CityLife

Dan Black overcomes his BIG setback

Dan Black: pop polymath extraordinaire

EVEN if he didn’t suffer from insomnia, you get the feeling that pop polymath Dan Black wouldn’t have spent any nights recently enumerating sheep.

Until last month, his onslaught on the charts was going without a hitch.

Tipped for greatness by the Head of Music at Radio 1, and featuring  in myriad polls of artists to watch in 2009, his vowel-averse Notorious BIG cover HPNTZ, released as a limited edition seven-inch single, attracted plaudits from both sides of the Atlantic.

The extraordinary track features Black’s vocals – once memorably likened to “a young Liam Gallagher if he'd been raised by Quentin Crisp" – over a mash-up of the beats from Rihanna’s Umbrella and the soaring strings from John Carpenter’s film, Starman.

Bit of a nightmare

Mastering for his forthcoming album, titled Un, had been completed. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, on the night before the video shoot for HYPNTZ, Black was informed that that Mr B.I.G’s estate had refused the use of his lyrics. “It was a bit of a nightmare,” he laughs dryly before his gig at the Deaf Institute.

“And part of the reason I’m still ****d now is that I’m still having to catch up from re-recording the album.

''The problem is with being signed to a massive major record label (Universal) is they’re like an oil tanker. So if you say ‘We’re going this way now’, they can’t do it quickly.”

Genuine fan

Upon receiving this spanner in the words, he immediately dug out the Forever Friends stationery and tried writing a pleading letter to Voletta Wallace, the mother of the dead rapper.

“I was very honest. I told her I was a genuine fan of the Notorious B.I.G, and I emphasised that I didn’t want any money. It was totally a tribute and celebration of him. It wasn’t ironic. It was completely sincere.”

When it became obvious that a response looked as unlikely as Gordon Brown’s smile, Black was left with no option other than to re-record his calling-card song.

So those hoping for a proper version of HPNTZ are out of luck – unless, that is, they bid on the promo copy I’m flogging on eBay (just kidding, Universal’s legal-eagles!) – but as consolation, they can enjoy the quasi-all-new re-write, Symphonies.

Moment of transcendence

“Fortunately, because I was so ***** off with the situation, I was very inspired so the lyrics came fast,” he remembers.

“It’s more personal now. It’s about how I will not give up. It’s about the moment when the inner-soundtrack to your life finally kicks in and you get that one moment of transcendence.”

It’s fair to say that Black is used to setbacks. In the late Nineties, he was played guitar and penned the lion's share of the songs for indie outfit The Servant (whose music featured in the trailers for the film, Sin City).

They were touted as ‘The Next Big Thing’; a snog-of-death accolade that usually leaves one with worse career prospects than Karen Carpenter’s nutritionist.

Musically straitjacketed

“We had some cool press very early on. In other parts of the world, we did amazingly well. But not here. So this is the first time I’ve thought ‘Wow...people might actually know my name’, remembers Wossisface.

Tired of being musically straitjacketed, Black jacked in The Servant  after releasing a 2006 album called How To Destroy A Relationship.

Interestingly, the opening song on the first Servant album actually uses drums sampled from Hypnotise.

“I felt restricted artistically,” he says. “I love pop and hip-hop as well as more alternative bands, so I like the idea of sewing those strange body parts together.

Everyone sneering

''So I’d come in and said, ‘I want to do something that sounds like Justin Timberlake meets Sigur Rós'’ and they’d dismiss it as rubbish.

''The classic thing would be on the tour bus and putting on songs, and everyone sneering ‘what’s this ***? Turn it off’.

“It’s funny,” he continues, “somebody came up to me recently and said, ‘is it true that you left the band by throwing a full cup of coffee across the rehearsal room at the wall?’.

''And I had done that in a fit of rage near the end. When the thing with HYPNTZ went off, I threw my mobile phone at the wall. So my stupid childish anger hasn’t completely gone.”

Creative vision diluted

Unprepared to have his creative vision diluted by other members, he headed back to his apartment in Paris – where he lives with his wife, an artist who collaborates on his videos and visual.

There he spent the winter of 2007  hunched over his laptop writing solo tracks that would eventually comprise, Un.

Not French for the number of people who bought a Servant record in the UK, the title instead refers to how the album is full of opposites, of happy and sad, lonesome and loved-up; with the u and n “being the same as each other, only upside down”.

Black thinks about things like this a lot; analysing pop with forensic precision: his digital-dance-funk he says, deals with the “big universal questions”.

Ambiguity annoying

Such as Alone which marries lyrics about an existential crisis to a spangly electro-pop tune; deep to ephemeral, another example of the dichotomy he’s striving to achieve.

“In general, I find ambiguity in songs slightly annoying,” he disclaims.

“I think you’ve got three minutes: project something into my head, fire up the synapses in my brain.

''The thing is, I have mild synesthesia. So when I think of songs when they’re good, they have a strong set of colours. But when I don’t like it, they’re drab and grey.”

Sound of pruning shears

At 33, Black is starting out at an age where, in the Logan’s Run world of pop, critics would perhaps snipe ‘If the bloom isn’t off the rose, then we can hear the sound of pruning shears’.

“I’ve been around the block,” he laughs. “There’s plenty of musical skeletons in my closet.

''I was once in Minty [Nicola Bowery’s shlock-and-awe group] playing guitar.

''I remember playing a beer festival with them in Battersea Park, and the singer [Matthew Glamorre] would come out in a spaceman insect outfit and then halfway through the song Hermaphrodite, he’d go into a cocoon and come out fully naked in high-heels, with some kind of clever tuck of his genitalia.

Horror and disgust

''I’ve never seen a crowd react with horror and disgust and anger at the same time. Half of the crowd were throwing beer; the other half left.”

An image, surely, to give all you non-insomniacs nightmares.

Alone is out now. Symphonies (Polydor) is released on June 29.