Gay’s reclaim the field (& locker room) in ANDY’s pop debut ‘Can’t Wait’

Enter a queer, locker room fever dream as AFL bi-con Mitch Brown and NFL trailblazer Ian Roberts star in the steamy debut music vid for pop artist ANDY – Can’t Wait.

The past few days, my feed has been teasing that an exciting music video is going to hit at 12 pm Thursday. It’s hot, hard-hitting, and directly confronts homophobia and homoeroticism in sport in a layered and beautifully powerful way.

Twelve hours before Can’t Wait dropped worldwide (yes, at midnight), I chatted with emerging artist ANDY about the song and music video. It’s giving ‘yeah the boys’ meets ‘kiss the boys’.

And the reality of what he is about to share with the world is starting to hit him.

“Being a performer, when you harness a piece of art like this, you have a critical eye on it and such deep care for it that you can’t really see it for what it is,” ANDY said.

“But since I started leaking tiny bits of it, I think the message is very clear, and I feel really excited to share it.

The music video for Can’t Wait is a steamy visual melting-pot of queer desire and yearning. Directed by rising DIVISION talent Harry Welsh, it beautifully crafts the feeling of being in the closet and surrounded by masc Australian sporting culture – something so many of us experienced.

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‘Caught between fantasy and fear’

ANDY grew up in Manly and went to a Catholic all-boys school whose motto was ‘Turning Manly boys into Manly men’. Little did they realise the school’s sporting culture awoke something else in ANDY.

“I’d look around and see wrestling, wedgies, sharing showers, headlocks, girth checks, sack wacks, gay chicken,” Andy said in the press pack, “And I witnessed a world where the line between homophobia and homoeroticism was invisible.

“I wrestled with how dangerous one seemed, while the other was celebrated. Caught between fantasy and fear, I could hardly spot the difference. But understood the consequences if I let myself be seen.”

“It’s our job as artists to protest by creating art so loud that we become undeniably visible.”

Can’t Wait reimagines the world of Australian contact sport as a space of queer longing and liberation. In an authentically powerful way, the layers and juxtaposition of the song and music video stepped past the usual tropes we are used to seeing in a world exploring homoeroticism in sport.

Sampling ANDY’s sex tapes with footy chants

Australian sporting culture is stamped all over Can’t Wait, but in a way that I remember when I was trying to figure out who I was before I came out.

The track beautifully samples ANDY’s own gay sex tapes with actual footy victory chants and celebrations, while the music video edges the viewer past their expectation of sporting culture that pushes queer people in instead of out.

Working as an actor for twelve years, ANDY’s world changed after a life-altering injury that required two spinal surgeries. Recovery reshaped his artistic direction and expression, giving him a deep curiosity for the human experience and passion for writing music.

“I had all this time to sit and reflect on what I had been through,” ANDY said, “What systems I had navigated, and the constructs placed upon me as a queer person. More importantly, the uniforms that I’ve had to wear in my life, the eras, and the expectations that come with that.”

“I started writing this song when I was actually going through like a big slut phase, and really embracing it for the first time in a beautiful way. A way I didn’t have when I was younger, because we spend our teenage years desperately trying to be invisible so that no one picks up on what we’re trying to lay down.”

What does sexual liberation for gay people look like?

“I was walking into a restaurant, and I just got the chorus, and I realised it was about edging. About running a race together, and two people finishing the race at the same time. So I started putting it together and wrote the whole song in about twenty minutes.”

ANDY wrote a song about sexual liberation for gay people, which often happens for us all later in life. In the track, he merged intimate sounds of himself and a very famous NRL team winning a game.

“If I did have the safety to be myself and be visible, where would that be?”

“I went to a literal f**king prison of a school,” ANDY said. But through recreating and merging of audio, “The question became, what’s the difference? It sounded the same.”

“So that’s what I wanted to do with the visual as well. Put these two things together and just push it that little bit further. Because if those boys had the safety to do that, they would do it too.”

If the music video to Can’t Wait was pitched in a room ten years ago, I could see people saying yes immediately, but the end product looking very different.

There’s a subtle sensuality and yearning mixed with masculinity that doesn’t punch down. And somehow it celebrates the beauty of both. It’s also VERY sexy.

“When I write music, it hits through me like a bolt of lightning,” ANDY said, ” and I see it in front of me.”

“You have deep eroticism, toxic masculinity, and a juvenile body response that you have when you’re a teenager. It’s the first track off the album, and it is about that first body response that we have as a teenager.”

Having Ian and Mitch be a part of Can’t Wait

ANDY started thinking of his dream cast and couldn’t believe it when the NRL’s first openly gay player, Ian Roberts, and the AFL’s first openly bisexual player, Mitch Brown, said yes to being a part of it.

“Ian represents that aggression, that toxic masculinity that turns into something more,” ANDY said. “I cast my choreographer and friend Ticky as a young me who looks vulnerable in the space. And then Mitch to me is all the things that are beyond this.”

“Yes, it’s like mild pornography at times, but the Mitch storyline for me is romantic.”

“It’s the heartfelt with the consent of it all. It’s the captain of the football team being able to kiss his boyfriend at the game.”

ANDY shared what a joy it was to work with Mitch. And while filming the scrum and choreographed kiss, it was “pin-drop silence”.

“The whole set knew that something very big, beautiful and serious just came alive in that moment,” he said. “Of how important it is to watch queerness and sport interact like this. To cross over into the world that we all think it probably does behind the scenes. That shocked us with how beautiful it was, how sensual and soft it was.”

ANDY’s debut album &e drops late October

The  9-track EP/mini album walks through the many uniforms we are handed in life and how it feels to sport, navigate, remove and understand the constructs that come with them.

That is, of course, until we are stripped bare and let the world see us in our truest selves.

“I didn’t know I was making an album when I was recovering,” ANDY said, “I was just like putting my thoughts together, and then I formed this.

“This track, as wild and awesome as it is, I’m kind of gaslighting my listener. We go on quite a journey from here, and one I’m very ready to share.”

Check out Can’t Wait and follow ANDY on socials here.

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