Andrew Ewing
First appeared - Issue #12

Thumb were one of those bands that became a cult in Perth at the start of the twenty first century. Brothers Andrew and Brendan Ewing and drummer Charles Chase released two seminal grunge-based albums ‘Nitro City’ and ‘Strange Kept Plain’. They rocked some people’s world but not enough to maintain a band. An earlier experiment in audiovisual counter-culture Thesaurus Rex had whetted Andrew’s appetite and in the next few years his name would start cropping up in Perth film, live music, video and radio circles.

Ewing blushes over the phone when Grabs mentions the term “renaissance man” but in his case it’s justified. A maker of videos for Gata Negra, Headshot and El Horizonte, Andrew has knocked on Screen West’s doors many a time and has just completed a short film ‘Automatic’ which took a year to make and features the music of Schvendes’ uber-diva Rachael Dease. “Within days of shooting our first scenes we discovered the film stock had a major fault. We returned it and eventually the company who manufactured it replaced it free of charge but it was a long drawn out process,” says the frustrated Ewing. The film was made in collaboration with Jennifer Jamieson, a fellow tutor in film production and photography at Murdoch University and the indispensable Cinzia Donald. This is his fourth film, with ‘Smile’, his debut short dating back to 1998. When Neil Rabinowitz from Found Quantity of Sheep (see article in this issue) was looking for artists to set the ten tracks of their new album to film he was introduced to Andrew through a mutual friend Noah Norton from cutting edge band Radarmaker. Thanks to Andrew fqs soon found themselves besieged by eager filmmakers and the Murdoch lecturer contributed his very own “crimson” statement to the track ‘Lapsang’. All this film talk doesn’t prevent Andrew from concentrating on his other love, the writing of pained thought provoking dirty tunes. Hot off the press is a demo of four songs that Andrew recorded at Dr. Al Smith’s Begerk studio. It’s just his distinctive electric guitar and voice with some nice lap steel in the background on the opener and title track ‘Long Line’. Stand out song is number four, ‘Sophisticated’ that mentions the unthinkable, parents “doing it”. The ex-Thumb man is certainly doing plenty of it in spades.

www.andrewewing.com