Andrew Mueller is a Wagga Wagga-born, London-based rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist, pundit and author. He is a Contributing Editor at Monocle, and a frequent presenter on Monocle 24, including as host of the award-winning “The Foreign Desk”. He also writes more or less regularly for Uncut, New Humanist and Smith Journal, among others. His byline has also appeared – and may yet again, who knows – in The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, The New York Times, The Face, eMusic, Metro, High Life, The Quietus, The Australian, Frankie, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Bloomberg Business Week, Gear, Arena, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Little Atoms and NSFW, among many others.
Mueller has no real idea why he’s writing all this in the third person, unless it’s out of some desperate, deluded hope that it will sound like he can afford staff, or command the loyalty of starry-eyed interns. Anything else just seems kind of gauche, though, so he will stick with it.
He is the author of four scandalously under-rated books: “Rock & Hard Places”, an anthology of rock journalism, foreign correspondence and travel writing first published in 1999, then reissued in updated form in 2010 and again in 2012; “I Wouldn’t Start From Here”, a history of the 21st century as seen from most of the places in which the 21st century has, thus far, happened, which was published in various territories between 2007 and 2009; “It’s Too Late To Die Young Now”, an affectionate memoir of a youth gleefully mis-spent in rock journalism, which was published in Australia in 2013, and elsewhere in 2014; “Carn”, an episodic historiography of Australian Rules football, which was published in 2019.
In distant to recent past, then: Mueller was Reviews Editor at lamented rock weekly Melody Maker between 1991 and 1993. He wrote a fortnightly opinion column for Time Out between 2002 and 2004, and the “Bad Idea Of The Week” column, a regular study of human folly, for The Independent On Sunday Review between 2004 and 2006. Between 2008 and 2010, a variation on this theme, “Moment Of Madness”, appeared weekly in the Financial Times Magazine. Between 2015 and 2018, he wrote a regular opinion column, sometimes but not always about sport, for GQ Australia.
Among various journalistic misadventures in more than 80 countries, Andrew Mueller has reported on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, the lifting of the siege of Bihac, the handover of Hong Kong, the invasion of Iraq, the wartime rock’n’roll scene of Sarajevo, an Elvis Presley festival in Tupelo and Ukraine’s efforts to launch Chernobyl as a tourist destination. He was probably the first foreigner ever to set foot in the village of Panggi in Arunachal Pradesh, north-eastern India, and certainly the first to take a wicket on the village cricket pitch (caught behind off a thickish outside edge). He has ridden the Cresta Run, driven the proverbial Road to Damascus, been given a guided tour of Lebanon by Hezbollah, travelled the Trans-Mongolian railway, patrolled Basra with the Welsh Guards and Kabul with the Royal Anglian Regiment, played the country songwriters’ open-mic night at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, spent ten days aboard a Finnish icebreaker, and flown the world’s least commercially sane air route – IranAir between Tehran and Caracas. In November 2005, he was briefly an extremely minor international news story, after getting arrested in Cameroon while travelling with an illegal separatist group, and finding himself obliged to spend the weekend in gaol.
Andrew Mueller has interviewed a bemusing panoply of public figures, including Libyan heir apparent Saif Gaddafi, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, Loyalist hitman turned surrealist painter Michael Stone, UN High Representative to Bosnia-Hercegovina Paddy Ashdown, British MPs George Galloway and Boris Johnson, UK cabinet ministers Peter Hain and Geoff Hoon, long-imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier, Albanian prime minister Edi Rama, Formula 1 drivers Eddie Irvine, Damon Hill and Gerhard Berger, Israeli dissident Mordechai Vanunu, supermodel Helena Christensen, Abkhazian president Sergei Bagapsh, Muslim Council of Britain chairman Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Cape Verde prime minister Jose Maria Neves, Renault Formula 1 team principal Flavio Briatore, former MI5 Director-General Dame Stella Rimington, renegade MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson, West Indian cricket legend Michael Holding, Australian Rules football titan Ron Barassi, Albanian literary eminence Ismail Kadare, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Australian prime minister/foreign minister Kevin Rudd, Armenian president Armen Sarkissian, Bulgarian pop legend Lili Ivanova, two Apollo astronauts, former US Vice President Al Gore, the deputy prime minister of Liechtenstein and two – count ’em – chief ministers of Gibraltar. He has also toured with some of the world’s biggest rock acts (U2, Radiohead, The Cure, Pearl Jam, The Prodigy) and interviewed any number of others.
Andrew Mueller was also a contributing editor to the fifth edition of Robert Young Pelton’s “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” (Harper Collins, 2003). Other author credits include chapters in “The Mammoth Book Of Sex, Drugs & Rock’n’Roll” (Constable Robinson, 2001), and “The Atheist’s Guide To Christmas” (The Friday Project, 2009). He has also written sleevenotes for Straitjacket Fits (“Straitjacket Fits”), The Go-Betweens (the “Spring Hill Fair” and “Liberty Belle & The Black Diamond Express” reissues, plus “Live In London”), The Fatima Mansions (the “Viva Dead Ponies” reissue), Microdisney (the “Daunt Square To Elsewhere” anthology) and U2 (the “Achtung Baby” 20th anniversary reissue), and programme notes for U2 (the “Vertigo” and “The Joshua Tree 2017” world tours) and Dead Can Dance (the “Celebration” world tour). He concedes, however, that on balance it’s unlikely to get better than appearing in between Mozart and Muhammad in the index of Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”.
Andrew Mueller has been twice shortlisted for the OneWorld Media Awards, once for the Travelex Travel Writers’ Awards, once for the Audio Production Awards, and won the Current Affairs category at the British Podcast Awards in 2018 for his presenting of Monocle 24’s “The Foreign Desk”.
Andrew Mueller is the singer and songwriter with The Blazing Zoos, an incipient alt.country phenomenon who released their debut album, “I’ll Leave Quietly”, in 2010, and its follow-up, “Chocks Away”, in 2016; the latter contained a song accidentally co-written with Jerry Chesnut, composer of “A Good Year For The Roses”. He is also co-proprietor of presently – but hopefully not permanently – dormant Nashville-on-Thames country & western club.
In 2011, Mueller collaborated with Luke Haines and Cathal Coughlan on a spoken word and music farrago entitled “The North Sea Scrolls”. This premiered at the Edinburgh Festival to reviews which were generally agog, if understandably perplexed. The album of the same name was released in 2012, and accompanied by a six-date tour of the British Isles, which was warmly received by appreciative crowds everywhere. Except Brighton, where they just stared at us like a golden retriever contemplating a Rothko. The show was revived for a performance at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in 2013 (in one of the small upstairs rooms, granted, but it doesn’t say that on the poster).
Andrew can be contacted at mail@andrewmueller.net. He is especially keen to hear from commissioning editors with a budget and a sense of adventure or, failing that, impressionable heiresses whose fathers own newspapers.