The Sheer Action of Fini Tribe: Chris Connelly and Andy McGregor on Edinburgh Post-Punk, Art, Rebellion, and Staying Interested

(Interview by Karo Kratochwil) Few bands captured the restless imagination of early Scottish post-punk quite like Fini Tribe. Long before genre boundaries hardened into categories, the Edinburgh-born project moved instinctively through experimental rock, industrial textures, performance art, tape collage, physical theatre, and the raw poetic tension of youth lived at full voltage. The newly remastered retrospective “The Sheer Action of Fini Tribe” brings those early recordings back into focus, not as dusty relics, but as documents of urgency, curiosity, and artistic hunger.

In this interview, Fini Tribe’s Chris Connelly and Andy McGregor look back at the formative years of Fini Tribe, reflecting on the band’s visual language, political atmosphere, fierce creative chemistry, and the city that shaped their sound. What emerges is more than a story about a reissue: it is a portrait of a band driven by instinct, movement, and the stubborn refusal to stand still. For anyone interested in Fini Tribe, Scottish post-punk, Edinburgh’s underground music scene, and the collision of sound and performance, this conversation opens a vivid window into a singular creative world.

Interview with Fini Tribe (Chris Connelly and Andy McGregor)

Karo: The title “The Sheer Action of Fini Tribe”suggests energy, motion, and confrontation. Looking back at those formative years, do you think “action” was more about rebellion, survival, or discovery?

Andy McGregor: It was all of the things you mention… and more! We were interested in “actions” as they manifested themselves in art movements like the Futurists, the Dadaists and Situationist actions. Political actions too, to an extent, just doing stuff and freely expressing ourselves. It was also something of an in-joke referring to a guy who collected our rehearsal room rent who talked about the “sheer action” of taking his hand out his pocket and losing his wallet. It was a tiny thing but we joked about it and it became a thing…

Chris Connelly: “The Sheer Action” refers to a private band joke we had, but it was a perfect title as Fini Tribe was all about motion. Whether we knew it or not, we were on, physically and mentally, all the time. It was all rebellion, motion, energy. We were young, but we had purpose, tremendous purpose that was often overwhelming.

Karo: Your early Fini Tribe lyrics, from “De Testimony”to “Backwards and Forwards We Lean,”read like existential manifestos. Were you consciously writing against the social and political climate of Thatcher-era Britain, or were those tensions simply the air you breathed?

Andy McGregor: This is probably more for Chris but I’d say that Backwards and Forwards We Lean was a lyrical and poetic text. De-Testimony was, as the name suggests, angrier, fierce and directly political. It was later, the basic stuff of survival had taken its toll, our youthful creative reverie had paled a little and we’d become angry as we grew hungry, disenfranchised and more aware.

Chris Connelly: As far as lyrics go, they did reflect the times by nature of art and creation being done at a certain time. We were all poor, mostly unemployed, but the lyrics came to me as a result of how the music hit me as we were composing it. Backwards and Forwards We Lean was written while I was still in high school, right at the end, so my memories of that time are pretty idyllic in a way, lots of friends, lots of discovery, being young and having freedom, lots of hi-jinks.

Karo: There is a striking physicality in your work — songs about bodies, pressure, repetition, and release. Do you think of Fini Tribe’s early music as something performed by the body as much as about it?

Andy McGregor: We were young men, very physical and full of jizz/spunk/energy (delete as inappropriate). I think it may be as simple as that on one level, but on another there was a kind of performative physicality at the time that fed into what we did and, in a sense, our bodies were a kind of currency that we could use in performance in the absence of any other currency. We also mixed with other artists such as choreographer Lindsay John who introduced us to Japanese Butoh, which very much treated the human form as sculpture.

Chris Connelly: We were very physical, especially during the era of Detestimony. We used our whole bodies in performance, because why not? Andy McGregor is an amazing visual artist and he really brought great and thought-provoking ideas to Fini Tribe. We also were exposed to a lot of art simply because it was fun and free to go to art galleries, and many of our peers and friends were visual artists. It was there all the time and the idea of the tableau as a moving, breathing, loud thing as performance was important to us.

Karo: The newly remastered Fini Tribe collection feels surprisingly timeless. Listening to those recordings now, what surprised you most — the youth, the naivety, or how modern it still sounds?

Andy McGregor: It sounds a bit boastful but I’m hugely surprised by how well I could play the guitar in the early stuff! I’m going to try and re-learn how to do that as an extension of my mid-life crisis! On another level I’m beyond pleased that it still has some relevance. It could just be dad-pleasing, but my middle daughter, who is 18, and her boyfriend say they are really into the album, and they really know their music.

Chris Connelly: For me it was how fucking well-rehearsed we were and how complicated our individual parts were, and that they reflected our personalities so greatly. When we were mastering, I got to hear individual tracks soloed and it was fascinating how they were uniquely different but fit together seamlessly.

Karo: Fini Tribe evolved from post-punk experimentalism into something that hinted at industrial, ambient, and proto-techno. Did you see yourselves as part of a movement, or were you deliberately trying to escape categorisation?

Andy McGregor: We were influenced by what was going on in music elsewhere, for sure. We had an appetite for everything but filtered quite quickly. Our immediate musical influences were bands close to us like Visitors, Explode Your Heart and Josef K, but they, in turn, would have been influenced by others like Wire, krautrock, Brian Eno and the Last Poets, and so it goes…

Chris Connelly: No, we were not part of a movement and didn’t want to be. We loved listening to music, we loved to go out dancing, but we were a very insular bunch.

Karo: “We’re Interested” remains hypnotic, both musically and visually. It feels like an invitation and a provocation at once. Looking back, what does that Fini Tribe song represent to you now — a portrait of youth, or a statement about curiosity and control?

Andy McGregor: More a question for Chris but my comment would be that Chris made incredibly poetic lyrics full of visual imagery that brought our lives and the landscape we inhabited alive. We’re Interested was perhaps the closest we ever got to a manifesto…

Chris Connelly: It’s a beautiful song. I especially love Andy’s guitar playing, these minor notes against the major melody. To me the song is a snapshot of Edinburgh, the vistas I was privy to, the backdrop of the Union Canal that cuts through part of the city and has always been omnipresent in my life. A lot of time as a kid was spent looking at things like the canal and wondering what was underneath the surface. It’s an invitation to the curious.

Karo: The Fini Tribe anthology captures the raw geography of Edinburgh — the rehearsal rooms, canals, and damp basements. How did the physical city shape your sound and sense of identity as artists?

Andy McGregor: These are the things that we knew. Like most creative people starting off, we drew from what was around us. Places like the Lamppost Graveyard, where the council stored old street furniture, chimed with our love of surrealism. The towering tenements of the Old Town and their abandoned spaces furnished us rehearsal spaces and a kind of vertical playground. The Hermitage park had an old quarry with a great acoustic where we bashed metal, made samples and dropped acid.

Chris Connelly: I think I hinted at that before in the last question, but Edinburgh, for me, was the intricate framework upon which I hung everything. I have not lived there for years, but I can navigate it in the dark, I am so connected to it. I think from a very young age, my eyes were open, and I never took anything for granted, every leaf-covered corner, every church spire.

Karo: Collaboration and experimentation seem essential to Fini Tribe’s DNA. How did working together — often through conflict or chaos — sharpen the creative process during those early years?

Andy McGregor: Good question! We were, in as much as any group of young men can be, “together.” We were a gang with a lot of shared trust and unified purpose. We loved a lot of the same music, art and outlook and, at its best, this crystallised in the music. Sometimes it felt like us against the world, maybe too much so, as we alienated others who might have helped along the way.

Chris Connelly: We were very young when we started, and I have been friends with Andy since we were five. We worked together like organs in a body. It’s inexplicable, but it was magic, organic, enlightening, compelling and truly wonderful.

Karo: You’ve described this Fini Tribe compilation as “a labour of love.” Was revisiting these tapes and memories cathartic, nostalgic, or at times difficult — especially when remastering the imperfections that defined the era?

Andy McGregor: This one is for Chris, I’d say, as he did all the work on remastering the audio side of things. Though you could say I remastered the visuals, I suppose. That was good to do, bringing everything that remained together into one place and digitising it as an archive. It was a positive process, reminded me of how lucky I was to have met and made things with these people and have such a formative creative life experience that has shaped much of my life since.

Chris Connelly: Never difficult. We knew going in that we were working with radically different audio sources. I personally love that kind of stuff, raw cassette recordings and recordings from people’s flats and houses, and there is a breadth to this. Originally I just wanted to license the Peel session, but it grew, so we have the beautifully recorded BBC session and a lot of random recordings too, some recorded outside. And the live material is just incredible sounding to me.

Karo: If you could send a message from 2025 to your 1982 selves — those teenagers rehearsing under flickering lights in Niddry Street — what would you tell them about art, endurance, and staying interested?

Andy McGregor: Another good question… I’d perhaps say: “slow the fuck down, keep at it, and don’t kill the goose that might lay a golden egg.” When you’re that age it’s all a bit polarised and actions can lack subtlety. I rather wish we had said, “let’s just take a break for a while and those who want to can go off and do some other things,” rather than, in huffy tone, “I’m leaving the band… harumph.” We might have then had a rest and regrouped later. That said, FiniTribe v2.0 went on to do some great stuff, as did Chris in the US and all of us in our own individual ways.

Chris Connelly: I would tell myself to never leave Fini Tribe, but advice? No message. We were pretty pure to our purpose. We didn’t listen to many people.

Karo: Fini Tribe’s performances in the mid-’80s — blending sculpture, film, ritual, and sound — were as much happenings as concerts. How important was visual provocation and performance art to the way you communicated your ideas?

Andy McGregor: It seemed like a natural development of what we were doing anyway. As mentioned earlier, we were inspired by Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, all art movements which had their performative action side. I was writing about the crossover between performance art and experimental music for my art school dissertation, so that also fed in and said, why not? These shows were also a manifestation of youthful anger. In some ways this harks back to the previous question around advice we might give our young selves, but I think we didn’t do ourselves any favours in the later stuff with all that aggression and shouty provocation. It was a rather alienating stance and I can’t help thinking that we should’ve been grateful to folks for coming to see us rather than yell at them. I think we could’ve done that and still had an edge. But we were genuinely angry about the state of the world as we saw it. God knows, it’s much more of a shit-show now, but the seeds were being sown then with erosion of workers’ rights and encouragement of a kind of Thatcherite rampant individualism which, in my opinion, has led us to the kind of self-obsessed, everyone-for-themselves, can’t-get-enough culture we’re surrounded by now. This, in turn, opens the door to fascism.

Chris Connelly: This grew from not wanting to just be a band onstage. We could and would develop the visual aspect. We were always into performance art as spectators, and I personally remember so much of it on the streets during the festival. Fini Tribe were never going to settle, we were just too curious. I do not see us as provocateurs, but we had a keen sense of mischief and fun, and a very keen aesthetic. It was hard though, a lot of barriers, some of our own making.

Karo: The Scottish post-punk scene of the early ’80s is often overshadowed by its English counterpart, yet it was uniquely experimental and community-driven. How do you remember that ecosystem of artists, venues, and attitudes that nurtured Fini Tribe’s beginnings?

Andy McGregor: We were very loyal to the idea of making things in our local area but we were not the most collegiate of tribes. Everyone in the Edinburgh scene knew each other but, save for a few exceptions, we kind of kept ourselves to ourselves. So much so that many probably thought we were totally up ourselves!

Chris Connelly: I didn’t see it that way. Those kinds of divisions are often seen in hindsight, if they existed at all. We had a robust music scene in Edinburgh: The Scars, The Visitors, The Fire Engines, Josef K, which kind of fell off a bit because they all split so quickly. But I remember going to see bands like The Slits, A Certain Ratio, Test Dept, Maximum Joy, The Fall, The Blue Orchids, Rip Rig + Panic. So when our local heroes collapsed, we had plenty of touring bands to behold.

Karo: Many of you went on to remarkable individual careers — from Chris Connelly’s work with The Revolting Cocks to Andy McGregor’s design and production. How does it feel now to bring those creative trajectories full circle with this Fini Tribe retrospective — is it closure, continuation, or rediscovery?

Andy McGregor: I’d say it was continuity and rediscovery rather than closure. In some ways it is more of a reopening. The reissued stuff is an eye-opener for me and it’s great to have it all together in one place. We’ve all moved on in life but we’ve all, without exception, continued to work in creative ways. We were incredibly lucky to hook up when we did and it was a really magical experience that has stuck with me and continues to do so. You never know, there might even be more…

Chris Connelly: All of the above! I use my time with Fini Tribe as a template for a lot of my creative endeavours. I learned about sound, and I learned about working with like-minded yet different people.