Features A Date With… Andrew W.K.

Andrew W.K. is well known as someone who parties hard. Heck, when we arrive he is even wearing a hat that specifies exactly that. ‘Party Hard’, like it’s a nametag for his soul or something. It’s a life that’s a far cry from the one us music writers and bloggers lead, alright. Someone has to hold up the online world when the rest of you are out gallivanting and having fun. We spend our evenings with our eyes fixed on the news feed because “that is when Pitchfork is awake.” We lie to our flatmates that we’ll go to bed after Twitter finishes, all the while knowing that it never will.

And so in between the album announcements and tour date releases, we play the odd game of online chess with whoever else we can find on our Facebook chat list at these unholy hours. If that fails, we resort to playing strangers who only seem to care about knowing our age, sex, location and what we’re wearing. It doesn’t help our loneliness in the early hours when people “leave the room” as soon as we tell them we’re a 22 year old male.

Meeting Andrew W.K. in the lobby of a West London hotel that hardly screams ‘R Kelly Afterparty’, we decide that this feature won’t involve a drug-fuelled orgy as you might imagine but instead a different kind of fun. And so with all the board games we can find at short notice, we meet Andrew in the bar, just metres away from what is a clearly a member of Westlife. On arrival, one out of the two of us is already nursing what seems to be a glass of whiskey. No prizes go to guessing the correct answer of which of us it is.

But just as soon as I set up the chess set, Andrew looks up from his mobile momentarily – having broken the first rule of dates for the past two minutes (i.e. Never look at your phone unless it’s to tweet that you’re with the other person, which everyone knows is a clear indirect flirting tactic) – and decides he doesn’t want to play. “Dude, chess is for intelligent people like you, not me” he says, looking back down at his mobile.

We settle on Simpsons Monopoly instead but we hit a fork in the already rocky road when I ask which Andrew’s favourite character is. “Are you the type of person who thinks like that? Do you pick favourites in life?” he questions, as if interrogating me with a torch light about my sexual past. “You have to enjoy the good and the bad in this life, my friend” he preaches as I collect all the ‘Chance’ cards.

Despite the suspected levels of inebriation of my counterpart, it seems to work. While I pick and choose my purchases carefully, the whiskey has inspired a gung-ho strategy of buying anything and everything in Andrew, like a drunk kid who’s sneaked a swig of his grandfather’s scotch and then walked into a candy store. It works to his advantage this time, but we probably shouldn’t adopt his strategy to any other dates. I don’t think it would end so well.

Andrew W.K. is currently celebrating the tenth anniversary of his debut album ‘I Get Wet’.

Taken from the June 2012 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.