After dodging past all the angry Libyan protesters outside the BBC building on Oxford Road we made it to the much more welcoming surroundings of the Royal Northern College of Music. The ever increasing line of people inside the building could quite easily have been in a queue for an exam rather than a gig. Now if you don’t know Andy McKee by name, you may know him as the dude with the beard that does the crazy beats on his guitar on YouTube. To date, his percussive acoustic guitar masterpiece has had over 37 million hits. This was one of Andy’s first ever fingerstyle compositions after paying much attention to Preston Reed, yet was recorded by Candyrat in 2006 in an attempt to win over a “few” more fans. Through his own admittance he was blissfully unaware of the impact his video Drifting would have on the web, and how it would catapult his career and the fingerstyle genre into the mainstream.

Before entering the music hall, I noticed the merchandise stall with posters and cd’s ready for Andy to greet the fans and sign them after the show. What could have provided more use to his audience would have been an Andy McKee shovel to prise their jaws off the floor. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it. Deafening silence circled the hall as every single audience member put on their best Scream impression and Andy effortlessly melted them all.

Fingerstyle has not just popped up out of nowhere within the last few years, Michael Hedges has been the most influential artist in the genre for over two decades. Andy pays tribute to Michael, after sadly passing away in 1997, on his beautifully crafted Greenfield Harp guitar with The Friend I Never Met. I’m a massive fan of Michael Hedges and he will undoubtedly go down as the Godfather of fingerstyle, yet there is something much more accessible and ear catching to Andy’s style of play through his use of texture and melody that tips my preference in his favour. More often than not it is aspiring guitarists that make up the volume of fans for this kind of music, yet with Andy it seems to be appealing to the enthusiasts as well as the musicians.

Ironically Andy has become known as a percussive guitar player through Drifting yet only has a handful of compositions to show for that. His latest addition to this style is Hunter’s Moon, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t blink once in the whole four minutes plus that it lasted for. Andy inevitably rounds off his set with Drifting and is rewarded with a standing ovation, to which he pays back the compliment with a beautiful cover of Michael Hedges’ Ragamuffin.

We caught up with Andy before the gig to ask him a few questions about his journey so far.

BR: I noticed on a lot of your earlier videos you had a big, resplendent beard, what’s happened to it?

AM: I cut a bit off I suppose, just changed the look of it. I’ve still got a little bit there!

BR: Do you think it will ever make a return?

AM: Oh yeah! Sometimes I miss it so it could come back again.

BR: Good!

BR: So, Drifting has become one of the most viewed videos of all time on youtube, what do you think it was that struck a chord with so many people?

AM: Probably the beard! Ha ha! I play the guitar in a very unusual way in that song you know, with the left hand over the top of the neck and I’m hitting the guitar body and stuff – a lot of people haven’t seen the guitar being played that way before so that was kind of interesting, people saying “what’s that all about?!” and hopefully they liked the music as well.

BR: Do you think finger-style guitarists such as yourself owe a lot of your popularity to websites like youtube?

AM: I guess, definitely in my case. The finger-style guitar has been around for a long time, I’ve got a lot of influences. They were doing really amazing stuff with the acoustic guitar like thirty years ago, well before the internet…

BR: Like Michael Hedges?..

AM: Yeah, exactly. He’s probably one of my biggest influences on the acoustic guitar. Maybe I was the first guy on the internet to have the most success of that style of guitar. We put some new videos up late 2006 hoping to get some new fans really and it just started to take off. It’s helped my career immensely.  

BR:  Cool. Finger-style is well known for its obscure tunings. Would you say that is vital to the composition of how you write a song?

AM: It is for me, yeah. I really get inspiration for new tunings on the guitar, just experimenting with what’s possible with different tunings. So a lot of times I’ll begin with a new tuning, either something I’ll come up with or use a more familiar one but make little variations on it, you know? I’ll start to experiment, come up with chords or riffs, and I’ll get a lot of different ideas that go with it and I’ll try to figure out a way to play them at the same time.

BR: It’s pretty well documented that Don Ross is another big influence of yours, we actually saw you both last time you toured the UK, in Bury. What was it like touring with a personal hero?

AM: Oh yeah it was amazing! Don and I got to know each other about five or six years ago, that was the first time we met in person and we hit it off and became really good friends, so it was great to go touring with him. We got to do an album together in 2008 which was really fantastic. I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to play with some of my biggest influences. In the states I was on a tour called guitar masters. There was me, Peppino D'Agostino and Eric Johnson - who was actually the reason I started playing guitar when I was twelve. It was mind-blowing. Amazing.

BR: Cool! Before the explosion of Drifting, you were a part-time guitar teacher. Do you still find the time to pass on your skills to other people?

AM: In sort of different capacities I suppose, I don’t really do private lessons any more. I did that for about ten years back home. But actually just about four or five days ago I was in France and I did a master-class as well as a concert. Sometimes there are opportunities when I’m on tour to do workshops, teach guitar and show what I do with the guitar.

BR: I’ve just watched some footage of you jamming with Sungha Jung the Korean guitarist, how did that come about?

AM: I’ve become familiar with him, of course as he’s on youtube as well.

BR: Yeah he covered quite a few of your songs, obviously Rylynn being the big one.

AM: That’s right, he’s quite young. I think maybe he’s like fifteen now, I don’t know, but I saw him on Youtube and he happened to be playing on the same bill at a festival in Thailand last October. Also Tommy Emmanuel was on there so during the actual concert me, Tommy and Sungha actually all played together.

BR: I’ve never seen anybody play as fast as Tommy Emmanuel! The way he plays classical gas is just…

AM: Mind-blowing! Yeah he’s really unbelievable.

BR: Looking at your guitars, one which stands out is the fanned-fret guitar. How is that different from a standard guitar? Is it any better?

AM: The idea with fanned-fretted guitars is that it helps with the intonation. So it plays more in-tune all the way up the guitar. The nut is angled one way and the bridge is angled the opposite way so what happens is the strings have their proper scale length for the pitch that they're tuned to. If you think of a piano, or a harp, the treble strings are really short then they get longer towards the bass strings. On a guitar normally you just have everything at the same scale length, no matter what pitch it’s tuned to so with the fanned-fret you have a longer scale length for the bass strings.  It’s not really dramatic but the intervals are in the proper location for each string.

BR: I believe you’re a little bit of a metal fan.

AM: Definitely, yeah.

BR:  Who’s your favourite metal band of all-time and do you follow newer metal bands at all?

AM: Sure, erm… That’s kind of tough for all-time favourite metal band, I don’t know if I could pick just one but Metallica would be up there. I really love their older stuff, some of the best metal of all-time there for me! I love Pantera though, so it’d be hard to choose. On the modern metal stuff, I don’t know if they're modern or not but they are modern to me are Kill-Switch Engage - one of my favourite bands from like the last ten years.

BR: Excellent. Do you have a particular gig that stands out as a favourite above all the rest?

AM: Out of all the gigs I’ve done?

BR: Yeah.

AM: For me I really love the audience interaction, I think most artists would tell you that, unless they’re sort of too into themselves, you know?! I really love an audience that’s into it; that gives it back. I had a gig in Glasgow a couple of years ago and the audience was insane and it felt so good. They were really loving every tune and freaking out. That was a couple of years ago, 2008 at The Ferry, Glasgow.

BR: If the world was to end tomorrow and you could tell our readers to go out and do one last thing, what would it be?

AM: Wow! Geez! Erm… Just enjoy yourself but don’t hurt anyone else in the process I guess. That’s how I live my life, so I always try to live by that rule. I don’t know if there’s any one thing that everybody should go and do! Just be good.

BR: Brilliant. Thanks very much.

AM: No problem.