NME, May 23rd, 1998
by Sylvia Patterson

Whatever you do, don't mention the well-known brother! Yup, UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH may have a famous family connection in their lead singer but, if you don't mind, they're rather just talk about the simple stuff like, er, life, the universe and prog rock.

The alarmingly serious, bespectacled young man in black with the expressionless features and the palpable aura of desperate self-consciousness stares straight into his kness and looks like he may implode with moral effrontery.
 

Oxford's Unbelievable Truth would rather set fire to themselves while standing atop a funeral pyre fashioned from their beloved book collections than to ever, for one-millionth of a nanosecond in a previous life, be seen to -urk!- cash in, in any way, on their most famed connection. They'd rather, really, no-one even mentioned it.
"Um...I used to do lights for a band," says drummer Nigel Powell, 23, he of the curious baldy head/pony-tail ensemble, confessing to a 'second career' while speaking of his extensive travels through the USA.
Who were they, then?
(Also to knees) "Radiohead."
Oh dear. But that, thankfully, appears to be that (unless smiley and 99 per cent mute bass player Jason Moulster, 23, knows something we don't and if he does he's not telling anyone, ever). The truly gifted, however, need no nepotism network and Unbelievable Truth's debut album, 'Almost Here', is as deep and striking a display of musical and emotional beauty-in-bleakness as any of the pioneers of the New Seriousness.
"Ur... I dunno about this New Seriousness," balks Andy, 22. "D'you think it's really there?"
Oh yes. It's an epidemic of musical sorrow.
"Well, I guess when someone like Robbie Williams writes a song like 'Angels'..."(he huffs and launches into a bewildering assault on the lovely Robbie for being an emotional fraud and not quite writing 'his own material' or some such fun-free anti-pop baloney which we will not grace with repetition here). Unbelievable Truth are, of course, from the olden days; the pre-irony days of 'integrity', 'dignity', 'no sell-out / compromise / surrender' and the Campaign For Real Rock which has traditionally offered the world one Radiohead for every 4,000 Deacon Blues.
The Truth have, however, a staggering gift for the atmospheric which Andy calls "intimacy. And melancholy. But I don't believe it's miserable." And the Pope's a member of Marilyn Manson. Still at least they're soooooo unbelievably bloody serious they must be, surely, barking bonkers.
Old school pals from Abingdon, Oxford, the first time Nigel met Andy, at aged 15, he'd spent the first half of his term talking to literally no-one and was to be found every lunch and morning break kicking a golf ball "up and down and up and down" the school driveway.
"I'd been a bit of a scallywag before that," notes Nigel, who'd moved up from London, "and when I moved I was totally depressed. I must have come across as extremely bonkers. So often I naturally gravitated towards people like Andy."
And to Jason, with whom Nigel, when they left school, formed a rhythm section for hire for many years within the buoyant Oxford musical 'scene'. Andy, meanwhile, had gone on to Russia to recive his degree in Russian Language & Literature and where he became an activist revolutionary for Greenpeace in a balaclava made out of tights and plotted to blow up the Kremlin for its nuclear testing operations. Or something.
"It could've been more fascinating than it was," confesses Andy. "I was actually working as a translator for Greenpeace. They asked me to go on an action boat in front of the Kremlin protesting about nuclear testing and I said no. Because they said, 'You might get arrested and you might get deported' and I was, 'Well, I just got here! Saved up loads of money! I'm not throwing it all away to get on a boat!'"
Curses.
He loves the country still - "There's something vaguely spiritual about the place" -although the creeping virus of adopted Western values distresses him deeply: "Nobody reads the literature any more. Everyone reads crappy pulp fiction translated from the Americans."

So it was to music he returned and to his old pals Nigel and Jason. Unbelievable Truth's ascent to prominence was achieved through a quiet determination and lots of people going on about what a beezer voice the young Andy had (not to mention the other two who, between them on backing vocals, sound eerily like the unmentionable Thom). It's a wonder, mind, their musical tryst ever flourished in the first place.
"I don't know how we even ended up being friends," muses Nigel. "Our music tastes couldn't have been more opposite."
"I was into David Bowie and Japan and REM and The Smiths," notes Andy, pansily.
"And I liked early Genesis," counters Nigel, toughly, "progressive rock."
Christ almighty. All that Bongwater stuff? Spirally swirls in the ether and... beards?
"That's possibly the important thing." he guffaws. "I always used to like the bands without the beards. Marillion's original drummer had a beard but they threw him out and the new drummer didn't have a beard. Or they had very small beards, like the guitarist with IQ, it wasn't one of those prog-rock beards with birds living in it. So, no-beard-prog-rock sums up my musical world."
What's with your hair, Nigel? "It's a two-pronged thing," he chuckles. "I was thinning on top and the only reasonable thing to do is shave your head and many years ago I had my hair cut short and discovered the long bit at the back had actually been my security blanket, I'm always hanging onto it. So this is the solution. And actually a lot of people have come up and say, 'Hi, really liked the gig, me and my friends just wanted to say we think your hair's a bit stupid'. Thanks!"