The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982–1987 is a new retrospective anthology chronicling the formative years of the innovative Scottish group. Curated and designed by the band, it includes their 1985 John Peel session, the original 12-inch singles (including “Detestimony”), the WaxTrax! releases, and previously unreleased live tracks. The package also features a wealth of archival photos along with essays by original member Andy McGregor and longtime friend Shirley Manson (Garbage).
Emerging from post-punk Edinburgh in 1980, Fini Tribe grew to include Chris Connelly, Simon McGlynn, Andy McGregor, Davie Miller, Philip Pinsky, and John Vick. Drawing inspiration from Throbbing Gristle, Wire, Can, Captain Beefheart, and a host of angular funk bands, they embraced experimentation from the outset, building their own electronics before gaining access to early samplers. The lineup evolved over the years, with Connelly relocating to America (where he joined Revolting Cocks, Ministry, and numerous other projects) and Fini Tribe itself moving further into electronic music, with the name standardized as a single word. Yet The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982–1987 offers a comprehensive portrait of that original, groundbreaking incarnation.
Out October 10, 2025, via Shipwrecked Industries, The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982–1987 will be available as a three-CD digipak with a 24-page booklet and as a shorter vinyl LP in a gatefold sleeve with insert. The full version will also be available digitally.
Over Zoom, Connelly and McGregor discussed the release and the history of the band (Miller had been scheduled to take part but had to withdraw at the last minute).
What was the motivation for doing a collection like this at this point in time? How did this project come about?
Chris Connelly: I’ve been trying to get everything together for a long, long time; decades, really. Nobody ever really knew where anything was. Then we found some tapes we didn’t even know we had.
Very quickly I had amassed enough material to start talking to everybody about doing a compilation. Also, with the way mastering is these days, you can take almost anything to a good engineer and they can extract material from ancient cassettes, if they’re still going round and round. That’s what happened. A lot of the stuff came from cassette, and some from reels, which we had digitized as well.
John from the band had a few reels of live performances that had been professionally recorded back in the day. I didn’t even know about that at the time, but there they were.
There was also an extra fire under me because of Grant McPhee’s book Postcards from Scotland. Grant wrote this amazing, exhaustive work detailing the music scene in Scotland from around 1977 through the mid-eighties, and we were a part of that. So there was talk about Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the post-punk scene in those towns, as well as Dundee and Aberdeen.
Could you talk about the music scene in Edinburgh back then, around the time of the start of Fini Tribe? What was it like being an emerging musician in that environment?
Andy McGregor: It was a good time. I mean, we were skint. We had no money, and all the people we knew had no money. We didn’t come from particularly terrible backgrounds, but there wasn’t much privilege either. A lot of it was scraping things together.
We were still at school when we first started and had part-time jobs in supermarkets and the like. We saved up our money and made friends with a group of people on the experimental fringes—the more experimental end of punk and new wave. They were inspired by broad influences, and although we were quite young, these guys took us under their wing a bit. There was a band called Visitors and another called Explode Your Heart. They had some success, not massive, but they were really interesting and a great influence on us.
It was very much experimental existentialism: do whatever you want, DIY. Knowing musical structure or even how to play your instruments wasn’t the priority. It was about attitude trumping skill, reacting against all the prog rock noodling that had gone before—where everybody wanted to play Stairway to Heaven, which was more like my brother’s generation. But your brother was a bit of a punk. I remember he had all these Damned record sleeves up on his bedroom wall.
Chris Connelly: Yeah, I remember from my brother I could tell that before punk happened, he seemed bored by music. He had a handful of records, but the stuff on offer just wasn’t that interesting. When punk happened, it really was a sigh of relief for a lot of people. And it didn’t last long enough to go stale. Part of it veered off into “punk by numbers,” I suppose, but most of the bands got bored quickly.
Take Pink Flag by Wire, for example. They couldn’t wait to move on. Wire were never ones to sit still anyway, from day one. The speed at which bands were changing—it wasn’t overwhelming for us, it just was how it was. Andy, remember how much the Visitors changed in two or three months? Suddenly they were on stage with clarinets, playing something completely new. They just kept changing, and that was highly influential to us. We really took that to heart and wouldn’t leave the house unless we had ten brand-new songs.
Given that environment, when you revisited this material and listened to these recordings you had lost, did anything surprise you about what you were doing at that time? Was there anything unexpected when you went back and listened to this old material?
Chris Connelly: Yeah. All the material was really familiar to me. For example, for Apple Music you need to supply all the lyrics, and I still know them by heart—all of them. I haven’t forgotten a single one. So it was very familiar to me because at that time it was incredibly precious to us, and we cared deeply about what we did.
Andy McGregor: We also drilled these songs like crazy. We rehearsed like maniacs. Because of what I said before—about not really knowing musical structure—the way we built music wasn’t conventional. We had to drill the songs to be able to turn on a sixpence and make changes from one thing to another. It was almost like Burroughs cutting things up in his novels. We were literally cutting up our songs. So we went over and over them. The early ones feel very familiar. Some of the later stuff on the compilation surprised me a bit. I thought, God, I don’t even remember doing that.
Chris Connelly: To Andy’s point, one of the things I didn’t realize when we started being a band—we were all huge fans of Can—was how much they used editing. I didn’t realize at first that they were physically using razor blades and tape. I thought they just played it like that. So we learned all these songs and changes live. We weren’t recording and editing tape because we didn’t know. At least, I didn’t know razor blades were used. That didn’t come until much later when we started making 12-inch, more dance-orientated songs toward the end of the compilation. John learned to edit and created these amazing mixes with razors.
Andy McGregor: We became technically more adept over the years. Not necessarily in playing terms, but with the technology of the time—tape loops and things like that. John, who started off mainly as a keyboard player, really mastered the studio. We used to joke about him being good at electronics because he was the only one who could strip cables with his teeth. He had a soldering iron and would actually build a bass amp from the ground up. He was really skilled at electronics. Now he runs a recording studio and produces a lot of music for TV, radio, and other projects. That’s very much become his life.
Chris Connelly: He built a digital delay unit, which really changed the band. Once he invented it, it was incredible. He used it live, and for us it was the beginning of sampling. He could put something into the delay and keep it going. Before we had a sampling keyboard—which came later—we had the digital delay, and that really added another dimension to the band. And yeah, he built it in his living room.
Do you feel that it gave the music a unique sound that you might not have achieved later on—for example, working within the limitations of early samplers?
Andy McGregor: I think all art forms are sometimes more interesting when you don’t have a 72-track, amazing studio in the Caribbean. What you get can be more honest, and in a sense it can force inventiveness. That’s how new things are created—by needing to find your own way with limited resources.
I remember reading that when the Eurythmics became mega-successful and hugely rich, Dave Stewart suffered from option paralysis. I thought that was an interesting idea.
Chris Connelly: It’s the downfall of a lot of creative people. About 20 years ago, I was lucky enough to interview Irmin Schmidt from Can. He told me how hard it was when they finally got money and could afford a 16-track. They’d been recording on two four-track machines from 1967 up until about 1974. Then they got this 16-track, and suddenly they had too many options. They had to learn to use it, which was a pain, and then the choices overwhelmed them. It destroyed Can for them. It went downhill, and they split up a couple of years later.
Before that, they had just been scrambling to make their records—and those records sounded amazing. If you listen, you can hear the hiss, the splices, the tricks they had to use to get the sound they wanted. When they first started, with Malcolm Mooney singing, he was literally using two record-player speakers and singing between them. That’s how they recorded their music.
They’re a great example of a band who used the studio as an instrument—up until the moment they couldn’t anymore.
“Detestimony” became a defining track. Could you talk about that song and the process behind it? Did you think it had the potential to be a big club hit?
Chris Connelly: We didn’t expect it, and we didn’t even know it. Actually, I left the band before it became a hit.
Andy McGregor: Davie explained it really well. Somebody he knew through Fast Forward, which was a distribution company he worked with as a kind of day job, got in touch with him and said, “Hey, did you know that Detestimony is a huge hit in Ibiza?” It had taken off amongst this nascent rave crowd, the scene that was just developing back then. He was totally surprised.
Had the timing been different, maybe we would’ve capitalized on that as the band we were at the time. Who knows? But as it was, people moved on to other things. That’s the way it goes.
In terms of the creation of the song—it was John, playing keyboards and working the sampler. He really took to it as a creative tool. And the bells… there’s something to be said for that moment when you first get a new medium, whether in painting or music. Those primitive first strokes can sometimes be the most interesting. They have an honesty about them. I think that riff, using the bell sample, is a great example of that.
Chris Connelly: Yeah. It was the first time we were messing around with the Mirage and a reel-to-reel. We were in Philip’s bedroom, and somebody played that riff—I can’t remember who. We were just trying it out. When we got the Mirage, we wanted to use it all the time because samplers were so new. It was like having a film camera or a video camera that could play things back instantly. It was really exciting.
Detestimony was actually part of a longer piece of music called Absolution. It was the second and final movement of this performance we’d been writing. At that point we weren’t even calling ourselves a band anymore—we were doing full-on artistic presentations, performance art. We choreographed them, built the sets ourselves, and composed this 13–14 minute piece of music specifically for one of those events. Detestimony was surgically extracted from that to make the single.
Andy McGregor: We were thinking about the Virgin Prunes and people like that. I remember being really into them. They were an Irish group who grew out of a subculture a bit like we did, in Dublin. They did a lot of performance art too. Same scene U2 started in, in fact.
Looking back at this era of the band, what do you each feel are some of the major things that may have influenced your later work? What do you feel you draw from the experience of this era of the band?
Chris Connelly: We were at the right age and in the right band for me to learn how to work with a small group of people. I learned about democracy—presenting new ideas to each other all the time, finding ways to use those ideas, and recognizing the strengths that other people brought to the table.
We rehearsed a lot, and we played together constantly to write these songs. We’d listen back, focus in on a piece of music here, add four bars there. That’s what I learned from being in the band. And as far as concrete musical ideas, I still carry all of them with me today in what I do. It was the first place I learned, and those were the best lessons I ever got.
After that, I moved to the States. When I was working in Ministry, I was learning how not to make records, because they took so fucking long. All the joy was sucked out of them. There was no pleasure at all, and that got old for me very quickly. But Fini Tribe—that was really good fun.
Andy McGregor: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. For me, I’ve been much more in the visual world post-Fini Tribe. That’s where I ended up. But I also do film and video work. I don’t physically play music anymore, but I’m involved in constructing things. I still have an ear, and I work with engineers—people who put music and soundtracks together. That’s part of what I do now, and I love it. I absolutely love it.
In some ways I wish I had more opportunities to sit in a studio like a kind of Svengali, saying, “Bring me the sound of 20 cowbells” or “Bring me a marimba.” I don’t quite have that power, but of course with sampling, you sort of do. I really savor the business of constructing sound.
Chris Connelly: I still do it. I do it in my basement, and I’ve been happy doing it by myself for a long time. But all the ideas I use are the same basic ones I started with—40, 50 years ago, whatever it was.
Could you discuss the visual aspect of this collection?
Andy McGregor: I did a lot of the artwork back in the day. Originally, when we talked about doing this, I thought, “Oh, I’ll dig out all that stuff from my old portfolios and put something together.” But then I thought, “No, what I’d quite like to do is remix the visuals in a funny sort of way.”
It wasn’t completely planned out, but I ended up using a lot of visuals that other people in the band had made. We were a kind of creative collective, and everybody had a go. Just because I happened to go to art school didn’t mean I was always the one making the best stuff. Everybody made collages and did visual work. I managed to get hold of quite a lot of that material, and I was drawn to it because it felt more interesting—like doing a remix, but visually, by foregrounding other people’s contributions.
Thankfully, most of us are hoarders, so we had boxes of bits and pieces up in our attics that we could use in the artwork. That’s been fun to put together.
The vinyl edition differs from the CD. How did you decide what was going to go on the vinyl?
Chris Connelly: That was me. The CD is a three-disc set, and I couldn’t stretch to doing a five-album set to get everything on vinyl.
On the CDs you’ve got demos, the John Peel session from 1985, and live material. I wanted the vinyl to be more of a “best of.” I wanted to include live material and the entire Peel session, which had never been released before, along with a couple of single A-sides and some nicely recorded demos.
But with vinyl, you’ve only got about 18 minutes a side. Beyond that, the volume goes down and it doesn’t sound as good. So it was a very hard choice. I wanted the best possible set of songs and the loudest possible cut in the mastering room.
With CDs being so cheap to make, I thought, “Everything on there.” And I meant it. I didn’t want 20 different versions of the same song, but I did want to make it a historical document of the band rather than a polished “best of the Fini Tribe.” There was no “best of the Fini Tribe.” I wanted to squeeze in as much of our history as I could and spread it out across the CDs, including rehearsal-room recordings and things like that.
A lot of it was done for us, really. I wanted the band to have it in a nice, beautiful-looking package. And if people out there are curious, they can get the whole thing.
The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987 can be purchased at https://chrisconnelly.bandcamp.com/album/the-sheer-action-of-the-fini-tribe-1982-1987.
