Mr Dan Reveals All...
Who is Mr Dan? Why Mr Dan?
'Just a rapper. I used to do a lot of hip hop and one rapper from New York called Lord Redeemer used to start his rhymes off by saying, you know, Mr. Dan and he just sort of gave me that name and I thought it was quite cool. But no one else does!'
I thought maybe you just had a really big ego?!
'No, first of all I just thought it was really cool name by the way he said it and then it became a joke name. But then because I had done a lot of remixes under that name and put the records out and I didn't really want to change it.'
What about the concept behind the new album?
'It's sort of more going back to the stuff I used to do when I was a kid, in that when I was much younger I used to just mess around with tape recorders and guitars basically and work out different ways of recording, you know like multi-tracking my guitar or... well there's two things, one it was songs, and I got out of the habit of doing songs and then doing more techno and working with Dan Mass.'
Were you Djing?
'Yeah, a bit, but more because we were doing club orientated stuff and I was very into dub because I learnt a lot about engineering from- do you know Manasa? Nick Manassa taught me a lot about mixing, he's a kind of dub guy, and so I changed my perspective on making music and it became more to do with the technology, and more to do with beats and sort of left behind what I used to do which was, you know, just write songs on the guitar. But with this album we're trying to put the two things together, you know write songs, proper chord sequences and do traditional songs in a more modern way.'
So you're a sort of Mike Oldfield for 2001?
'I wouldn't say that (laughs), but some people have said that, yeah.'
So obviously you've had a lot of input in the production of the album?
'I've produced it, yeah! I had input from, you know, people at the record company...I had had this images of record companies that they'd come and tell you what to do, but I was actually asking them to come and tell me, so I had a lot of freedom. Ultimately, they decided to drop two tracks but I think that was probably a good decision as it definitely sounds more like an album. In the original idea for the album I had a much broader range of styles, there were two hip hop tracks on it, a little bit of... you know, all the music I liked... trying to...'
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About Petrol Records
About Petrol Records
