Party Hard. Cour­tesy of Lucid TV.

The first time I heard about Andrew W.K. I was some­where out­side of Glen­rothes on a stage­coach Cityl­ink bus. It was a Fri­day and I was 18. I hadn’t as yet heard any of his music, although admit­tedly at that point I hadn’t heard much music at all, but from what I could gather from Ker­rang magazine he was young, appar­ently music­ally gif­ted and THE NEXT BIG THING in metal. At the time I was younger, music­ally inept and hor­ribly eager to learn about any­thing my new group of “mosher” friends were inter­ested in. Years later this art­icle would be the only thing that I had per­man­ently filed away in my memory from my brief flir­ta­tion with heavy metal journ­al­ism, apart from a story I read on another bus jour­ney about Slip­knot being pel­ted with Mars Bars by the angry fans of another band dur­ing a gig.

I always hated Slip­knot and was obvi­ously grat­i­fied other people felt the same way.

I wouldn’t actu­ally hear his music until another Fri­day night a few weeks later. This time I was slumped ungra­ciously in front of a friends tele­vi­sion, per­us­ing his music chan­nels. I had none of my own, liv­ing as I was between Uni­ver­sity halls of res­id­ence and a selec­tion of sofas scattered around Dun­dee. And it was here that I heard Party Hard for the first time. It was, like the art­icle in Ker­rang, inter­est­ing in a way I couldn’t quite pin down. There was some­thing about the man and his music (apart from his seem­ingly never end­ing legs, unwashed jeans and wet strag­gly hair), that was fas­cin­at­ing and judging by the way that the song fol­lowed me around dif­fer­ent club nights for months after­ward and filled dance­floors every week it indic­ated that other people thought so too. Party Hard was essen­tially a song that did what it said on the tin — insert CD, crank volume, rock out. The fol­lowup song She is Beau­ti­ful and the video (which I still believe to be an accur­ate por­trayal of a day in the life of Mr W.K.) was the same. I couldn’t fig­ure out why I liked him and I cer­tainly couldn’t begin to under­stand why the hell I thought he was so cool.

Con­tinue read­ing: Andrew W.K.