three different Walkmans in the last three years, in and out of repair shops. They re just fucked!
I can t stand technology, because the same thing happens in the studio when you boot up a programme. It could crash on you, and you d just lose all your shit. Forget that, man. It gets to a stage where you just say, Fuck it, let s do it with live hi-hats or whatever. No, I don t like computers, man. They re not consistent. Not immediate. I prefer more immediate sounds. Ain t got time to hang about waiting for the sound to come out (laughs).
Then there s the Tricky connection (Finley s half-sister Maxine was Tricky s mum). Predictably, Finley becomes as guarded and cautious as a Lithuanian defender when the subject comes up, having presumably fielded this line of enquiry from 7,326 other hacks before me.
I m not interested in talking about it now. Not interested in playing it down or up. I m eating Japanese crackers in a Sony office.
Whaaat?
That s where my head is at now. Not bothered about it at all. Don t care.
Okay then, talk to me instead about Iggy Pop (who Finley hooked up with in America earlier this year).
Tricky introduced me to him in New York.
Did he contribute anything to the album?
No.
So what did you work on with him?
Nothing.
Have you anything to say about the man at all?
Um . . . I like him a lot. He s an amazing guy. We were talking about drugs, music, LA, food . . .

HARD LIVING

Ah yes, drugs. As Nick Kent will no doubt tell anyone who ll listen: if in doubt, if an interview is winding up slowly but inexorably in a cul-de-sac, mention drugs and you re generally away on a hack. It s a maxim which serves both of us well here.
I don t do drugs . . . don t do drugs in the papers, Finley says, referring to Tricky s much-publicised coke nightmare of 1995/96. Not a chance. Fucking incriminating, and it s a pest.
Have you learned from Tric . . . from your more famous relative s experience?
Yeah, but it doesn t stop me talking about em what drugs do you wanna talk about? he says animatedly.
Let s start with Ecstasy.
Don t do it. Fucking terrible drug, of which 99% is all fake, of which a very small percentage is the real MDMA. And there s a lot of stupid stuff that they put in em. (begins ranting) Methadrine amphetamine, dexydrine amphetamine, ephedrine . . .
Is that the specific reason why you don t take drugs? Is it a straight-edge thing of not wanting to put any poisonous chemicals into your body?
I just know what they re made of and how much of them is fake, he says. And I know what they do to you. The effects they can have long-term on your nervous system. Put it this way, there are very few drugs that are good for you.
Forgive the cynicism, but it s rather hard to believe that you haven t dabbled in hash at some point in your life, Finley.
Not in the newspapers, I haven t (laughs). You know what I mean. You have the police knocking on your door. It s just silly. Unnecessary. More people need to not be taking drugs, rather than need to be taking them. That s the way I see it.
So we can take it that you re not an advocate of drug-legalisation?
(emphatically) I would not be in favour of decriminalisation. Not at all. It s not in control. If they wanted to stop drugs coming into this country they could do it. I m not into heroin addicts taking heroin, or being given it either. I d kick the shit out of them. My mum died of a heroin OD. Happened ten, eleven years ago. I ain t got no sympathy for a junkie. I don t believe in fucking rehabilitation or methadone or any of that shit. You gotta weld somebody to the wall and feed them food. Hold them there for two months and feed them every day, that s how you get somebody off heroin.
Finley quickly warms to his theme.
I ve seen how somewhere like Soho operates, he continues. Strip bars, video games, pool halls, jazz clubs, food shops, taxi ranks, drug dealers. It s all entertainment. I ve seen how that works. Something for the suckers. It s for people who need to escape. All concentrated into one little area. I lived there for a while. Did my fucking head in! Hard living, I can tell you, man. I lived right next to Paul Raymond s revue bar that you see on the back of every porn mag.
Did you ever while away a dreary afternoon in there?
No, he laughs. But looking out my window every night, I could see literally thousands of people milling around, looking for some cheap thrill. I could see how depressed all these people are. And that s just not up my street. When you ve got this kind of intelligence, you should use it not for your own means, but for other people s gain and benefit. That s how I feel I m so intelligent that I should use my intelligence to help other people.
Really? How intelligent do you think you are?
Oh, very intelligent! he answers without hesitation.
To be more precise, how clever would you say you are, on a scale of 1 to 10?
8 or 7. I m very wise, more than intelligent. I m not intelligent in terms of things like mathematics or science . . . I m more wise. It s after the experience that I ve got the wisdom. It s not like I was born with it. n
Maverick A Strike is released through Sony on September 15th. The second single from it, Even After All , is out now.