The Black Watch

At a London gig last year, the black watch frontman/songwriter/novelist/ex-English prof John Andrew Fredrick joked that he's "a recovering Anglophile... something I'll never recover from." Believing his heritage to be "a third Scottish, a third English, a third Irish", when Fredrick formed his band in 1989, he named it after the famous Scots infantry regiment. Though a recent 23andme test has revealed him to be 98 per cent English. So much for the nod to the regiment! "British music, history, fiction, and poetry has formed so much of who I am as an artist and a person. Especially The Beatles," Fredrick notes from his studio in the trendy Angeleno Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. "The year The White Album came out, I broke my leg so badly playing American football that I had to spend eleven months in bed. I read maniacally about English History, and propped a little Silvertone acoustic on my cast and started writing songs in kiddie imitation of my heroes. That sad-at-the-time year turned out to quite profoundly if not fortuitously make me who I am."

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