Nanaki - The Dandelion Radio Session EP
Recording a session for Dandelion Radio is something I’ve wanted to be asked to do for quite a long time now. So I was honoured and very happy in February when Mark Whitby approached me about recording not one but two sessions for his show - with Nanaki and Postcode. I’ll talk more about the Postcode session in the future, but for now here is the Nanaki session which was played throughout June by Mark on his show. It is available now from Small Bear Records and can be downloaded for free/pay-what-you-like from https://nanaki.bandcamp.com/album/dandelion-radio-session.
For those of you that don’t know, Dandelion Radio (which can be found at http://dandelionradio.com/) is an internet radio station inspired by the late, great John Peel and is definitely recommended listening. We’ve had a lot of support from Dandelion Radio over the years, particularly from Mark Whitby, who I think has now officially played more of my music than anyone else. Obviously I jumped at the chance to record this session, but the question I was immediately faced with was what tracks was I going to do? Usually it would seem sensible to record new versions of recent material to help promote your latest release, but that idea didn’t appeal to me. With ‘The Dying Light’ not long out, and with many of the tracks finished not too long before its release, it seemed a little pointless to redo any of that material, especially seeing as it would be me playing everything anyway. I was (and remain) very proud of that record, so I felt that if I were to revisit it I’d either be trying to simply recreate what I’d already done, or possibly even ending up with inferior versions. New material would have been an option, had there been any, but there was not. That being the case, it occurred to me that this would be an ideal opportunity to revisit older Nanaki tracks and to record versions that I was happy with. Thus I decided that I would go back to tracks from ‘Fashion Is The Enemy Of All Art’ which has been unavailable for many years now (though selections from it appeared as bonus tracks on the ‘Afterlight’ CDR).
I originally decided to record four tracks (’January Overkill’, ‘Disembryo’, ‘Luthiers (Of Heaven)’ and ‘Let Me Close My Eyes’), all of which were staples of live sets back when Nanaki was a real band. I even recorded the tracks using the Fender Jaguar that was one of my main live guitars when performing with the band. That wasn’t for purely nostalgic purposes, I needed a guitar that I could play behind the bridge on ‘January Overkill’ and ‘Disembryo’. It did feel kind of good to be using something that I played back then though and I was happy to find that it was still in more-or-less working order (it definitely took a lot of abuse back in the middle part of the last decade!). Those tracks came together pretty quickly after I’d relearned parts that I’d forgotten; for the most part I remembered everything that I used to play live, but some of the other parts I’d had no cause to play since I taught them to other band members about 12 years ago. At some point not long after completing those recordings it occurred to me that if I were to record ‘Candyfloss Deathwish’ then I’d have new versions of everything we played at our first gigs, which is something that appealed to me. I knew it ran the risk of there being too much for Mark to play, but I figured he could always choose four of the five, maybe play the other on a later show, or I could just include it on the EP when it came out. As it turned out he was able to play the whole session and ‘Candyfloss Deathwish’ proved to be the track that I was the happiest with.
As the original versions of these were some of the first things I ever recorded, before I had any real idea of what I was doing at all, it definitely felt good to be able to revisit them and to produce them in a way that I was satisfied with. In fact, aside from its inclusion as a bonus track on ‘Afterlight’, ‘Candyfloss Deathwish’ had never even been released. Actually that track is not technically a Nanaki track at all, though we played it live from the outset, it being the set closer at pretty much all of our shows as far as I can recall. It dates back to my time in Circus worlD and began with the bass line, which was written by CW bassist Tony Leadley. In fact all of the tracks that I recorded for this session were co-written. ‘Disembryo’, ‘Luthiers...’ and ‘January Overkill’ began as bass lines written by Nanaki co-founder Emma Ryan and the second set of chords featured in ‘Let Me Close My Eyes’ came from Circus worlD frontman Mark Sayle, as did the chord voicings used in the strummed part, though he doesn’t seem to recall that fact.
Overall I think that the EP is often closer to post-punk than post-rock, with perhaps the exception of ‘Candyfloss Deathwish’ and ‘Let Me Close My Eyes’. In fact some of the tracks were not originally conceived as being instrumental, it was only when we had decided that we were going to be a fully instrumental band that I realised that they didn’t need to have vocals. ‘Candyfloss...’ had always been instrumental, but ‘January Overkill’ was the first track to be written specifically for Nanaki, as an instrumental piece (it was also, incidentally, the first thing I wrote on my then-new Jaguar, if memory serves me correctly). So in a way this record helps to show the beginnings of what has become Nanaki and though it may be quite different from ‘The Dying Light’ perhaps you can hear how Nanaki has evolved over the years. Obviously the fact that I now write everything myself changes things, but the bass parts from these early songs have definitely influenced some of my writing and I do sometimes start with the bass now, harking back to those early days. I also play guitar with a drumstick on three of the five tracks here, something that I do to this day, though perhaps a little more sparingly now (I think my favourite drumstick-playing by myself features on the second half of ‘Unholier Than Thou’ from ‘The Dying Light’).
So anyway, here it is, my first Dandelion Radio Session. As I said, I’m happy to have had the chance to do it and to revisit this material. Now, more importantly, I hope that you enjoy it. To recreate the desired live gig feel, please listen to it at high volume!
