The Legendary Danny K - Silence Between The Words

Artist: (The Legendary) Danny K
Song: Silence Between The Words
Photo: Girl sitting alone in the Sea Grill, a bar and restaurant waiting for a pickup, Washington DC, by Esther Bubley 1943


A note on being a legend
Saturday, July 12, 2008

Since my artist name change in 2003 I can't help feeling that one or two people round here think that I am bigging myself up a little too much so I thought a thread to explain its slightly random etymology might be in order. I'll take the slightly longer way round.

I come from a musical family - my grandad, before WW2, was a jazz musician of some repute until his career was cut short by the war which was also to end his life. My father also has always been a musician/song-writer and was the founding member of a band called Sailor who are well worth a listen if you have time with hits such as Girls, Girls Girls and one called A Glass of Champagne (recently covered in a Scooter track - the original is better!!), and then went on to play keyboards and write songs for a band called Culture Club, which some of you 80's kids should remember; the highlight of his career probably being that he wrote Karma Chameleon, which managed to get to number 1 in the UK and in the US simultaneously (something only a very select amount of bands have done).

Music is obviously in my blood, and i have wanted to follow in his footsteps ever since really. I attempted to do a music degree after I left school but was kicked out after a year mainly because I struggled to play scales on a piano. After uni I had a tricky couple of years writing demos and sending them off without any luck. My fathers name proceeded me a lot and was both a help and a hinderance. Its amazing how quickly the record industry can label you - and I yearned to be judged on my own merit rather than as an extension of my fathers career.

"well its good kid but its no karma chameleon" was something I heard a lot. It was frustrating as I am a very different musician to my dad but dems da breaks I suppose. Anyway when I was about 21 I decided to try a completely new approach to how i wrote music. I moved to the countryside (i'd grown up in London) and started to use sounds and textures over and above all the music theory I had learnt at university and college. This seemed to be the switch I had needed to flick as the music then flowed and the early material for my first album, Melatonin, came together.

The night before I moved to the countryside I always remember this dream I had which was in big bright pink neon lights "THE LEGENDARY DANNY K". It was one of those dreams where not much happened but it stuck in my memory.

After I had moved I made friends with some great musicians who all helped me work on the Melatonin album: Andy Hoskings, Danny Ash, Sarah Millyard, Carl Hovland and Geoff Hill all regularly hung out at the makeshift studio over the summer and slowly the album came together. We came up with the idea Melatonin as a band name (the drug that your brain secretes to send you to sleep) which seemed like a pretty cool name for a trip-hop band. We also decided to use a new site called mp3.com to promote the material. I remember uploading all the stuff and feeling like Mathew Broderick in War Games because I worked out how to encode an mp3! Sadly though the band name Melatonin was already taken by a Christian rock band in Utah so, thinking of a John Lennon interview where he mentioned the name The Beatles had come to him in a dream - I remembered the name that I had had in the dream, but decided to shorten it to Danny K for fear of coming across as an egotistical maniac. (!!)

The rest some of you probably know as thats how I met most of you - but its important to stress Danny K was a band name at the time being the combined talents of about 5 or 6 people in addition to me. Me, Andy and Sarah then worked on the 2nd album Freetrader the next year (2000) and that seemed to be very popular and Danny K became a sort of entity beyond my control.

Then came along some pop singer from South Africa called Danny K ( http://dannyk.com ) and they got in touch to say my name was breaching his copyright. I felt a bit miffed seeing as we were using it first but had a feeling they probably had better lawyers than me so for the release of The Drop LP reverted to the initial name I had had in the dream, ie The Legendary Danny K - the in-joke being he's a legend because he doesn't exist. My names not Danny and my second name doesn't even begin with K.

So there you go...I hope you can understand it is meant to be infused with a heavy dose of irony that doesn't seem to translate quite as well in the US particularly.

In short - I know I'm not a legend - though in my opinion anyone that can want to make music in their spare time for no other reason than they just seem to have to - is in my book....L E G E N D A R Y
http://forums.artistserver.com/messages.cfm?threadid=19D55D3B-1143-DBB3-C6A35...

Category:

Music

Tags:

• TLDK
• DannyK
• The
• Legendary
• Danny
• Silence
• Between
• Words
• Baba
• Ram
• Dass
• triphop
• lounge
• Downtempo
• Electronic
• Hiphop
• Melatonin
• 1999
• yt:crop=16:9

[keeperholder]

@FANKANable This track (along with tracks by dj promo, bonobo, acp, danmass, blue states and others) was included in a compilation entitled "London Cool" released in Italy in the late 90s - early 00s and practically unavailable everywhere nowdays, that a friend lent me last month.

[FANKANable]

Hey man I live in new Mexico and me and my friends are like the only people I know of that listen to or know about great artist like Danny k, I was wondering how you found him