The Welsh rock ’n’ roll power trio known as “mclusky” (all lower case, if you please) “formed” in 1996, in Cardiff, though they wouldn’t become, in the transformative sense, until 1999. In their initial existence, mclusky put out three albums—My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours (on Fuzzbox in 2000), Mclusky Do Dallas, and The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not on Fire (the latter two released on Too Pure, in 2002, 2004, respectively)—of music that could be described, with enough accuracy to avoid deletion on Wikipedia , as “post-hardcore,” “indie rock,” or “noise rock.” These designations are fine. Mclusky indeed existed after hardcore was invented, and they did make music that could be considered “hardcore” if it were played faster and dragged its knuckles an iota lower. If one is inclined to see genre through the lens of market viability, then mclusky were indeed signed to an independent record company. As for “noise rock”: mclusky were noisy. And they did rock.

If none of these labels feel sufficient to encompass the band’s amalgamation of stupid/smart heft, girlgroup shimmy-shake, alt-Beantown loud ’n’ quiet dynamism, and the kind of potty-mouthed profundity most commonly found in the ripples made by a poet of the confessional school hitting the water, then that’s not mclusky’s problem. It’s not anyone’s problem. We’re all only as independent as the world allows. It’s always post-hardcore somewhere. Keeping it simple, one can call mclusky “a Cardiff band.” With all the pride, discontentment, and pride-in-beingdiscontented that comes with.

When asked about the town from which mclusky came from, Andrew “Falco” Falkous describes Cardiff as “always spiritually in a recession. It’s kind of what it does.”

On Zoom, Andrew Falkous is not as caustic as he appears on record. There’ve been encounters with fans where those meeting him were disappointed that the man who wrote “The World Loves Us and Is Our Bitch” is not a cartoon. Now—elfin and vaguely rakish, looking less like a sociopath than ever—Falkous tells an anecdote about how his old band mclusky could have been successful.

“Our manager at the time, who’s still a friend, remembers hearing ‘She Will Only Bring You Happiness,’ and him going, ‘This is great!’ And you could see his eyes. I mean, he’s a genuine fan of music, but still, somebody manages you and is excited about a notional 10 to 15 percent of some money because he never got any of that managing us, right? Because 15 percent of nothing is nothing. And he gets to the first chorus and you could just see...he’s starting to shake almost. Then the song gets to the refrain ‘Our old singer is a sex criminal.’”

“And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Why do you always have to fuck this up?”’

Falkous explains that if he hadn’t added the line “Our old singer is a sex criminal” (repeated in round robin for one full minute of the song’s three-minuteand-27-second length) to his band’s otherwise best chance of getting mass radio play, the song would “otherwise just be a Pavement cover.”

This anecdote raises a question.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the reporter asks.

In the beginning, mclusky were Falkous on guitar, Geraint Bevan on bass, and Matthew Harding on drums. The drummer and singer met while working at a call center. Bevan (a “fantastic musician” and “lovely guy” who favored the more centrist fare of Super Furry Animals and who played a drug dealer who died by fire on the Welsh-language soap opera Pobol y Cwm) departed a year into the band’s existence. He was replaced by John Chapple. At first, by Falkous’ estimation, the band was a “fairly leaden kind of Pixies-ish affair” until they, in one of those lucky mysteries that come out of being hard-working and the best band in the world, eventually “hit their gear.”

“It all kind of,” Falkous says, “I don’t want to say ‘snowballed,’ because that implies a speedy momentum which resulted in an irresistible force. It all kind of ‘galumphed.’”

The band developed a fervent fan base consisting of record store clerks, beardos, weirdos, witty/pretty aesthetes, and a smattering of all the other subculture types too cynical for punk, too commie for metal, and too sartorially lazy for goth. Maybe mclusky’s crowd didn’t dress as sexy as other crowds, but a mclusky audience had a strength of character atypical of the time. Watching a mclusky audience, you knew that these were people who did cocaine because they were addicted to drugs, not simply because it was the thing to do.

This integrity in dissolution is relevant because, as those who keep trying to make the indie sleaze revival happen keep reminding us, the early aughts were the height of a post-punk revival where the lyrics to Gang of Four’s “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist” were taken as an aspirational guide to living on par with “It was all a dream/I used to read Word Up! magazine,” and all the hep kids were clamoring at random LES bathroom doors, hoping to be the next to see about any given member of Interpol’s ham.

In the midst of this guignol of horizontal stripes and extraneous belts, mclusky were outside-of-time underdogs. While some borderline noise rock bands (such as Coachwhips, as mastered into the red by Weasel Walter, or Chinese Stars, who utilized disco beats but were still clearly ex-members of the woolly Rhode Island band Arab on Radar) operated on the fringes of the almost-popular, most of mclusky’s contemporaries fixated on the sounds that were coming out of the United Kingdom in the early ’80s. Conversely, mclusky were an actual U.K. band who sounded like American secondary market bands from the mid-to-late ’80s (like Big Black and Naked Raygun). Even if those comparisons were exaggerated in the press (Falkous claims to be almost entirely unaware of Steve Albini’s writing credits prior to recording with him), it’s safe to say that what mclusky had playing on their walkmen was not what the Strokes had playing on their solid-gold (presumably gilded with the discarded hymens of Swiss ski instructors) iPods.

And what mclusky did have in common with their contemporaries—an affection for Gang of Four, a rejection of the nil metal shorts-wearing, the recurring disgruntled/horny lyrical concerns of youth—was expressed in as bracing a fashion as possible, thus rendering it unfashionable. John Chapple played mutated Dave Allen bass lines like the disco floor was made of lava. He and Falco traded vocal lines about sex and drugs as though the typically desired rock ’n’ roll tropes were plagues inflicted upon them by a pissy Moses. And, while eschewing shorts like it was a job and having an anthem called “Undress for Success,” all three members of mclusky dressed with a fanciness just south of your average Kings of Leon guitar tech.

It should also be noted that, even if they weren’t sharing Mormons-only bathroom stalls with the Killers or needles with the Libertines, mclusky were also sprinkling, albeit sparingly, their songs with pop melodies as sweet as anything crooned out by the NYC anglophiles/U.K. yankophiles. On “To Hell With Good Intentions,” the band chanted, “My band is better than your band/We’ve got more songs than a song convention,” and they attached those lines to a “We Will Rock You” hook as if they were challenging any poor sap to call them liars.

As braggadocious as he may be in song, Falkous is as self-aware as a person can possibly be before paralysis sets in. He is nearly as insightful of his own character as he is incisive of the people around him. At the same time, while acutely articulate discussing the minutiae of songwriting, Falkous claims to never having given much thought to where his sense of melody comes from.

When the question of pop melodies comes up, he says, “Songs just aren’t songs, they’re the memories they bring back as well. Me and my daughter dance around to ‘The Bare Necessities.’ Or it can be ‘Reign in Blood.’ All of those things have something which makes them great pop music to me.”

It takes three reframings of the same question before Falkous offers up, “Well, my parents were both music teachers. My dad used to write children’s musicals. In the house, we pretty much just played the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel all the time.... My mother was always playing music on the piano,” he continues, before granting a “So I suppose that?”

If the reporter wants to believe something as silly as Falkous’ mother playing piano all day, Simon & Garfunkel drifting through the air of Falkous’ childhood home, and his father—who died when Falkous was 13—writing children’s musicals was somehow formative, the reporter is apparently free to do so.

Whether from nature, nurture, or an old-fashioned deal with some showtune-proficient Satan made at the crossroads between Crwys Road and Cathays Terrace—where mclusky’s pop instincts derived isn’t important. What matters is that on mclusky’s third album, The Difference Between Me and You Is That Tm Not on Fire, the band leaned harder into unshakable hooks, with every one of those hooks cut with societal/scene analytics such as “What’s the point of leaving home when you own it? What’s the point of do-it-yourself when it looks so shit?” Critics at the time appreciated this brilliant album, though they—en masse as critics are prone to act—preferred the preceding one. Which might have mattered to someone, but, by then, mclusky had reached the point of not giving a shit. In either the positive or negative sense, depending on the day and the band member.

Even with the departure of drummer Harding in 2003 (with replacement Jack Egglestone joining as the Muppet Animal to Falkous and Chapple’s Stalter and Waldorf), mclusky persevered. Three against the world; heroically boneheaded in a refusal to concede the world’s advantage. That is, until the midpoint of the first decade of the new century, when mclusky cemented their underdog status by doing what the majority of underdogs do when faced with mounting debts, plateauing interest, and internal dissension: They gave up.

A 70-word statement of disbandment that thanked everyone for “the love and, to a lesser degree, the hate” was issued. A mclusky triple album rattle bag of singles and B-sides, etc. (aptly entitled mcluskyism) was released in 2006. And that was that. By the time the retrospective was released, John Chapple had already formed Shooting at Unarmed Men and moved to Australia. Falkous and Egglestone had already formed Future of the Left. There were no shows to celebrate mcluskyism.

If mclusky’s tunefulness was underappreciated, Future of the Left (a trio that would eventually be filled out on bass by Julia Ruzicka, formerly of Welsh posthardcore band Million Dead and eventually Falkous’ wife) equaled Falco’s first band in both its exploration of a near Buzzcocks-on-Broadway melodicism and how the band’s genius was misapprehended. Despite a string of albums that melded squirrely guitar lines, a Roland Juno-60 synth bringing in all the she-bop fun a girl could want, bass lines seemingly run through pedals made from the muffler of a Ford Pinto, and choruses that occasionally careened into Supertramp territory, Falkous remained on the wrong side of fashionable.

The Plot Against Common Sense—a very fine Future of the Left album containing a perfectly solid joke about Billy Corgan—came out in 2012. Its first piece of coverage was in a Pitchfork review written by that publication’s resident Smashing Pumpkins superfan. Mclusky may have previously avoided being a Pavement cover band by dint of a single line. Now one throwaway line about Pavement’s archnemesis, in the song “Robocop 4 - Fuck off Robocop,” was heard by a critic still nursing grudges from being picked on for wearing a Siamese Dream T-shirt in high school, with predictable results. In a time—hard to imagine now—when Pitchfork could destroy an artist’s career with a single review, the album got a 6.0, complete with a line comparing the band to Bad Religion.

“Reading that review, waking up in Cardiff one morning and swinging over in bed just to read it, because it was a month before the album was out,” Falkous says matter-of-factly. “I think in my life, in terms of what I loosely considered my professional prospects, that was the most deflated I ever felt, because I saw that record and everything we’d gone through to make that record, including recovering from, you know, quite massive debts.... It was like, ‘This isn’t gonna work.’”

Falkous is not prone to self-pity. At points during the interview, he mentions something painful from his life and quickly cuts himself off, requesting that the anecdote remain off the record lest anyone think he’s milking trauma for some narrative gain.

He wraps up his tale of a debt-inducing bad review “tough moment” by saying: “But that moment only lasted for six hours. Then you climb out of it. Because...fuck, everybody’s got a fucking well, don’t they?”

In life, as in Future of the Left (and his solo project Christian Fitness), Falkous’ priorities range from the profound to the (in his own words) petty. He has no interest in trivial art (“I always wanted to be in the best band in the world. The best band. Not the biggest band. Because again, the biggest band is never the best band in the world. That’s just science”) and repeatedly uses the word “magical” to describe the joy of playing with his bandmates and the process of making music itself. At the same time, he has to check himself before he devotes large swathes of our conversation to the evil of wearing shorts on stage or the industry standard of referring to songs as “tracks.”

“I’m simultaneously a people-pleaser and I don’t give a fuck about you,” Falkous says when asked about all these cascading aspects of his personality. “When you actually step back and look at it, that tension is fun because there’s lots of space to play around in there. But being hyperaware of it would just be tedious.”

In 2014, Falkous and Egglestone (with Ruzicka on bass) played mclusky songs for a benefit to raise money to get the Le Pub venue soundproofing. This mclusky part 2 initially added an asterisk to the name. Theoretically as either a loving (as it were) acknowledgment of dead (to Falkous) homies. Or as a preemptive “as-is” disclaimer for any trainspotter who might be tempted to—upon not seeing their favorite non-Falco mcluskian on the reunion stage—demand a refund. Or because, as Falkous claims, “I just like punctuation.”

The band then played a benefit to raise money for the staff of a different venue that was closing. The following year, mclusky played a benefit for cancer research. What was initially the rare one-off show, with the band at the start being more Future of the Left “cosplaying as mclusky,” eventually, by 2020, became a viable concern.

There was something perversely heroic about a band making any kind of ambitious plans for the future in 2020. But, for Falkous, the COVID lockdown(s) seems to have cemented what can maybe be called the man’s more humanist tendencies.

“I probably knew it already,” he explains, “but during the pandemic, I realized that I really like musicians for the most part. I don’t usually like the music they produce. But there’s a still-in-love-with-the-world vibe—especially to lifers—where there’s a childlike excitement to things.”

If the isolation of the pandemic brought this awareness to the fore, Falkous’ sense of a different certain kind of grace was paradoxically driven home by some non-COVID excruciations; namely, a bout of sciatica so serious that it required operations and “unbelievable levels of painkillers.”

“During that period,” Falkous says of his relationship to music, through his time being in near constant pain, “I mean, I’m not going to say ‘music saved my life’ because I don’t want to give you a headline for a different kind of magazine. But it was pure magic. It sustained me, as if it wasn’t already valuable enough to me. It was everything.”

The current iteration of mclusky is Falkous, Jack Egglestone (whom Falkous describes thusly: “When he’s playing, I can hear that it’s Jack playing straightaway. That’s why he’s so fantastic”), and Damien Sayell. Sayell—an amiable Ent kind of character, who is also the singer for the quite fab and decidedly mcluskian band St. Pierre Snake Invasion—has been a fan of mclusky since he was an 18-year-old living in a seaside village in West Wales, writing songs that, as he says, “sounded like shit Deftones.” After his band developed a relationship with Future of the Left, the bassist was tapped to handle Chapple’s parts, first on vocals and then, when Ruzicka stepped away, to play Falkous’ foil full-time.

(Name-dropping sidenote here: Damien and Adam Devonshire, bassist of Idles, became “best friends”— Devonshire’s words—after a 12-hour bonding session in a pub while listening only to mclusky. This was years before either Idles or Sayell’s position in mcclusky existed. “To me,” says Devonshire, “mclusky are as important as the Fall or Pixies. To watch Damien on stage in the band fills my heart with pure joy.”)

In 2022, after the sciatica was made manageable, around the 20-year anniversary of Mclusky Does Dallas, the asterisk after “mclusky” was removed (for reasons of being “insincerely modest”), and the band announced its first American shows in 18 years. The first leg of the tour, five dates on the West Coast, became four when Falco’s vocal cords proved to be uncooperative. Then, during rehearsals for the second leg of the tour—12 East Coast dates that Falkous had thousands of dollars of his own money tied up in—a small case of tinnitus, which had been barely a bother in one ear for years, blew up with a near-debilitating fury.

Falkous says, “We had a rehearsal and the next morning was just, like, living in an echoing metal cylinder. Like having an MRI or something. It was absolutely bizarre. I couldn’t even be in a room with a refrigerator. The sound of that was too much. A running tap was too much.”

When asked if the feeling was pain, exactly, the singer clarifies, a bit ruefully as if still in those moments, “‘Painful’ would mischaracterize it, but ‘painful’ in the sense of ‘I can’t live in the world.’”

On Nov. 25, in a statement as graciously apologetic as the 2005 announcement of mclusky’s breakup was brief and unsentimental, Falkous announced that the tour, along with plans for a new mclusky album, were indefinitely postponed. He ended the note with “i won’t be checking messages for the next few days - this has been an exhausting time (logistically/emotionally/generally as a human) and I need to stare at a ceiling for a little while, apologies, please take care, try not to smoke, always rate uber drivers 5. don’t get ill. x”

Talking about the tinnitus now, Falkous is philosophical, insistent on how “interesting” it all was. He talks about how interesting it is that “the working theory is that it’s your brain trying to help you out, saying, ‘You’re missing these frequencies, mate! Try this.’ And you’re like, 'No, no, I don’t want that.’”

Falkous says this with a slight exaggeration that should imply humor. But there’s a flatness to his tone reminiscent of a Midwestern stoic recounting to a true-crime podcaster what happened to their “adored by everyone” loved one on the outskirts of some idyllic small town where nobody, up until that point, ever locked their doors.

Months of experimenting with different treatments, with there being a five-month period when it was unclear if Falkous would be able to continue making music at all, have made the tinnitus manageable. He now uses an in-ear monitor/ear defender combo on stage, with few negatives outside of an occasional sense of disconnect.

While an LP is still in the works, September of last year saw the release of the first new mclusky music since the first Bush administration. Billed as a “double A side,” unpopular parts of a pig/the digger you deep is everything a mclusky fan might have hoped for. The rhythms are still pummeling. The bass lines still sound like an atypically lithesome hippo trying to speak dub. While Damien Sayell may have qualified as new bassist in part because he’s a ginger like Chapple and, when asked how he’s

different from Chapple, Sayell says, “Well, the biggest difference is that I’m a large human being,” he also describes his stage presence as aggressive as it is campy. Maybe it’s easy to project an enthusiasm on Sayell’s playing, knowing how overjoyed he is to be in the band, but the aggression and enthusiasm feel audible. As for the lyrics sheet, it’s got lines like “there was blood, of course, there always is,” the kind of casual dread-mongering that might lure those predisposed toward laughter into thinking that Falkous is merely kidding, but which feel anachronistic only in that they’re smart, still lousy with buckshot surrealism and last-call concrete, and—in direct opposition to the Mark E. Smith cosplaying currently in vogue amongst U.K. press-approved ranters—not being sung as if the frontman would rather be somewhere else.

“If there is a comparison to be made to the band back in the day,” Falkous explains, “there was always the idea that somebody might just suddenly go off on a religious pilgrimage or something or just completely lose interest in playing. We don’t have that concern.” This lack of concern, far less nihilistic than not giving a shit, translates through the songs as the sound of a band unbothered with legacy enough to make continuation feel natural.

When this magazine hits, mclusky will be waistdeep in their rescheduled tour of the United States. One hopes. A second canceled tour would be, by Falkous’ estimation, financially ruinous. The emotional rewards outweigh the risks. “Touring [with the current lineup] is the best holiday you could imagine,” Falkous enthuses. “Where, every night, a succession of strangers, numbered anywhere between 200 and a 1,000, turn up and shout with you.”

A few days later, Falkous will send an email that says to “take out everything kind i said - truthfully, i am motivated almost entirely by spite.” As if a few days prior he hadn’t been holding his cats up to the Zoom camera with the evident pride of a Nigel Tufnel showing off his volume dials.

As our talk winds down, Falkous will say, about the upcoming tour, that “it’s going to be really good. If it’s not, I’m going to find the entire concept of rock ’n’ roll, and I’m going to kick the shit out of it. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get Damien to kick the shit out of it, because Damien is a unit, as they say.” A fitting end to the interview: the threat of bodily harm made to the tradition that sustains him, coupled with an offhand joke that’ll hopefully end up as a song title.