Matheson, Andrew

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Origin: Sudbury, Ontario, 🇨🇦 - London, England, 🇬🇧
Biography:

Andrew Matheson is a British-Canadian rock singer, most noted as a founding member of the British proto-punk band Hollywood Brats in the early 1970s. He later released two solo albums, and garnered a Juno Award nomination for Best New Solo Artist at the Juno Awards of 1995.

Sources are in conflict about Matheson's childhood. In Canadian media, he was reported as spending his childhood in Sudbury, Ontario before moving to London as a teenager, while British sources state that he grew up in Gillingham, Kent as the son of a serviceman in the Royal Navy. He formed Hollywood Brats in 1971. Although championed by Keith Moon and later recognized as an important early punk band which had a significant influence on many of the bands who would later have success with the genre, the band had little commercial success while active and released just one album before breaking up in 1975. Matheson was then involved in the short-lived band London SS.

Matheson released the solo album Monterey Shoes in 1979. He later moved to Toronto, where he released the album Night of the Bastard Moon in 1994 and was nominated for Best New Solo Artist at the Junos in 1995. He did not release another album in Canada, and moved back to England again sometime after 1995.

In 2015, he published a memoir of the band, Sick On You: The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band, named after one of the Hollywood Brats' songs.

The Hollywood Brats are the greatest band you’ve never heard of.

Recording one near-perfect punk album in 1974, they were tragically ahead of their time.

With only a guitar, a tatty copy of the Melody Maker and his template for the perfect band, Andrew Matheson set out, in 1971, to make musical history. His band, The Hollywood Brats, were pre-punk prophets – uncompromising, ultra-thin, wild, untameable and outrageous. But thrown into the crazy world of the 1970s London music scene, the Brats ultimately fell foul of the crooks and heavies that ran it and an industry that just wasn’t ready for them.

Directly inspiring the London SS, the Clash, Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols, The Hollywood Brats imploded too soon to share the glory. Punk’s answer to Withnail and I, Sick On You is a startling, funny and brilliantly entertaining period memoir about never quite achieving success, despite flying so close to greatness.

After the Hollywood Brats, Brady performed with Wreckless Eric. Steel briefly joined London SS before becoming a member of The Boys.