Before their split in 2007, Dan Black had been singing with indie band The Servants for a decade. Now Paris based, he's heading out alone, and sounding better than ever.
Dan's cover of the Notorious B.I.G's 'Hypnotize' got music writers and aficionados running around with their hands waving in the air and generally making themselves sick with excitement. Even Perez Hilton likes it and on the back of it the Head Of Music at Radio 1 is tipping Dan as THE Big Thing of 2009.
Currently at work on his eagerly awaited debut album, Dan's single 'Yours', out this week, will whet your appetite and perhaps leave you salivating a little as you await further treats. In the mean time, we threw some questions in his general direction.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
A school friend of mine fancied a girl in my village. We needed a reason to call on her house. We knew she had a guitar so we went round to "borrow it". It only had two strings and was about to fall apart. Anyway, we had to take it to complete the charade and so it ended up in my bedroom. I then just started messing with it, trying to write songs with a couple of cheap cassette radios, banging out simple one string riffs, recording them and then taping myself singing on top. I think the first song was called 'Marmalade'.
Q2 What inspired your latest single?
'Yours' was me having a stab at doing something a bit like N.E.R.D. I tend to find that if I try to rip someone off, I always get something woefully wrong and end up with something that is well off the original mark. Though sometimes those tracks can be interesting and charming in themselves. The lyrics are about passive aggression, but I wanted it to be loose enough to be applicable to a nightmare girlfriend I was once with, but also to people I once made music with.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
Sometimes I just close my eyes and let the all the ancient forces of the universe pour down from the ether, into my puny frame, into my brain, down my nerves, into my fingers, into the mouse, down the cord, into the computer, into the software, through the plugins, out the computer, through the audio interface, out the speakers and out into the air. But mostly I just sit around, freaked out, trying to remember how the hell I wrote that last decent one.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Schooly D, A-ha, X-Clan, Vangelis, Royal Trux etc...
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Er... um... so... like... er what do you think and stuff?
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest single, and for the future?
I hope, some might say a little unrealistically, that every single person that hears it, loves it with a deep, uncontrollable passion, that all their sadness and loneliness evaporates, that the blind, once again, can see, that the lame can walk, that sweets rain down from the sky and that all taps having running hot and cold ice cream.