“I got in touch with my mortality making this record:” Failure's Ken Andrews on drugs, Paramore, and being the world's greatest cult band

“I had a really tough time coming out of the medication they used to put me down,” says Ken Andrews. When his band Failure unveiled the song The Air’s On Fire in February, many assumed it was the Los Angeles alt.rockers doing what they do best, conjuring the same kind of cosmic imagery they’ve been expanding minds with since the early nineties.

And in a way, perhaps, that’s what Ken was doing, albeit as a way to articulate the hazy hinterland he found himself in recovering from serious back surgery before the making of Failure’s seventh album, Location Lost. The procedure necessitated Ken being administered with some very powerful drugs, ketamine and propofol – the latter being responsible for the death of Michael Jackson, a fast-acting anesthetic and sedative nicknamed ‘Milk of amnesia.’

Even now, back to full health, the 58-year-old speaks in a low drawl, but he always has. Wearing a baseball cap, he’s quiet and restrained, administering the occasional slow nod to let you know he’s registering the question. He was considerably more animated when he first came to after surgery, though. Unnaturally so, in fact, asking the doctors when he could leave, before passing out for eight hours and experiencing powerful hallucinations when he woke again.

It’s a prospect no doubt made more frightening by the fact Ken is a recovering drug addict, which was a contributing factor to Failure disbanding in late 1997.

“It was a rough time,” says Ken of his convalescence. “We delayed the start of [Location Lost] because of it. Physically, I could drive and walk, but mentally I still wasn’t there. I think it played a role in why the record lacks an overarching theme. I couldn’t muster that level of mental acuity at that point.”

Ken could muster songs, though, even in his psychologically clouded state. And without a concept to write to, he was able to focus squarely on the task at hand, one song at a time and following his natural instincts, which unconsciously led him back to the music of The Cure and Bauhaus, formative musical influences that erred on the gothier side.

“It was like returning to my childhood in a lot of ways,” he reveals of the regression that seemed to arrive hand in hand with recuperation. When Ken began to feel better, he listened back to his compositions, surprised that he’d made them. But instead of reining things in after being back in his right mind, he decided to continue with them, as if collaborating with his younger self.

“I followed my bliss on each song. I knew it was kind of retro, but I loved the sound of it.”

Ken’s bandmate, bassist Greg Edwards, certainly agreed. He’d later suggest Location Lost features “sounds and parts that really don’t have any precedence within the Failure world.”

Those stylistic shifts will be evident to everyone else, too. Take Solid State, with its upbeat, new wave tones recalling Boston rockers The Cars, the band Ken had learned to play guitar listening to. Or Take A Way Down, with its incessant rhythms sounding like prime Primus.

Those nostalgic impulses changed the course of what Ken was writing about, too. The Rising Skyline is a prime example. A duet with Paramore’s Hayley Williams, marking the first time the band has had a guest on a track, it’s warmer and more wistful than we’ve come to expect. It’s a love song, but to a lost love, making it new territory. Despite its title, The Nurse Who Loved Me from 1996’s Fantastic Planet, covered by A Perfect Circle on 2003’s Thirteenth Step, isn’t a love song at all. Instead it’s a paean to addiction, delusion and obsession. On The Rising Skyline, however, we’re in more earnest territory.

“It’s sentimental,” adds Ken. “It’s looking back on a relationship that didn’t last, but in a sentimental way. Pursuing something like that on, say, [2015’s fourth album] The Heart Is A Monster probably wouldn’t have worked out because we were not wanting to be overly schmaltzy, whereas on this record we weren’t letting the inner editors have their way as much.”

As Paramore fans may know, Ken Andrews was the engineer on the band’s self-titled fourth album, released in 2014. What they may not know, however, is that he had the opportunity to produce Hayley and co.’s full-length debut, 2005’s All We Know Is Falling. But it didn’t work out.

Back then, Ken and a host of other big name producers had been invited to a Paramore showcase in Los Angeles, to give the prospective candidates a taste of what the Tennessee stars-in-waiting were capable of. Excitement levels were understandably high, though not for Ken, who was going through a divorce at the time and had just had a rather bruising meeting with his attorney that had left him in a foul mood.

“I walked in and watched a couple of songs, but couldn’t focus on what I was listening to at all,” recalls Ken. “So I literally walked out in the middle of their performance and then they went on to become this really huge act.”

Everything, as they say, happens for a reason. And so a decade later, with Justin Meldal-Johnsen in the production hot seat for Paramore album number four, Ken had another chance. Justin was friends with Ken, having co-produced his debut solo album, 2007’s Secrets Of The Lost Satellite. There was no nepotism involved, though, as Ken and the four other candidates were all asked to mix the same song, with neither Justin nor Paramore knowing whose mix was whose. Eventually, Ken’s effort won out.

While working together, Hayley, who Ken knew to be a huge Failure fan, asked him why he hadn’t taken the chance to work with them all those years ago.

“She asked me, ‘What happened back then? Because you were going to be our first pick to produce our first record.’ So I told her the whole story. It was very full circle, and we’ve become friends since then and we text a bunch. When I had a handful of mixes for Location Lost, I sent them to her and she was really into it. So that’s when the idea came up for her to sing on [The Rising] Skyline.”

Hayley is featured in the Failure documentary, Every Time You Lose Your Mind, released last year, in which she rhapsodises about her love for the band alongside the likes of Tommy Lee, Maynard James Keenan and Butch Vig. The project had been started by a couple of other directors pre-COVID, but they abandoned the project with the arrival of the pandemic, handing what they’d shot so far over to Ken, who was impressed by what had been captured.

As a younger man, Ken studied for a degree in film and television, having been a late bloomer, musically, who didn’t start learning to play guitar until he was 18. He was directing music videos in the early nineties when Failure signed to Slash Records, so had the requisite skills to complete Every Time You Lose Your Mind, which acts as both an unflinching history and an appreciation of the outfit regularly dubbed ‘your favourite band’s favourite band.’

“I wish I understood the formula for what makes them so special,” Hayley says at what point in the film. “Because I would be doing all of it. I would just be ripping it.”

Elsewhere, producer Butch Vig suggests what he thinks makes the trio, completed by drummer Kellii Scott, to make dark and dissonant music that makes listeners feel uneasy as well as captivated.

“I don’t know what Ken and Greg’s working relationship is like,” suggests Butch in the film. “But I assume there’s some tension between them, and that comes across in the music. I think that’s a big part of Failure’s sound.”

“I think it’s interesting he said you can hear that in the music,” Ken says of Butch’s observation, before addressing Failure’s dynamic these days. “There’s probably less straight-up fighting and arguing, but we still have that tension in the sense of ‘I’m not sure what you just did musically there.’ All three of us are trying to impress the other, but at the same time trying to muscle in and get our creative way.”

Ken’s favourite movie, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Despite his predilection for the cosmic, in 1996, when it came time to direct the promo for Stuck On You, the first single from Fantastic Planet, it was a different giant of film iconography Ken drew inspiration from, James Bond, and the franchise’s silhouetted credit sequences. Little could Ken have known then that 10 years later, he’d be working on a Bond song.

“I wasn’t brought in at the very beginning,” Ken says of his involvement with Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name, the theme from 2006’s Casino Royale. It’s a tangent that brings out a more animated Ken.

“Chris had already written and recorded the song for the movie, but he came back from England and he wasn’t happy with his vocal performance,” Ken continues. “So he asked me to re-record his vocal and mix it back into the song. He came to my studio at my house, which was kind of crazy, as I’d never met him before and I’d only just finished construction on the studio, so he was the first person to ever sing in that vocal booth, which was an amazing thing to be able to say.”

Eventually, Ken added in some of his own vocal harmonies and an additional guitar part, which Chris loved so much, he asked Ken to perform the song with him on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.

“That’s one my teenage kids found on YouTube, which impressed them. That and working with Hayley Williams.”

Meanwhile, Ken’s synergising of film and music continues apace, with him currently doing the score for an independent horror film that he has to be tightlipped about for now. Might this be something he has more time for in future, given the speculation that Location Lost could be Failure’s final album?

“I got in touch with my mortality making this record,” says Ken. “So every album cycle these days isn’t to be taken for granted. When we started the last two records, I asked Greg and Kellii, ‘Are you up for doing this?’ because it’s not automatic. It’s a three-year investment. Making the records doesn’t always go smoothly, then there’s the promotional cycle, which doesn’t get any easier when you’re getting older.”

Failure have an appearance at Sick New World in Las Vegas in the weeks after this chat, followed by U.S. tour dates throughout May, then in October. At which point, the trio will go for a dinner that’ll double as a summit.

“We’ll sit down and discuss whether or not we want to keep going,” reveals Ken, giving no clear indication which way he’s leaning on the matter.

Fingers crossed that Failure continue to operate, as we’ve now had more out-of-this-world albums from them post-reformation (four) than before their 1997-2014 split (three), so why stop now?

After all, quality is supposed to be permanent, and the world needs more strange and inscrutable bands, even if, like Failure, they may never get the commercial recognition they deserve.

Failure's album Location Lost is out now via Failure / Arduous.

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